Christopher Barnes-

Strapped

 

Unfetted power

Is not drawled,

Cryptic as sanctioned.  Liar dice have sounded –

Nowadays you’re ‘The Appellant’

In this fixture of the departed.

A flash squirms copper cables.

Grimness summons its ghosts;

Duress evaporates

As light knocks-for-six the eye.

 

(from the Electric Chair poems)

 

Unpardonable

 

From corpse to executioner

Sparks are zeroed, skirting the brain

Across the eyeball, hanging the gut.

 

Subject?  Life-ditching by legal prod.

Who does this hoodlum have a conviction to be?

Bundy?  Boston strangler?

 

Merciless barb-pixels strike.

The screen stamps itself

Into a lachrymal nerve,

Shivers.

 

(from the Electric Chair poems)

 

 Bird

 

As the eye fathoms

Lumpishness has vanquished;

Down aisle to lock-up

You’ll stomp no more.

 

The stir of disintegration,

Bodied in the black-out

Will knot, fizzling out

The unanswerable sparks

In a singed brain.

 

Bessie Smith’s bawl

‘Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair’

And this Google portrait

Will survive.

 

(from the Electric Chair poems)

 

Christopher Barnes' first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer Press.  He is a participant for www.stemistry.com and has just had an art review published by Peels Magazine, UK

 

Neil Ellman-

The Treachery of Images

(after the painting by René Magritte)

A pipe is a pipe

we think

or not

we think a pipe

is what it is

or not

or something else

but still a pipe

or not

what we think

it is

a pipe

it is

most clearly is

or not

but clearly not

a hand

or face

we think

it’s not.

The Son of Man

(after the painting by René Magritte)

Even with a bowler hat

red tie and overcoat

he is not who you think he is

or anyone, if anyone or what

an ordinary man

behind an apple-face

the son of man, perhaps,

but not of any god

who won’t reveal his face

or say his name

in so many ways

more like a god than son

if god himself

were the son of man

an ordinary man

in a bowler hat.

Golconda

(after the painting by René Magritte)

Repetitive

like rabid bats

in bowler hats

infest this neighborhood

of thought

anonymous

they hover in our ears

and gather in

the alleyways

and passages

in the crevices

of the brain

twenty, thirty, forty

at a time

the same old ways

the same old men

in bowler hats.

Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey (USA).  He has published numerous poems, many of them ekphrastic, in print and online journals throughout the world.  He is particularly attracted to surreal images and has published separate chapbooks devoted to the works of Dalí and Miró.

William S. Burroughs-

'Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.'
 

William S. Burroughs

Kyle Hemmings-

Post-Op

The best tools are the ones she leaves buried in their bellies: rasps, trocars, intraosseous drill bits. Even love letters in her mother's handwriting. She tells Tuesday's lover that there's nothing wrong with cheap thrills without anesthesia, gives false testimony that her kind of love is only minimally invasive. One of her thin-skinned loves calls from Osaka’s underbelly and tells her It still hurts. She once used a head mirror to diagnose his sickness. Friday's goat-man brings only famine and ruined metatarsals. To soothe him, to make him forget, she hands him a retouched photo of herself dressed as a WWII army nurse. When her lovers don't return, she dreams of spreading the ribs of Tokyo, cross-clamping its aorta to block traffic. Thoughts down a Penrose drain, Shibuya can no longer be seen from above. She loves the sound of car crashes. From tonight's dinner menu, she orders a wound, a shattered-spine, a hopeless case of bradycardia immersed in ice. She will break open a new victim, remember her mother's surgeons who practiced without a license, recall the whoosh of closing curtains. A number. The hollow. She couldn't be numbed. In her room, they appeared in threes, never answered any of her questions. We need, they said, the experience. She will continue to pull sponges from the bottom of her soup.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Cat People (Scars), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and

Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP).  He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/

 

Howie Good-

HARBINGERS

1

Three suns appeared in the sky. Statues sweated freely. The baby refused to crawl no matter how much we threatened.

2

The trees and boulders seemed lost in thought. At the critical moment, the hunter’s rifle jammed. He smiled. The sight was so unfamiliar that I saw it as something else, a long, crooked border with hell.

3

There’s time enough to panic when crows gather in the dark, only a few at first, then by the dozens, while a boy and his little sister play quietly on the floor with their father’s loaded gun.

4

Silence had been put on trial. Nobody, least of all us, expected the jury of assassins to return a just verdict.

5

I woke up in a house made of words. A deer was standing in the doorway, and then it wasn’t. What do I do now? I asked myself. I went looking for it. Heat and decay were everywhere. Tell everybody you know there’s a man trapped in the dark.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red

Mark Hartenbach-

Discovering the Key to Nameless Things-
                             
 a larger piece of supposedly preordained is whittled

         down to an elaborate ruse to escape predicament

                   starry-eyed crowned with thorns schizophrenic

               second comings are coming out of the woodwork

  culminating in a grand scheme explosion

               that eventually became imploding blip on radar

               an unnatural juxtaposition purposely missing target

                   then slipping away while the demons slept

   brick kilns became my windmills which became my giants

       which became delusions from which i drew my imagery

                that clenched my hand tightly like i was a child

        then dragged me through all the stages of degeneration

 trembling toward what could be dangerous territory

            to see chalky bones of those who failed  in their quest

     as well as those who succeeded expressing their thoughts

              if only to themselves if only to prove they could

                    rudimentary scales began falling from my eyes

        found uncanny ability to deconstruct the architecture down

        to something which could only have been created by myself

               not yeat's holy manger not rimbaud's leg severed

            not dante's staircase stumbled down in unblinking fear

     not artaud's shillelagh leaned upon in morphine glaze

                      not jarry's death bed toothpick grin

   but finding deeper meaning in all the nameless things
 

Hunger For All Possibilities-

    a chicken bone mojo caught in my throat

          while another shyster

                   with hand in my pocket

      renders my confessions null & void

                            in flowery language

        a monkey wearing a tuxedo draped in affluence

   which looks ridiculous on any primate

          whether deftly making circus

                            catches or all thumbs

         a hallelujah destructs without fear of restitution

   since certain words can get away with murder

      no counterclaim with any validity can change this

    there’s nothing in this stained glass

                     to induce devotion

             to wrap our head around

                 no beads of sweat or blood

                        or a cheap pasted pearls of wisdom

 hanging above is a bubblegum card of the madonna

                surrounded by saintly skulls grinning madness

    troubled cast of characters

             need cleaned up for consumption

     gathered together for what seems to be my benefit

              though admittedly i am delusional

               have never taken to clarity

                  so it’s highly unlikely

        but not entirely impossible

Jean Cocteau-

'Each day in the mirror, I watch death at work.'

Petra Whiteley-

Of Smallness and Nothing

The river has given me
                        a small skull,
its emptiness is ticking.
 
Time is a music-box
                       inside my ear
softly,
              and with sharp tugs
                           it un-knits my
                                            nothing.


Anatomy of a Being

Bodiless
head, hanging organs -
unloved flowers
with colours un-nameable
and mute. Fingers holding
emptiness of songs, wringing those
small necks clear of dirt in
a slow breath.
 
Barbed
cicatrices in subconsciousness,
rhythmic blood libido
a piebald horse straddled
with blind eyes and a crown
of nails. Without entrails.
 
Broken
thoughts and images,
smothered, that plush
mouth agape with maggots
marching through open silence.
 
Bold
push in the larynx - again(st),
the bell of ruined hours.
The metallic swell of their
clatter and nonsense. Eaten in a blast
of its side-to-side rocking and shrieking
out incomprehensible  Gods. Devouring
flesh of the pulse. Crawling under a tongue
expecting the miracles of language.
 
Stunted and un-giving.


An Excursion/Cosmos Inwardly
 
Take in your eye, an I, seeing itself in the hollow
spaces of a body, perceived. The mouth
of its noise a barren branch of sickness
spreading thin lines against electric midnight,
in-turned against the red-blue fists of a life, felt.
Sickness
of silence and thirst for the Sun, the torture of music
pulsing in vast blackness of a tree set against the skyline,
the contour of impact, imaginary, closeness
of pain and indifference - only here suffocating
pillow of useless digits of thoughts. Resurrections shining
with stolen time of billion cold stars like a red neon. And only
in this place, it lays with everything breathed in and sculpted,
sensed beautiful, sensed in sweetness, sensed in generosity
of plush touch.
A village of one, mime theatre of hopes, a shattered in-scape
of world swallowed and digested, mirror of images and language stains,
here, see it talking as if it knew itself, as if God was juggling
its hells, as if God was the whispering Scheherazade.


Petra Whiteley was born in Czech Republic, but England has been her home since 1993. Whiteley’s poetry collection 'The Nomad’s Trail' (Ettric Forest Press) was published in 2008, a chapbook 'The Moulding of Seers' (Shadow Archer Press) in 2009 and ‘Exhibition Of Defined Moments’ (erbacce-press) in 2011 with 'The Liquid Metropolis' due out with the same press in the spring of 2012. Her children’s book Watchmaker’s Quartet And The Shattered Pendulum describing a surrealistic adventure has been released on Kindle in 2011. Her prose, poetry and articles have been published widely in webzines and in print. She reviews CDs and interviews bands/musicians on regular basis for the Reflections Of Darkness.

Misti Velvet Rainwater-Lites

His Factory

I'm famous in his factory
in my bee buzz battle ax fascination
stark and succinct
standing out in the dumb drug haze
he feels me feeling things
he shoots my blood loss
blows it up
passes out my pieces
to amused debutantes


Pastor Dick

he has something to show me
his shaved pastor dick does not go down
reaches up to the angels
a pink prayer rock
i turn away
reach for my own prayer
buzz it against my clit
turn my head
when he dives in
for a kiss



Rows

all those american rose bitches
in their pretty thorny rows
bloom burst eyeball scream
the dream few men are wise enough
to wake from

Misti Rainwater-Lites is working on her third novel, Framed By The Word. Misti's first novel, Nova's Gone Potty, is available at amazon. Bullshit Rodeo, Misti's second novel, is forthcoming from Blunt Trauma Press.

Aad de Gids-

Hibernationsignalloss
 

the refreshing countersphere of abrupt chill as you step out from

estate immobiliare womb warmth and already inside in your knees

felt the stiffening,mahogenizing waves as this ossuary somehow

picks up outer thermal gradients,shackleton amudsen antennae

like precipitation inside the knee inside the real estate forecasting

outsides’ turmoil of seasonless winter as the day begun with rain

and an almost feérie dans les tuileries kind of temperature,then

this tempera ran out unto warmer slides of shadowchill,warmer,

then again the sudden chill falling in the trachea bronchii bronchiolii

inhaling oxygenating terror torpor shock revelation hibernation

pseudowinters inner tropicalismú the europeo wettest summer

of the century seasonlessness this winter already with budding trees

buddenbaums cherryblossoms chill frost on the water the dreamy

walks through the days omittant of seasonality,dreading,in a moment,

seasonality,tropifying globally irreciprocally smoothely indifferently

oxygenating hypoxia asphyxia di milano automobility microclimate

frosted flowers candid colours mixed festives guests astounded

all the knees of all the guests made up with greige tempera sort

of a rodinnening of the unseasonality lost tonality aleatorism finale

aaddegids54y.nursehomosexualphilosopherdadaistoutrageousnessistdutch

E. M. Cioran

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Melanie Browne-

Recurring Dream

My teeth are falling out

My teeth are falling out

My teeth are falling out

My teeth are falling out

My teeth are falling out

Joseph M. Gant-

Stage Left

Moses, the abortionist

parted all you'd ever see.

silly, silly, silly girl,

you stirred the pot with broken thumbs,

bones of splintered solitude.

and all for profit, 

making change

your births 

and your performance art;

we passed the biohazard hat

around the room and listened.

 Tablets

 whatever gets you on,

whatever gets you by the

ebbs of chemical tide and undertow.

waves of lithium roll to drown,

and rising for benzo breaths of sleep

I

piss

the night

and all resolve

to photograph the

dark

away and count what I’ve got left.

Guests

the only angels 

come round here

all use my dope and never call― 

feathers on the coffee table,

empty seats around the fire,

cell phone numbers, bits of paper;

no one here expects a thing

because the liquor watered down,

cocaine cut with laxative,

and furniture brought from the lawn

is not the way to host the night

nor toast the revelation

that waits for us the same.

Joseph M. Gant is the author of the obscenely large poetry collection, Zero Division, which is published by Rebel Satori Press. A scientific glassblower, Gant has no idea how he found himself in the small press world but assumes it bad karma to over think the matter. When not feeding potato chips to his cats, he edits poetry books for S A M Publishing.

Samuel Beckett

'Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased...'

Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

Surrealism in the Whites of the Eye
 

Surrealism has its place.       The streets of France
the hills     of Colorado.           In New York

we do not tend so much toward dream.           I cling to the briars
in the briar patch             the metal fence with prongs
parethesizing my snowed-down garden.     Pricking fingers.

Cornflowers are blue I believe
as is the sky             come tomorrow.
Eye whites are nearly blue              when one comes close
in combat             the field of war or peace.

They skip arm in arm like little girls on the great playground
drawing circles in the snow with their shoe-tips.

O the dream world leaves the sadness behind
almost.         Not quite.       I dreamt of you last night
walking out on me in the library

of gloom.              The library where soon
shadows will fill the windows            in a stock exchange with light.




Improvisational Ballet
 

Of course they come for all of us.
The proponents of world wars & Waterloo.
The hippopotomus has massive jaws         that can crack the ribs
of any airplane.       They come for each of us
as we lean into the airraid jangling            our hands cupped open.
The Hangedman from tarot twirls on the horizon
with the dual face of janus, spinning.
                 Some speak the book of names
other the tree of life.            What of the graves
piled               one atop the other
in places without name?       I am afraid
there is nothing to be said.
It is all an improvisational ballet
over a field of ice.             I called my father Daddy
but it was a different Daddy        than the one you know.
                                It was a different tree
blooming yellow in marina summer & early forsythia spring.




The Invention of Fire
 

Of course, the torch was dipped in lava
roiling down the valley lilts
& fire was stolen.    Not a vestige of air & ether
Not the revelation of mythdom
But a purchase from the earth. A dollar in the pocket
of the great pole dancer
Her velvet thong.         & the wheel was a fluke
a cougar's hairball      roiling down the valley lilts.
& the work of oxen was revealed.
             Fire & wheels & death
preceding life.        A purchase from the earth
From the great medical table.
At the corner of fifty & Front there is a building
where Hendrix made of iron leans back
as his groin plays electric guitar.
I remember meeting you there         to listen
as I tasted your spit at the back of my throat.
Your not strange      you said        but special.
But my dreams I said
But my dreams.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore lives in Upstate New York with her husband and daughter. Her work has been widely published, and radio or blogzine interviews can be found via Google. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best-of-the-Web. Her books Memory Rituals: an Army of Suns and Enough Light on the Dogwood also can be found via google. More work can be found on Carolyn's facebook site. She has two or more books forthcoming in 2012.
 

Dom Gabrielli-

 The Body Without Organs-

 he said legs crossed/listening to eight cellos sing/eyes closed to better see/the notes paint the sounds/softly relinquishing/any will to rise/this notebook his blank lung/he was floating /he was India in monsoon/heaven a concept/he had played as a young man/he had dabbled in paints/and women and sex/he had learnt how to live outside/beyond the tracks/without losing this libertine core/later they came for revenge

/women and dialects with rage/in their bloody bosoms/asking for money for stints/they had done inside/as jailers of the writer's words/about then he turned to time/playing symphonies/with kisses out at sea

/pianos and cosmic-coloured fish/he had been convinced/there was an exit/for something in him and the pen/from this prison for coded riders

/but now all that mattered little/because blood/was controlled directly by the pen/he hadn't a brain to think/nor thoughts to speak/because the notepad was outside/and he imagined his hand alone/without a body

/scrawling black words/on infinite papers/they said this is very eastern/all this nothing and unwilling/this breathing/he retorted it is very western/Artaud had gone west not east/and the rite of the black sun

/had finally got the better /of both the poet and the sorcerer/because there is a moment when wills/are better not being wills/but lungs and hands and blood/moving in waves against the jugular/Artaud's merit beyond all other poets/was to state clearly that man not society

needed to be transformed/his attack on sexuality on organs and god

was a radical manoeuvre/to regain a non-human will beyond the man form/from beyond the grinning man-mass/with eyes of soul theft/he foresaw in his marvellous madness/the panopticon and its necessary implosion/our loss our welcome apocalypse in the bone/and van Gogh was suicided  /because society couldn't tolerate/his new found freedom

/because they don't allow you anything for nothing/you have to pay and they know how/instinctively like sucking/they learn it young/as they run/and push your hard-earned beauty/back down your lung/because an ear wasn't enough/they needed more of him/a corpse to stampede

and erect as a shrine to the dollar/and the nuclear bomb/a dead artist to worship after murder/no cross that's the modern jump/make them/do it to themselves/innocence and joy/the last pure emotions to die

as the mob sings murder dressed as suicide/to kill the artist/and what is intolerable/is that precisely what he had learnt/how to rid oneself of the will to kill/how to die/to collapse and rebuild the body as it were

with breathing and reciting poems form the journey/with a notepad to fill /with his discoveries/so the man is just an accessory /and this is how we see him now/sitting in the park/barely noticeable barely breathing/with a wry smile on his face/of perfect imitation/as words poured from his pen/he calculated about five or six pieces/every sitting/there is no measure of time for that/it's the pulse from another sphere beating/with poems for units/he likened them to winds or waves/or reptiles in the sun scampering and slithering/there was no need for revenge anymore

it was the ultimate anti-fascist act/it couldn't even frighten the masses with a stick/because he was dead to them dead to the world/he posed no threat to the mind of the law/because they were incapable of reading/and history had gone blind/and was cumbersome with its murders/so the man just sits/outside in the park with his stubble and his nobody mind/breathing in poems/proper name on a book with a mast and a sea/his signature two snakes dancing and black/mating in every twist and turn/of frenzied words caught open in a shriek

gone away with every line/with every word 

 

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery. Gabrielli's books are here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search?searchTerm=dom+gabrielli&search=search. His own whereabouts on an axis between language and nowhere.

Georg Baselitz-

'Negation is a gesture of genius, not a wellspring of responsibility.'