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Tuesday 29 May 2012

Bas de Gids- ('Wir-Sind-Tot')-







Séamas Carraher-

THE
FISH
OF
NOBODIES

"Ignoro lo que seré del enfermo esta mujer, que le besa
y no puede sanarle con el beso, le mira y no puede sanarle
con los ojos, le habla y no puede sanarle con el verbo?"

"I don't know who this woman is to this sick man, for she
kisses him and can't heal him with her kiss, she looks at him
and can't heal him with her eyes, she talks to him and can't
heal him with her words?"

César Vallejo 'Las ventanas se han estremecido' (1923(?)-1937)

  1

My cousin, this fish with wings,
this two-time fish of the lobotomies,
(this dumbdrughappy talking-fish): 
what's this, it says
at the entrance, at the collision
and conjunction of the exits
- a nobody!

This sneering fish with wings
sharpening on politics,
fish of my ungodly soul,
this sea filled with my silence!

Here is my answer.

First i pick up the ice hammer.
i shatter the glass of my many faces
hanging from the unfurled street
like a tree of lost lives.
Next i close all the books
for i see only my selves
(these workers endlessly creating their own industry)
in their dead.
And so the dead live on
eating away at my own life:
this life without wings,
this life, sadly, brother, with no friends.

This is my answer
twisted into ribs, 
the caress of the machete in my many faces,
on garbage day, at the sad end of town,
at the most sorrowful end of this time of sighs.

II

 My fish, this once and future
child of the wings,
cries deeply and silently in need:
for i have shouldered him not an inch,
nor could i offer him one piece of bread to eat
but my own ugly face.

Always why, fish!  Always why, human!
O my brother.

So still he asks and asks and the stars
come out and the stars fall
and no one writes of this:
this flesh of my winglessness
their murderous torture of the nobodies
in the name of democracy.

III

In this way the walls scratch my skin.
And the day in its cardboard shapes
is beneath my contempt.

I say, before this question
- another one!

How come we are here at all?
For i've proven in your science of the losses,
(this anarchy of my aches)
in the whispering of winds whistling through my bones
how all the world fills with all these countless ones
not buried in books,
not carved on stone,
all the nameless ones i breathe
with this emptiness i carry
instead of a name.

All those, brother, don't hang from the street
like lives lost hanging from a tree.

Even though, they have eaten and eaten
and are never full.

Eat and eat, voracious feeding from our life,

from my life, and yours too,
sister of solitude,
(saintly sister of my unequal halves,
this fraction that will never be a whole:
you, that falls between my love and the abyss!)
O you, who i long to hold in this lost world
sinking between our sighs.

IV

O how they eat, these unearthly ghosts!

But what’s it like? like a child,
this incessant instant of the fishes,
with an endless question in its genes,
and all our snakelike selves,
and watch: these dreams i spit in daytime
between car exhausts
and the dawn:

listen to the wind scream.
Listen to all the cancers groan.
Listen to the emptying of streets!
How the air is heavy with cigarette smoke
and it is hard to breathe
among dead men and
the dust of dead men

- this single meal of many mouths.

V

Then with my glass skulls
shelled and washed with rain 100% proof
i am as empty 'til they use me
as horse or hand or mouth
in the forgotten morning

listening to their words
without mercy,
arms in splints! and the world,
only this pretty thing
balancing
on its crutch of lies.
 
VI

For these aches speak
and my bones are already naked
and half in the grave already...

...how is there
this silence between our thighs?
isn't that why the words shudder?
the books tear themselves in two?
the walls shake with our trembling?
and time passes
never to return?
 
VII

And now, love, between you and me
there is this hollow sound
no one will
hold
breaking my chest in waves,
in lungs,
in mouthfulls not yet born.

In this way, fish,
we are risen from the sea each morning.

In this way, i am coming to understand
in the rootless tree of my legs
we are all nobody.
We are all, both you and me together,
we must be on the verge.

VIII

Now i understand
(between gasps like a landed fish)
why we fly earthwards
both flesh and spirit!
why the torture won't stop
why this shuddering
as i hold you endlessly
sings
like leaves softly
shaking the tree.


Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He lives on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present. Recent publications include poems in Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, Anthology of Irish Poetry and the Irish Socialist (newspaper). 

 

Monday 28 May 2012

PD Lyons-

Last Poem Before Oregon

Slept in groves of oranges
Visited by only wet nurse bees
Shaded by impossible leaves
Clouds the drifting shapes of which made harlequin
Dreams disturbed gently by nimble hums
A voice like Marcello young again
Lip sticking fully curved
Remember the time
We discovered our deep lush alikeness
And rose, perfect stamens
A fruit of aching beauty
Wrote
 
(for Olga Blue)
 
 
The City I Live In

stiletto fingers thorough search
organic testament
piercing releasing fluid
rainbow of bad colours
bread crumb numb
in the aftermath
in the mean time
the dry before place
cruellest patience
weight weight weight waiting
no exit
clung concrete tit
iron penis pierced
willing any peace for any price
for any sense of soothing


Saturday 26 May 2012

Michelle Williams-


copulated
 
the night bleeds slowly
but i am tumbling erotic

plunging breathless

beneath the silken thrusts of your benediction

an exhale away
a gasp in predication

and your refrain

elusive

a carnal indifference
nebulous as rain


tattoo
 
i’d wear your perhaps
like a tattoo
eternal

if there was but     one
reason
beyond the rational
to



grains
 
we peer through glass  
                darkly
stained with windows
as if the denying the master
had not already enslaved

as if time were not the marrow
framing these bones

as if it were only passing    grains
counting lullabies

like Buddha in repose
 


Michelle Williams is the author of Female (Alabaster and Mercury) and founder of Vocal INKorporated, an organization dedicated to the freedom of expression through poetry, music and art. She is the host of several poetry, art and performance events in the NW Ohio area, including Simply Poetry. She is the host of Vocality and Selections on BlogTalkRadio and also serves as the Ohio Senate Member for the international music and arts organization, Poetry Over Music. She will be publishing a new chapbook during the summer of 2012 with Crisis Chronicles Press.

Thursday 24 May 2012

Apocalyspe Now- T.S Eliot-


Carolyn Srygley-Moore-

Ode to Horatio & Other Saviors

The moon is a window filled with bright winds.

It is more than a door.          It has no hinges
by which to cape the sea with vermillion light.

Where are you now Horatio?    The dog

bitten to death for the sake of love.

The imagination sustains itself by virtue of

waterholes & its lions & its elephants.

By virtue of vengeance.        Frightening, the enemies

one garners over the years.         Are they
enemies, really, like Lady MacBeths, time-traveling?

Scrubbing the lot of blood from their hands?


The moon is a window          dragging the sea

as a man was dragged behind a pickup truck,
having enemies, by means of only his skin timbre.

Horatio was a dog not man, a dog owned by a virulent


woman.      I saw him quake in the crate

I lifted the body from the ice chest.          I laughed
not thinking it real....The imagination sustains

itself.      No plank leads from the ship

to step upon, into safety. No plank leads from the stern
or bow.    I say to my husband

save me! You must save yourself this time

he says; you must be your own indelible savior.


The Word Crazy
 
Solitude shines on the balcony like the whites of eyes.
I'm crazy he says            I'm crazy for you       the rain pounding.
Children leave their existences unexamined
they clutch solitudes    like playthings: for indeed they are
peopled with sailboat & sailor         with the Middle C
stretching the pianist's hands             one octave to another.
*
I'm crazy he says            I'm crazy for you.  The great tiger
is dying.    He can hardly walk the rockface
down to the source of water.           I forget that, the source
of water, as if I too encounter a great enclosure
as if I too live in the zoo.            I'm crazy he says crazy
for you.           A card player's chair sits alone mid-field.
*
Who is it calling the trump?        WHo is it saying
crazy like it's a good thing            confirming the landscape
of lithium & zoloft & no           such things need no detox.
They are what the body lacks & needs in replenishing.
I'm crazy he says     I'm crazy for you.        & you mount my lips
with your kisses your flayed tongue your inordinant unpride.


The Things We Leave By the Sea

This morning the sky is rice paper
meant to be sketched upon: monsters, mostly monsters.
This morning the bankrupt piano
is playing Vivaldi of its own accord.
I am frightened for someone. It is not for me
that I draw my breath inward, sharply,
as if facing down a ski slope that I cannot ski.
              Darling, you forgot your shoes!
You wore your blue sandals & the funeral's black dress
to the art exhibit. You forgot your shoes.
You polished your nails blue       so they would peek through
the sandal opening.   The strap is unbroken, unbroken.
We leave such things by the sea,
our black funeral dresses              our unbroken sandals.
             The sky is not paper but parchment.
I dreamt of an inheritance I broke, one piece after the other:
cream colored elephants, castles, riders.
Was that last night? Time is an inheritance.
I tuck my knees to my chin & dream of safety.
Dream of rocking beneath the table      as war went on around us.
Domestic violence is a kind of terrorism.
If the mother thinks death is advancing
what do the children feel?          O the sky is a parchment
you drew your teddy bear monsters upon.
            It ripped like a mirror     & you stepped on through
to the other side of descendance.
You stepped on through. 


Carolyn Srygley-Moore is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Songs Scared from the Conch // as Voices Carry. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Web nominee.  Widely published, Carolyn lives in Upstate New York with her husband,daughter, and three dogs. Interviews with Carolyn are accessible via the Google machine..

Tuesday 22 May 2012

Aad de Gids-

Webstar-

webstartwo screens,two coldnesses,two warmths. defunction.too cold,too warm,too screen,towards the mal webstar.the spider of the world weaveth forth,its pray radiarydangling,its prayer silent and toxic,obscenely leafyvaulted inside the branches,in tunnels,rapids,shifts.a mafiakiss,kiss of the black widow,analogon ultrathemafor screenisms showing index and lacy intricatenesswhile the other tv screen lateralizes silent,stealthilya sanitized hyperreality pixxelated pixelationparalysisstatic and interference,what once was a testingimagenow became "the show" itself,transcoloured emptyinvasive imageprocessing scanning the touch of theworld intimately as plainly planely planly planlessas ry showed bodily skintouch particularly of theultimate feminin clit innervates 8V next to this thetouch of the screen rather implies an impending imagestalinism superimposition as what adler arendt freud jung still called projection. the tribu ritualizedsuperimposition of assumptions antropo|obs|cene upon the thingness of the tenthou things,and what with the enligtenment and "la petite mort" within heavily ornated overrated oversatiated obscenifiedtiaras&toddlers substratum grown abberant showymendel-mengele sprouts dancing to parents' everyscreenist whim and hulled unbacked invertebraedvisions of laBrea and  avenida diagonale nuit de menace.omertá,the silence of the lambs,the ultragraphic fireholehyperdefinition pornopixxelation of images "n'importequoi",sex as cinéma nouvelle vogue,violence insertedas "the way the day goes",an autopsy on broad morningscreen 10am,whatever you'll want you get. it is new.the screen delivers the snuffmovie now in your house.


aaddegids54y.nursehomosexualphilosopherdadaistoutrageousnessistdutch

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Shrove Tuesday - emulated cento, T S Eliot
 
He disappeared in the dead of winter;
death, in a dark, in a deep, in a dream forever
and said nothing of 'the life after death'
and when the Fool and the Blind Man stole the bread -
the girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall -
from out the house there comes the dullest flutter
frail and sad, with gray bowed head
aggrieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.
A dog barks; the hammock swings; he lies
no farther advanced than in his ancient furies.
No, it is we, soaring, explore galaxies
with an osculation of yellow light, with a glory like chrysanthemums
lichen-alive, governed in gametosporous colonies
towards the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling
quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone.
Angels are at the door: admit them, now.
 
1   W H Auden, In Memory of W B Yeats http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544
3   Ezra Pound, Canto XIII http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/canto-13/
4   W B Yeats, The Circus Animals' Desertion http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group5/poem.htm
5   Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland http://www.bartleby.com/122/4.html
7   D H Lawrence, End of Another Home Holiday http://jonathan.beaton.name/archives/1861
8   John Crowe Ransom, Dead Boy http://www.poemtree.com/poems/DeadBoy.htm
12  Louis MacNeice, An Ecologue for Christmas http://www.flickr.com/photos/12826947@N05/6837288692/
13  Charles Madge, Lusty Juventus http://www.flickr.com/photos/12826947@N05/6983421967/
14  Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son http://ninaalvarez.net/2007/04/14/poem-of-the-day-32/
15  R S Thomas, Song for Gwydion http://www.markcwyman.com/contemporary.htm#gwydion
16  Michael Roberts, Assault of Angels http://rachel.moss.tripod.com/rachel/id2.html

Sunday 20 May 2012

Michael Mc Aloran, (II)-

XII-

Break now, far from the beyond of it, your silence, my blindness, of this breath without causality, of this love lacking flesh, these lacerations, given to the taste of nothing.

I ask of no possession, no toll, I tax the nights spent absent of you, yet breathing, birthed unto these absent to and froes, all spun together, in the naught of us, the suffocation of this.

(What sun could love us now, we are not its’ children…)

I look to the presence of you, of the what has, what may, through the cracks in my eyes, washed away by silken oceanic, as if there were, as if it could be, as if it can, if spoken, yet subtle, yet not in a rash of the hyenic.

This clasp of us, I see its’ bankruptcy, its' beauty also, yet tread along, I am for the burning/ undone with, foreign as our distance, removed from flight as a wild bird severed of wings, over-shadowed.

(You are the breath of my undying mind, raging, in the night’s embrace…)

I know only the laughter of gravesides, the ash of all that can be, and yet in my hours of dying, knocked upon, the heart cast out, soundless the spasm of the body flailed, by this earth’s sharpening teeth.

---

XIII-

Sleep’s assassin, my hands clasp the dying bud, yet the spark within it sears, ceaseless, to un-fall, unto, fall unto you.

I awaken to blood red ice, to cold dry sands in a mouth that cannot fathom, as if it were to speak of all, if it could.

In this, cycloid of emptily, opening out into some vast breath of poisoned gardenias, where only the cleft hand holds the shell of mollusc laughter, the mind a-bleed, stray to touch.

Ah, if only to whisper were to be aloud, as if to dream of light were to suffice, in this chamber, this chamber of nothingness, asking of.

I see you yet I do not see, I hear you yet I cannot hear, such is this mute design, this deaf/ stun absence of my bearing, of my denude.

I walk alone, through savage ashes, adrift, skull vacant of all, some vacant tryst, some breath; how now my shadowing, gilded, where now the grace of this, and your vital presence.  

---

XIV-

Absent, yes, gone, I speak of I/ eye, of the frozen eye, and the silken head, the bowed fist of dreaming of, settling to absurd.

The dark claims my light’s fissures, tears from limb till spasm, as if the flesh were, truly, were mocked by death.

I seethe in the burning breathe of, the head aloft, I think of you and I die a little else, much to the drama of effect/ cause, knocking upon, the longing, the doubt of this, the redeem.

Absent, yes, no not gone, still of the eye to speak, cold colours, majesty of grace, I move through you, I am a silhouette of vapours, where now this flesh, this sinew, this bone and warmth.

I trade with the hyenas, being somewhat of a carrion dressage, these ranges to roam, this endless blood to taste, I ask of it, I do not know of it, words break upon my death, sieved, by vibrant fingers.

---

XV-

I lose you to the winds, yet changeless, absent, yes, the grave of this open as a slashed wrist, a beckoning smile.

The soil is hard, blood clot, burst dam of extensive heights, as if it, no, it says, I spit it out the loss, this breath of sudden excavation.

Toil empties out the breast of pulse, skin clad, moving throughout, as if to bask in you, as if I could, all said, in or out of grace, shifting without turning, the bulk of laughter breaking like tears, sudden as.

Ah we will yet sing, so I am told, untold, the songs ripped from our throats, from our bodies, scattered to ooze into the snow of death, scattered to bleed, emptily to flow as of some tributary’s demise.

The sky locks its’ veins around the eyes, vice of all my desires, waves, we say that we know, yet we know none of all, but broken imagery, invisible traces, only in the afterglow of what has unfolded/ begun.

---

XVI-

I coagulate, silenced by, tread unto vast of the ghost hand’s filtering lights, breaking as if to bleed, no not of this but of the breathing of this, there’ll yet, be.

The sun’s vast jaws crush the roots of the dead seasons, from out of which the breaking light tentatively casts no shadow upon.

Smoke drains from the lungs of poison chalices, irredeemable chance, your bare flesh and my longing, the trace of this and the cool blue of your eyes.

I am drunk upon the vines of you that do not seek to bind yet only wish to clutch, willingly I breathe of the milked ice, the blood of your traces.

The pulse laughs in silent settlements, fresh waters scattered upon the death of breath, the none, of the nothing of it, the soil washes away from my eyes.

Yet also I live for the sorrow of this, the irredeemable of this, these razor nights, the stillness herein and the spoken turn of light, blending with absence,
the lattice of desire, the head lost, in some skyward opulence.

---

XVII-

No not of the…given of…breath till chase to follow, championing the ash of, the cluttered vacant rooms of pulse, a clock face melts, silenced, silenced, in overture of sun, walls crumble, as of death.

We lay alone, in this circus paradigm of effortless, the skies fold their shrouded teeth in the dreaming of, the exhalations of, words to taste, formless abandon, in a flourish of exigent.

Ah drag out your flesh into the light’s caress, to spill upon the grave of I/ eye, where the laughter breaks, echoing of shattered mirrors and unspoken shadowing, all.

I’ll greet you in the foreign summer air, laden with pelts of forgotten nights, blood upon the skin, the traces of which to set to light, in spite of. We’ll fade as we burn, the sky no longer visible…I will ask no more.

And from these hands, a soaring exhalation, tracing the depths of you, the space between, beyond stun and asking, the language is yet young, the songs yet to remain, burning unto sung/ I beseech of thee/ I/ eye.

In a vice-light of this absurd chasm, turning over the soil’s blood, the adoration of the scar’s weeping whispering, bailing out from out of the silence of the redeem, I am silenced, silenced, silenced…

Kyle Hemmings-

Cheng & I

Salvation at the edge of the city. In ratty-tat bars, where Cheng tries to pick up men whose eyes remind him of sad lemurs, souls of suicidal leaf monkeys at typewriters. By break of tri-color stream of sky, no one can afford meat. No one can afford to lose. Beyond perimeters of broken fences, in an alley reflecting fragments of sky & passing face, Cheng is raped by a man with scissors for lips. I chase the man down East Houston until he is nothing but night without plasma, laugh & spark in pre-war doorways. Cheng says that it is alright. He knows the man, the Agony of Tawain in his eyes, the smile that reminds Cheng of sinusoidal waves of happiness & ennui. He leaves trails at laundromats, dropping quarters, stealing someone's warm colored socks & greasy tails. For Mr. Tawain, sex is car chase & flick your death. I clean Cheng up but his glasses are cracked beyond repair. I lead him by the hand into the protoplasm of night. We bleed from mercury spill of memory. In late night bars, we rip off rueful jokes from plastic strangers with fruity breath. Cheng's favorite: Life is like finding out your mother was a whore with nice teeth and false knockers. You spend the rest of your life, shaken, outside the hoops, in the dither. Ha Ha.

 
Some Random Thoughts of Joan d’Arc Before Being Burned as a Witch
 
I will name my soft-burning side, my unborn child in thought only—-Paris

Last night, I dreamt of having anal sex with the wind. I awoke penniless.

If Lord Vergy cornered me in my secret tower, lifted me with his thick lust, I would blind him with my seeping virginity. I would sound like a wounded nun, those high-piercing cries of love/hate.

I flaunted my fleurs-de-lis for the army at Blois. I expelled the prostitutes who kept the soldiers warm in the rain. Made the women confess to me their memories of being raped, the sodomy forced by motherless Counts. Each woman described herself as a leper craving fire. With their words, I turned into a trumpet of God. St. Catherine of Alexandria hovered over me & smiled. A mute peasant shook his head, offered me his ruined hands.

My army plows along over grainy landscapes. In the night, the sky is lit by distant torches. The moon is causing the ocean to lick low leftover clouds. Our hunger, our bloody feet, is our reward. In the morning, we will claim Burgundy, the bodies of unforgiven women, no longer susceptible to wine, no longer able to resist. 

Kyle Hemmings was born in New Jersey. He writes all kinds of weird shit that no one reads. His latest chapbook is Anime Junkie up at Scars Publications. His latest ebook is You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press. Kyle's philosophical slant on life is Fuck 'Em.

Friday 18 May 2012

Sandy Benitez-

Following the Monarch
 
The past was a dark tree
whose diseased leaves
I wanted to pull
and pick apart
until it was barren
and grasp the heart pained inside.
In the same way
my body a hollow shell
carried melancholy like a cocoon
my mouth shut but never sewn
by a stranger's needle and thread.
A sigh emerges from my mouth
like a monarch.
I try to follow in haste.
But the present is too far gone;
the future a broken jar.
 
 
The Sanitarium
 
The horizon cracks open its
shell, revealing the sun; a
scarlet-tinged orange yolk. 
Below, the ancient sanitarium
 
awakens to the sound of nurses
and orderlies prowling the narrow
hallways like fallen angels
searching for lost souls. 
 
Doctors smooth out the wrinkles
on their white coats and foreheads.
Charts are prepared.  Medications
are lined in rows of 4 next to
 
plastic cups of water.  A final
meal?  Behind a locked door, a
zombie moans.  Punches padded walls
looking for a way out.  Further
 
down the hall, a young woman
scribbles Help me on the walls
with an invisible pen she found
beneath the bed; her fingers raw
 
and bloody.  In the media room,
the television sings a song of
static as patients rock to and fro.
A skeleton of a man stands frozen
 
in time as a statue, gazing out the
window at the watercolored world
outside.  He'd seen enough of hell.
But Heaven was just beyond his reach.
 
 
Wiederspahn Funeral Home
 
As we approached the funeral home,
we heard the sound of Taps.  Old men
stood at attention like rusty hangars;
wrinkled uniforms dangling. Stained with age.
 
I felt as though we were trespassing. 
Invading their peace as enemies did long ago.
I wanted to tell them I was here for
other reasons.  Raise a white flag.  Surrender.
 
We were greeted at the front door by chimes
and a woman dressed in a black pantsuit.
Or maybe the angel of death.  The difference
wasn't so disparate.  She smiled at us
 
with a practiced sympathy etched in laugh lines;
a ventriloquist's puppet whose expression
never changed.  Just the tone of the voice.
We were led to a room with movie props:
 
a wooden desk that resembled a puzzle box,
plastic chairs from a trailer park,
and orange curtains from the 1970s. I began
to wonder if we were in the right place.
 
That's when the smell hit me.  The scent of
wintergreen mints in a candy dish.  Mingled
with an inescapable odor.  Moldy.  Ancient. 
As if the cleaning lady neglected to vacuum. 
 
Leaving behind remnants.  Layers of death.

Wednesday 16 May 2012

Dom Gabrielli-

A Poem for a Painter

the blue of the sea
the silver of the olive
the dead white straw of Helios

where your daughter kisses
the absences of jailed night

the white day turns you black

the elite come to inspect your works
they part the pubes of your pride
to insert the probe of their prudery

sometimes they buy
they make out big cheques
zeroes for colours

you wear a black beret
you write long poems in the sun
and recite them to passing trains

film directors from Roma
make films
they win prizes with your character

you have nothing you want nothing
just cigarettes and coffee
the kisses of your daughter

you build the walls of an imaginary asylum
to be alone finally
with the olive trees and the poppies

the choruses of your colours
are the only light left to us

(for Pucceto)


Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has 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. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.