A Preview of Reuben Woolley's 'the king is dead' (Oneiros Books)

mountain poem

writing on the edge . an awe

full balancing , each word

tight . no room

for whims . no fears

of falling . finding footholds

hang by fingers . no

crampons , no ropes

alone , you & the wind . put

that idea here

safe . hold

on to it . your life

de-pends

on the next word

unholy silence

living here 
is no pleasure . the death
of things , the stillness
here
they do not cry . they stare
with blooded eyes , unseeing
black hills run down
to blacker water unheard , ears 
pierced . the death 
of dreams

they are dry trees , stand
for no flame . no
red licks of bones

we lock these things away 
they will not return with stories
we cannot but hear . blindfold
they will not see
our secrets , our fumbling
games of wet flesh . hoping
for immortality , for
memory . our overwhelming
use-lessness

shadows

birds fly
heavily
over blooded land . it is
no matter . we
did not name
this place
            still
singing hymns before
the sun . does not
rise . the shadow
makers came
before . stripped flesh
from all the living
stories , sucking 
details from bones . eyes
are choice
for rats & crows
            the nothing
that was done
casts long shade
& fear spreads cells
unseen . we do not
move . we are absorbed
in dark streets . we feed 
the screams of all
the silent children . red
meat hanging to dry . we
lost this game . there is
no replay , no last appeal

orchard

I grow arms
& legs . a face
will appear & I
shall learn speech

if bleeding is needed
I'll open
the veins , bead
this orchard red
it will grow bones

                         this
is my graveyard . 'm
behind these stones
singing
with new lips . I grow
skin for these rites , coming
in profusion , renewing
dead earth

the king is dead (ii)

hero , you have sold your golden armour

for a night’s lodging · priest,

a lady has taken your robe for a pillow                         

the ventriloquist’s dummy

has stolen his words

& all our eyes

have been pierced

by the same silken thread

we will make

the same mistake again , all of us

when the time

comes again

those of you

who chew your food slowly

against the coming of the rats            

consider

the king did not go short of food

madame             

the flowering tree

has been corrupted              

& the other parts of the body

fell off

long ago


'the king is dead' is available from Oneiros Books, here

Jonathan Butcher

 The Crawl
 
 Entwined with those cold winds, edging our way
 home; stoned, and wrapped up against the world that
 has yet to inflict its climatic evils upon us. We held
 our collected breaths, our lungs heavy under the onslaught.
 
 You, stood on the corroding brick wall, that surrounded the
 sky-rise flats, the lights of which stared down upon us like
 a thousand disapproving eyes. Each one however, seemed
 as blind as the last, raising their eyebrows at our

 every move.
 
 We left those squalid rooms of peeling tiles that curled
 at the corners like sun blistered, peeling skin. The walls
 as blank as they were damp, yet as inviting as the
 abandoned super-market, that our idle hands could never
 leave alone.
 
 At the bus stop we leave tags and crumpled Rizlas, the
 shelter at this time offering cover from the passing blue

 lights and neighbourhood watch. Our sly laughter offering
 a welcome distraction from any mis-interpretation, our
 hands never bound.
 

 As the breeze settled, through the transparent screens,
 that were shattered into tiny fragments like mud stained ice,
 we once again halted the orchestration of this shambolic
 parade, and again remain the drunken conductors of
 a soulless chaos.
 

 Hold Back
 
 The cut glass slices through the sole of my foot,

 through this dawn that carries its own stench, like an
 abandoned, un-manned sewer that drips its condensation
 down stained, broken windows.

 My back slightly bent from the powder's onslaught, that
 leaves its scars, each one a fond momentum and which are often
 often displayed to retell stories; a convenient replacement for
 unnecessary words.
 

 Another blind stare of anxiety; to hold onto those scattered
 thoughts becomes far too laborious; they fall like dice into
 gutters that reek of rotting carcasses, floating like pools
 of oil down cracked urinals.
 
 A painted solace, that offers the same repetition year in-
 year out. I hear the flesh stretch itself forward, no time here
 for false names, and again, I once more reiterate- I'm sorry,
 it's nothing really personal.

 
 Shift
 
 Now even this chair has become stagnant. Myself,

 its ever compliant mould, I grace it with my presence

 each morning. My fatigue never extenuated enough

 to the point of collapse.

 The jagged keys remain as filthy as yesterday, their
 fading letters like a fisherman's rope, encrusted with dead
 skin and blood stained dust, that still seems to creep its
 way into my resisting lungs.

 That concentrated breath, that is focused upon each
 morning in this empty space. The bustle of voices and
 screaming lights delays my sensors like radio static,
 a situation you would avoid, like conversations
 with coppers or landlords.

 Over the clashing chatter my brain scrambles, a different
 picture each time, the limited light straining the vision.
 Each face here remains void, watching the clocks slowly
 climb that greased mountain, never reaching its summit.

Candi V. Auchterlonie

chance : she dreams : events homeless : time’s thoughtful appraisal : bramble weeds fisting : cycling: dormancy  maddening fours : bestiality : no, but it is only mankind with mankind : a great divide, the evolution itself : a different sort has become the largest sort : antlered hands : reaching for it all : et al : so many languages to say one thing: something we cannot say : mossed : worried world : dandelions breaking concrete down : crows feet : murderous clouds : a peaceful way : I read about trees growing ears : a dollop of grey : rust in her metal teeth : she catches radio songs : swallows them down : dolls partitioned into pieces and scattered throughout the reclaimed woods : houses are woods : houses are woods : there’s a forest in your room : there are foxes hiding in her hot hair : there are beasts waiting patiently as a storm at sterling crescent dusks : how to make it into nothing : this dull quiet too bright : the walls were eggshell finish : waiting for cracks to emerge : for renovation : reinvention of colour wheels : for the world to let in : for sizzle : for forks and knives : for taking back the day : for the wild oak to ride out the ultimate brackish wave : the six news : wild repetition of the same headline : names like tasteless fuzz on the tongue : cosmic freckles : this madness is a looking glass : is green sea glass : is madness alone : and pockets inside of pockets : and doors behind doors : and windows within windows : and hallways that turn into rooms : and rooms into other hallways : and bare flesh without lines : after all : there are are still children : we know : we know : we can’t lead them without weapons : without trials : without tribulation : without tribes of separates : without degrees of differences : without currency exchange : and social security this and security for that : we cannot lead with less : a man made motto : heard about a boy in the middle east burned alive: taken across this figurative and literal border to that : we cannot get it back : no : and that’s simply that :

--- 
directions : intersect : lost and found : paper pulled from hand : so many ideas into that : we could run : run with that : there was always some puzzling piece gone : there is always that kind of frustration : of others : of else : of sense and wonder : don’t mention it : a strip of camera film : a sepia negative that captured his galaxy eye : that is it : snaps : trappings : butterflies : dragonflies : moths : all in nets : pinned to cork : boxed behind a glass display : a hundred days : could turn page to a hundred years : just as well : you pinned the wings : you tried your hand at capturing some essence : iridescent dust on your thumb grounds that dead : no ghost : what makes something what it is : and not what it isn’t : I want flight : I search the airport at night : for a free ride : a way out of all that I’ve built up : a blue seam to pull : that would burst into blue cornflower : a hill that can truly scream : wake the cemetery of its slumber : and dance these bones : I imagine : prague : egypt : colours and textures and scent and light I’ve never experienced : I imagine some great chase : some losing it : and some secret memories : that I’d carry round my fingers as stones : to remind me where I’ve flown : though : poor artists stay home : home can be ancestry : I was new zealand : I came off a boat from europe : our children died with sick lungs : one of our young men jumped in front of a train with intent : no blood carried beyond that man : no essence pinned over cork : but a single archive about a tragedy : or was it bravery : I say brave : to admit your death : when the world says you’re well:

Martin Freebase

Leaving

Out into the street, dragged, under your nose

they, you, us, killing thing-fingerless gloves

executed, dressed all nice and fancy-black leather

all others, admired touch, which a velvet

burned the pretty words, some very subtle things

tongues nailed up with your shadows, pretending

on the courthouse walls, I rolled you down.

Look, dead prophets, a buildup of layers

once flowed as your boredom laughed

never owned, me the views, to be real

by the love song from everyday life.

Now they are silent, large landscapes

staring into the distance , all sepia tones

and dead little fleck, light upon your breasts

like the rest of us, your rawness.

Fields, still comes through, never more beautiful

with good intentions, I watched and waited

changed so much, as your scarlet see-through blouse

because they were blessed, danced through the streets

with such insight, repeat ourselves, with flowers in your ears

and understanding, building upon the other.

---

Tupelo

sitting on floor, casting long shadow

with the smell of bodily pronounce

physical exertion, the end-slaughterhouse

propped up all around you, with flamboyance

can possess, between your legs, voices

hear the music, anymore; you hide it under your seat,

poison everything, with mercy and born

they will never fade, inhospitable cradle

smoke, holding Bacchus down

Valhalla, with one foot-on your soul

I didn’t realize, the downsize of truth

the full extent of the down here, the awakened flesh

of your injuries, and the beforehand starts,

the postures of exhaustion, spits freestyle

they fall out empty and get paid

onto the floor; are themselves exhausted

I pick through them, the guilty confessions

everything appears like a slippery nipple

flattened, shortened and bastardized.

 

Michelle Greenblatt

Streaks of Scarlett: A Story in 100 Parts

from ASHES AND SEEDS

1. 

It’s 7:10, she notes. She’s just about to leave her cursed computer when an another goddamned idea demands it’s time  /  to drench the pages.

2.

I will come back…she starts, then pounds the delete key in fury. She hikes out to meet her edges.

3.

The motion of her eyelashes distracts her as she types, as does the irresistible urge to call this her autobiography. She considers this / sentence; she (re)considers herself. She looks out the window into the nothingness that envelops her. Having endured so many circular, identical events, how can she tell this story again?    

4.

He drives a shiny new white BMW, which he bought but now can’t afford; he rides around all day, looking to score. He knows his cleverness is a weapon. pour to melt, he insists.

5.

She floats in a perpetual state of emulsion, strips the last bit of syntax that makes any sense into pieces that suit her purpose.

6.

Her hand speaks out loud as it slaps her

face repeatedly,

factually and with a plethora of brutalized dreams.

7.

She picks roses |cut| She picks skulls |cut| She picks perpetuation. |cut|cut|cut|

9.

She runs through the empty chalk hallways, the white pages, the chapters of absence, looking for anybody, anybody at all who knows her name.

10.

who is she? they whisper after they have taken (their turns with) her. They don’t imagine she can hear then. None can match her features in any royal database. Facial recognition informs them she does not exist. They contact the FBI.

In hushed tones, they whisper, how can we best be rid of her? And: is she dead because her eyes have gone black.

12.

A memory: He won’t wake up and she wants him to wake up. She repeats this to herself.  you won’t wake up and I want you to wake up. you won’t wake up and I want you to wake up, wake up, WAKE UP.  Each time she thinks this, she grows mightier

in her anger.  She pauses, then rises, casting furious shadows onto the mirrorwalls.

13.

He is flecks of liquid placebo.  He harbors his many hands inside her. 

14.

disentangle! disentangle! she screams as she dashes through the palace corridors.

15.

witch and lunatic, they murmur, shaking

their heads.

16.

Meanwhile, the prince is in the forest, hunting

butterflies. He catches them, scratches their feathers off.  By this he means oh, look what’s left. And: here comes the butcher.  He does, of course, need to eat.  And he can’t fry those jeweled fish forever.

17.

His tongue is made of moonlight, of magic, of dreamlies. When she kissed him the first time—nearly nine years ago now—everything paused as her wish

(let it always be this way, let it always be this beautiful)

morphed to a smashing of prayers, then scattered into whispers, and the echoes of starless whirlwinds carried them away. 

18.

(But his kisses were dust.)

19.

Stillness. A blackbird. All is silent in that bloodforest but for the sighs of the carbon-trees and the scrape scrape of butterfly wings as the prince performs their ritual slaughter for his feast.

20.

Road reverse, reverse road: she can’t get away from this palace.

21.

The sky underfoot, the sun in her / skin (again, and always), skein of fire sweeping through her veins, blossoming in her gut, propelling her perpetually forward.

*

The foreground flies alongside her, colors blurring together in a haze of green and brown mingled with streaks of scarlet in the bloodsap leaking from the deviltrees. As for any context or sense of direction—she lost that long ago, when the weight of light broke her

back. Nothing but loneliness to keep her company now.

|cut|

*

begin, she thinks, begging herself to believe. I must begin again. 

|cut|

*

But here comes the wall of sepulchral silence slamming into her. Her 6½ sapphires spill into the abyss.

|cut||cut||cut|

28.

did you exist ever did you—Scarlett reaches for his hand, gone for so long now. But he has left her a gift of slain sky, shredded narrower than her small

despairing sighs. 

29.

They must have collapsed on the moist ground, but the (lack of) hospital records contradicted the corpus delicti: blood and flesh / evidence they left on the forest floor.  

32.

Her appetite outrages him; he strikes her, pummeling her face and chest, pounding her with his right fist, raking the nails of his left hand down her breast.

No one shapes their weapons like he. 

33.

Rage taps on the window. The window taps on the door. 

34.

She washes her hands in the bloodriver. Wisps of her climb into the bus that runs back to the forest branching beyond the palace. She can’t find a single place to pray amidst this, his vast darkling forest.

38.

don’t be afraid, he says to Scarlett, I can see you in the deathmirror. 

39.  

what does this mean? she asks him.

40.

Greet the dead the way the dead greet you, she has learned

the hard way. He grabs her by the throat; he hides inside her  /  bones. She forgets what hands are for. a light will come, he promises her, you will be held up and you will be blessed; you will be raised above the most glorious of altars.

It is then that she remembers: hands are for offering him needles.

41.

O sand O silk O galactic black wild—she dances naked, breathless, on the web-spread surfaces of Zodiacal light.

O exposed bruises, O love doubled into madness, madness into self                                                         murder,

flood of sunlight bouncing off dust particles, ions in the coronal plasma, forbidden spectral emission lines—

She reads pages of blank verse; her eyes skim the skies, registering the empty majestic light of heavenly bodies, most of have already died; their light is an echo, a ghost chased by time.

She’s drowning in the cold                                                                                

moonlight..

43.

don’t move, he said to her, don’t dream,

until I come back from the dead for you.

I will come back from the dead for you.

50.

Nights like these, the edges blur into eternity, into a single red scream that begins with the heart’s first beat and continues long after the last breath expires, leaving the body

with only the fact of itself: a discarded sac of skin filled with rotting meat.

*

he sleeps and she sleeps; they dream the same dream:

(don’t move.)

(don’t dream.)

(don’t even breathe

until I come back from the dead for you.)

But to live in his palace?

(I will come back from the dead for you.)


Michelle Greenblatt is the poetry editor for Unlikely Stories. A two-time Pushcart-Prize nominee, Greenblatt’s second book, With Explorative Hands, co-authored with Bill Mavreas can be purchased on Amazon.com; her third book, Ghazals, was co-authored with Sheila Murphy. Her book, ASHES AND SEEDS, is forthcoming. She can be reached at michelle@unlikelystories.org

mpcAstro

“Dirghatamas”

somesh* rooms                                                   *lord moon

                 “i have drunk of the soma

                                and now half of me am Urth

                                                 the other half [mirth]”

~Dīrghatamaster, “There was in olden days a wise Rishi…”

 

 

toadstool

              bufo ten nine

                      mooscaria countdown

                                         sync into the skin of the gods

~Once i was me; but now i’m you

 

 

well known for     verses in the Rig Veda

added to     since 1^st Mandala

//

chief priest of King Bharata

after whom

India was first named

//

birth of Dirghatamas in

the MahaBharata

studied in his mother’s

womb the Vedas

     Semen tuum frusta perdi non potest.

“O father, cease from

thy attempt. There is no room here for two

     Quum auten jam cum illa coiturus

esset,”     but Mamata

possessed the most beautiful pair

of eyes.

//

wombling     enfolded in perpetual darkness

     born blinded by the father’s spit

yet possessed     of the Vedas     yet

famous for his paradox     mantras

enigmas     : “     ,     he who knows

the father     above by what is below

is called the poet

//

called by many names”

//

360 spokes placed in the sky.

---

 

“That Lot’s History Motors, Way Gone”

 

 

On its plains where grew fine plants

Lamentation reeds now grow.

//

Circa 4300 years (“where go?”)

“gone” — Sargon of Akkad     arm wrestled

Sumerian city-states from     Umma, then stormed across her

Fertile Valley Between Two Rivers     controlled

trade from the silver mines of Anatolia/

     to the lapis lazuli mines of Badakhshan

          from the cedar forests of Lebanon

               to the Gulf of Oman

fortresses were built/

     to silo imperial wheat

irrigation canals     extended     bureaucratic reach

fed     palaces and temples     imperial taxes.

//

Then, like a hundred-year old cookie  

the sky crumbled/

     withering storms cut through wheat fields

          coated them in black dust.

For another hun-     dread dry mouthed

sulfurous halitoxic summers/

      southwestern Europe to central Asia

          Iberia to Crete     Egypt’s Old Kingdom     towns of Palestine

               great cities of the Indus

dusted.

//

sudden abandon     collapse remains.

300-year cottonmouth

full of erosion deposits     no trace

urbanality. Only above     3 centuries of strata

later

do ash, trash and

     monumental apparitions

haunt     anew

same o’ same go.

//

2 millennia before Yeshua

people like Abram fled the Assyrian plains

en masse.

//

A thin layer of volcanic ash

sprinkle the last Akkadian mud bricks

under an 8 inch-thick cap of fine sand

testifies to centuries

of global drought   

     Hongshan (“round heaven, square earth”) triangle collapsed

     Emericus? Still out

          remains tight-lipped as a jungle

               pyramid cut off and overrunneth

with old-growth jaguars and Homeland guillotines

     carrying a big “We’re Number One!” shtick

for review. No set up     just     gobble gulp go

//

The 3^rd Dynasty of Ur

was last attempt to revive Sumer

     back in the day     before the great famine & drought

like when Tom Jones

     back in the day     came on stage    

every woman in the front row

crossed her legs.

//

now it’s all

FBI warnings     about video piracy

5 years in prison     ¼ million-dollar fines

//

follow the movie     don’t mess with our cut

//

wands whittled from holly wood     wave fluid Druidlike spells

cast mass market     cast mass media     cast of thousands

pulling strings     pulling feathers     American Bald Mockingbird

he he he Fidelity/har har har Vanguard/

          hey twitter tweet State Street

BlackRock da bomb     go long, NSA:     PRISM A-ok     for liftoff

//

making a living     let alone living a making     can no way     , like   

slickass Zombie movies     , prep anyone

for the headshot     it’s in the clause     apparently

cuz all we do is bite

infecting those we bite

devouring what little is left after the hail    I mean     aren’t we just

asking     for     it?

//

only Corporations are

people

//

profits

not prophets

//

mitts off

Big Soma. 

---

from mpcAstro's newly released (9 June 2014) book of poetry,

Nidus Plexus: a metric montage (Oneiros Books)

http://theoneirosblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/nidus-plexus-by-mpcastro-has-just-been-released-at-oneiros-books-poetry/