Ness Sadri

 

Fog of reality 

 

A dark cloud of nothingness covers my world.

I wish I could see things differently like most people. 

No glass, mist, cloud or a deep fog covering reality.

No echoes of voices ringing in my ears telling me how unworthy I am of everything good in my life. 

No constant self-loathing and self-doubt about each and every decision I make in my life.

No more guilt about past decisions or mistakes. 

No more fear of the inevitable pain knowing that everyone I care about and love will die before me. 

---

Bernard Saint

Petronius

Petronius ‘the arbiter of elegance’?
Fastidious throughout a long career
It took three days and nights –
The binding and unbinding of his wounds
In that official suicide
Nero had decreed without due foresight
His victim would obey ‘between the lines’ –

He had so many friends
The flow of blood was halted
To greet them and renew their bowls of wine
The festive awnings and the seafood buffet
The lavish tales of travel and amusement

Time flew by
We thought it was his birthday

An Urban Myth

The ‘Ghost Bus of Notting Hill’
Is a phantom Number Seven

Fully lit the Night Bus
Driverless Conductorless
No apparent passengers aboard –

Some claim to have seen it in full sail
On Ladbroke Grove on Westbourne Grove
It did not stop for them

One night when you are heading home
Euphoric and a trifle stoned
Justifying to yourself
Some small illicit ‘fling’

Perhaps it will stop for you

Café In The Quarter

‘A blonde and beardless merchant in Harar?
I doubt it is your man…
This Rimbaud is a perfect gent
He does not drink arak nor take majoun
No kif pouch does the round when he meets here
Those hired hands assisting in his trade
Who say he can’t be French because
He never visits brothels
And pays their wage on time –
The sum agreed and sometimes with a bonus –
If they are sick or injured in his work
He sends to pay the doctor for a nurse
I think he’s what is called ‘a natural Moslem’

All in all
He won’t last long out here’

Marcus Aurelius on the Poetry Reading

Whenever I hear the word ‘poetry’
I fear I shall soon lose money
Call me a miser if you wish

This dread is based on raw experience
To which I would subscribe
In preference to your curious magazine

In my time a poet was paid outright –
Infrequently he might receive
Requests to read without a fee

Now this measure is taken as read
Soon he will pay admission
To his very own poetry reading

Such a disadvantaged state deserves
Your callous blackleg egoists
Who seeking urgent audience take all

By dint of doing everything for free –
They rob the wine and meat of those
Who lack their private income and tax haven

Do they feel they have something to say
That will not wait –
As schoolboys who rush home to blurt their news?

And that is why today
All poetry counts for nothing
Too many clever simpletons ignore the common good

Horace Ode Xxv Flip-Gendered

He is old
And wanting to be wanted
He drinks too much then forces conversation
Earnestly on office girls
Who hide their unkind smiles Behind cupped hands

He thinks that Cupid needs another cocktail
But the song he stands to sing
Nobody knows –

If love might stumble in its flight
Resting on a blasted oak
Or tender olive branch
It cares as little for its perch
As any crumpled rummy in a bar

And with his teeth unnaturally white
Sparse hair enhanced by silver from a sachet
Nothing can restore years cast away
In shepherding his wrinkled sheaf of verses

But time that stored all memory within them
Now makes its vicious audit

Marcus Aurelius in Luton Airport Meditates

They fail to inform you when you are born
Everything is matter most impermanent

The push-chair where you rule as potentate
Assured a maharaja’s sweets and lollies

Swivels in reality
Into an airport trolley

You are a luggage that your parents push
Toward the certainty of their Departure

Your teenage years you lurk and sulk between the shops
But there is nothing offered Duty Free

The airborne world is solid hurt
A Boarding Card will put you on

A Budget Flight – on top of that
Your food and drink are not part of the Package

You forage a depleted Iceland shelf
For prawns on brown with mayo –

Emerging from that hieroglyphic cave
An ancient urban man who must consult his new papyrus –

You Google in a pre-dawn hour your flight
Into that night of nights from which you came

A Piercing

Silvio that ring through your nose
Just call it ‘modern poet’
Why?
You simple beast it means
Anyone can lead you anywhere
By promising ‘a reading’
Or a pamphlet publication without payment

A ‘House’

‘That Memento Mori over there –
Ancient gent with leopard spots
For hands and still
A flower in his lapel?

Be kind to him
He tips more than he pays
To girls who may remind him
Once he was the lover of…

Yes…of Ballet Russe
So keep your wits about you
On your toes
And fly

Don’t ask me!
This world is full
Of novelties surprises
Love conundrums’

Marcus Aurelius Arrested

‘Hubris brings a swift descent
Neither must we seek
Our residence resumed within the womb

Life is a line so few can walk
I was stopped and breathalysed for being sober

While self-intoxicated crowds
Foamed at their mouths to yap inconsequentially!

My lawyer gods are otherwise engaged –
Delayed upon their golf course

So for a while this ‘jail’ may just suffice –
Get your head down sonny Sleep it off’

---

Chrys Salt

What can a poem do at times like these?
Does it say, look at you, this is what you are
you did this you bastard
this is your rotten cock-up your responsibility

or

Take a look at this guys, look at these
big-eyed children with their pumpkin bellies
that haven’t seen a square meal since god knows when
dig deep into that fat purse of empathy,
I’m gonna make you feeeel

or

does it say what’s the point I have no rhyme
or reason the daffodils are here
I’m for the spring

or

make us see the world in a grain of sand
poetry has a fine focus friends, it’s your tea-leaves
in the cup, not the destiny of the whole
fucking universe so keep it real

or

is it for standing still and doing nothing to

or

for shouting out loud at the obscenity,
the obscenity of certain well…obscenities

or

for jumping into someone else’s skin
and running off with it

or

for laughing at us behind our backs
with snide chimes taking the piss
out of the human condition from which the poet
is miraculously exempt.

or

simply for making cut-outs in the sky
to peer at gods through so
this smell of food rotting in a broken freezer
this timpani of empty buckets and the brains of
this mechanic on the wall above the petrol cans
and this father scraping sand off the face of his
buried son in the hospital garden and the filthy
hypodermics and the wards awash with blood
and diarrhoea and the black wafers of ancient scrolls
scuttering across the market selling a few last shrivelled figs
is a distraction from counting the stars or lifting the gold hair
trapped on your lovers lip ?

Turn it on its head no money will come out of it
put it in a drawer and it will lie silent forever
speak it aloud and it will fly from the mouth like bee swarms
or keep coming back to you
like an annoying tune in the bath or on the bus
planting its echoing mantras for good or for ill or for dancing
or for making love to deep deep in the skull
and sometimes it will dance on the tongue of the universe
to be sung over and over again and again and again
world without end, world without end.
Amen.

Lost

There are no maps for poets in this country.
The compass finger, mindless on its post
will not direct us on this dangerous journey.
An unfamiliar landscape tells us we are lost.
Above the bramble and the rambling wood
the technicoloured dragons wheel for bones
of luckless travellers who have misconstrued
the alien symbols on the milestones.
We have nowhere to go but where we are,
our options closed, the exit double locked.
We may not take direction from a star.
The stars are out and all the roads are blocked.
How can we dare this nightmare territory?
the shifting contours of the hills and coasts.
the gibberish signposts and the season’s enmity.
What hand our touchstone in this land of ghosts?

The Shadow Knows
(i.m. Adrian Mitchell)

You didn’t bat an eyelid
when I told you my son had fought in Iraq.
It took some courage to tell you –
knowing where you stood and why you had come.

You smiled, being you, and said nothing –
no judgement or rebuke.

I tried to unpick the conundrum
of the gung-ho soldier with a pacifist mum,
how nothing I felt or believed in fitted,
as if the gun had been in my hands,
or placed in his by something I had omitted
to do, or say, or understand
and in the face of it all,
I could do nothing but love.

Now your Shadow grows huge and kind
down my long table
telling me ‘yes’
that is enough.

---

Farida Samerkhanova

Echo of War

Three hundred and sixty five nights
Multiplied by twelve years,
Plus leap year nights,
Make thousands of nightmares.

In his troubled dreams: dead men,
Women, children, horses, sheep, j –

Pigs – all in one huge messy pile
On the riverbank by his home.
In different dreams he was dead among the dead,
Alive among dead, vomiting in bushes
Or wading in blood-red water.

He saw his tank on fire; his comrades killed;
Had to go to their mothers and fathers
And tell them he had failed
To rescue their one twenty-year-old son
In the battle. In his nightmares
The grieving parents would pierce him
With eyes like laser beams.

One of his friends whose nose was blown off
With a grenade, haunted him.
Blood poured from the hole above his mouth
And the dark red bled on the carpet
Near his son’s bedroom door.

He saw the head of his bosom friend
Cut off his body with a knife;
The eyes were open
With an explicit question:
Why didn’t you save me?
If he had saved the friend,
They would have killed him,
Then his wife and kid.

Another friend he rescued from
Execution, would always meet him
On the wooden bridge yelling
And pointing his gun
For being doomed to tormented survival:
Sans eye, sans arm, sans foot).

He screamed; sweated in the night
For flashbacks to those brutal men
Gutting the stomachs of pregnant women.

The soundtrack of his nightmares:
The roar right overhead of NATO
Aircrafts bombing Belgrade
On a Sunday morning while his friend
Was taking his daughter to Baptism.

He survived; tried to be normal.
In the broad daylight he could manage it:
He worked, smiled, talked to people.
But the tension of the nights
Was unbearable. Once the burden
Overweighed, there was nothing he
Could do but take a grenade
Hidden in the ground in the vineyard
Behind his house; let it explode
In his hand.
Only then the replay
Of those horrors stopped,
To a pin-drop.

---

Clare Saponia

A Market for Adhesives

Today, it’s as though there are prizes for
clinging around the White House. Casualties
and eye-witness divas become a commodity
as salt and psychoanalysis. Death is taken
down and favoured according to location.
Prayers are recited and withheld in equalling
measures nobody can explain:

there are fewer reasons and motivations,
fewer justifications to those ears bent, yet
more prizes for selected deafness, for
those clinging around the White House.

for England

multimedia images quickly
onto you today. No fleeing
into death without a webcam
or digital mobile to hand: fancy

Abu Ghraib bereft of nostalgic
sadists; England caught.
England saved. She was
sick and we didn’t speculate
nearly enough.

The Uneventful

A plain time doesn’t seem quite appropriate, agree
the heads of state, pinching here, biffing there,
collecting the ingredients for an eclectic bear-hug
and sneaking a coy left hook in when the referee’s
back his turned. On that they agree. A need for

haemorrhage and weakening backbones. There
are pills and powders to help. Documentaries and
flash newspaper coverage, telepathic satellites that
determine the outcome before it has happened;
heroes that survive and pander to commercial

indiscretions before a victory, fidgeting with the
meaning of the word victory. Morals have been
grated slick as iron filings and teeter between
winds. Magnets have been discontinued. As have
ashtrays, buckets and cat-litter troughs. In the

next decade, bloodshed might become genetically
farmed and screened prior to deciding who to
discriminate against. If we try hard enough.
Though, science can’t really help taking the piss;
putting bashfulness aside as the fancy takes him,

a tight coquettish grin rings from ear to ear and
sounds his intention. “Oh, go on!” he says, with a
flapping wrist. And forgets to blush.

The pacifist Pacifist

I don’t want to fight this because
fighting this is also war.

So what is the peaceful pacifist
supposed to do? Equanimously
sit cross-legged, eyes closed and
lightly smiling at atrocity and its
allies? Do I let enemies maul each
other and then me, should I
accidentally get in the way? Do I
love them, all the same, sit tight,
ommm and hope for the best?

I have no special reason to get
hysterical. We live sufficiently apart
for me to delete you from my wad
of preoccupations. I simply have to
sell off the TV, carefully avoiding a
morning tendency towards BBC
online, Radio Four, Guardian-Buxton
Spring deals at WH Smiths – in all
national railway stations – and a

history of serious guilt complexes. I
could start eating animals again,
maybe even on a daily basis. I could
take up judo or kung fu in the name of
self-defence, christen the world a dojo.
My dojo. I could build a cyclone B
plant for fun and tell all the journals
I no longer read: this is how it’s done.

I could write about these adventures
and invent some others, like the one
where I met Gandhi and we secretly
took Elevenses in his back garden.
And then I became him.

And we copied ourselves into myriad
Gandhis because the elevenses we
took were actually aphrodisiacs and
love got all randy on an empty stomach.

How different it would have been had
love multiplied relative to us.

Illegal Illness

It’s official: the stats have shrunk.
It’ll be illegal to be sick by 2020.
Disease has been cut. So don’t
develop ME, rheumatism or any
strain of mental imbalance
or you’ll be pawning breadsticks
for psychotherapy sessions.

Don’t catch STDs or smoke yourself
to infertility. Don’t have an accident
on your front porch without a fully
comprehensive insurance policy:
there’ll be no beds to death-rattle in,
no emergency staff at hand to yank
gadgets out of children’s noses.

Don’t bank on anything other than
this one minute detail: that sickness
will be cut when there is no longer
a service for it. The league tables
will see to that. Just watch how
cancer dribbles off the NHS menu,
how hip replacements halve to a halt.

There’ll be no future docs with nous;
just the stupid, rich ones who can
foot the bill and bribe their way into
the medicine cabinet with a sharp
wrench at daddy’s little finger. So
don’t get sick any time soon. There’s
a time and a place. But it’s not here.

Finger-mouse

He hadn’t meant to be put on trial like that.

He said, they were of a different opinion:

They tickled each of the remaining five pigs
of his right hand before snapping and carving
in reverse order.

They stopped at two and a half;

enough to make writing difficult, female
satisfaction – the job of other men. Not for
the likes of him.

They said, it was because they had caught him
having sex –

in a tree.

He said, they weren’t blessed with imagination.

He said, they didn’t care much for his films either –
even those made with seven and a half digits.

He said, he was glad they had left his thumbs,
for want of something to twiddle whilst awaiting
his asylum papers.

He said, he had no intention of letting the other
seven and a half leave the UK again.

He said, the word homesickness meant something
completely different to him.

Waste Disposal

Where is the drive, the imagination, thought, instinct,
self-imposition that gets you to a better place,
a higher plain? What have onlooker’s seen
but savage and stupid, binge-like broken instincts,
toxins with no quick-fix antidote, freak-show-style contestants

cooped up in grim-rimmed chicken grids for homes,
their bladed cages promising sharper, steelier freedoms
beyond and stab at the sleekest glint of self-improvement.
Inevitability is government policy at its most austere, MPs
playing bow and arrow from the glistening turrets of Shitehall.

Social mobility is segregating buses and schoolrooms
and city centres; it’s being granted permission to breathe,
to smell the weed-wrangled breath of your neighbour
on the other side of the wall: his rising damp, your rising damp:
in the soup with asthmatic, nicotine-hungry kids

who are kicked in the head before they know
what disadvantaged is.

Tahrir – Before the Tambourines

In the stretch from tyranny
there were lists, long and sly;
alligators squeezing out the remnants
of back-splashed teargas, their offspring
tendering batons

and a wrench of rubber bullets
casually raining down in bastard
sound mutinies, mapping out
the swamps of oceanic quicksand:
the challenge of Saracen-plump
assault tanks; of torn, swept-up,
pissed-on squares, of poorly
equipped clash-crowds

with nothing but freedom-speak
on their side, nudging their pride.

They lick the wound of the rule
of law. They aim and fire by
street-strike; unhinge the backbone
of Tahrir vertebrae for vertebrae
in their million-dollar, million-man
marches. They kick the badest

and blackest of bad-arse back-teeth,
a salad of real-life pirates whipping
the brittle with a flat lacquered hand.

It glides over state sceptics with only
solvent credibility; a spill of constitutional
die-hards and sectarian bloods flow
cocktail-smart like a fast-forwarded

pilgrimage. Artillery rounds select

death in thin symmetrical zigzags:
armoured carriers have eaten out
the still panting offal of revolution
amidst a rich mix of lithium-kissed
lies; the potbelly of propaganda
prefers its favourite pre-dinner binge
out of the newspaper. Silence

becomes a veil of dehumanisation,
a sword of guilt; a volley of bullets
and suspended killings interspersed
between stale election sweats:

interim Cabinets with interim love
potions but no remedy. Just bile.
Offshoots. Revisited. Same again.

---

Partha Sarkar

Cumulative sins for the century

Cumulative sins
Of the shrewd for
The centuries or
Hell by any means.

Heap them skulls
Without looking
At clock ticking
Or rare seagulls

Flying to search
For green nectar
For pallbearers.
Yet, none is urged

To be alive among
Mob- pure or wrong.

Three-fourths of the sins

The green handwriting from the sway of my childhood.

I do not forget the meagre meal served by my noble mother.
Yet, I cannot tolerate
The nightlife
The eternal vomit of wisdom
And no question from the dead ring of the solar system.
Yet I cannot tolerate
The sounds of the sobbing and the weeping
When they write the names
Of mass hysteria
Carnage
Garbage
And then I wish no salvation for the dead city
And the nitty-gritty is –
We have not touched the river
We have not seen the flight of the birds
Since we met development.

Above all,
No clock has welcomed the cloak of the fog.

The digital consideration

The shadow of the war.
The closed substance
And a clue to clear the sky.
The digital consideration.
Yellow hope.
Have reached the top of the corpse the frequent centuries
Without telling where the rooster is
And it is dawn
And you may tell the open secret to open the door
And it may open.

Everything is possible
If one is dead.

The atonement

I have lost my roof.
I have got the starry sky.
The atonement!

The collapsed automation.
Every other day
Comes a letter with green postcard
From the horizon to tell the truth that
There will be another retrenchment
For the bed of roses.
The atonement?

‘Go if you come
And come if you go…’
The preaching.
But where will I go?
And why shall I come if I go?
The questions
And no answers.
None know the answers.
The atonement.

I do not wish such victory

I do not wish such a battle field
As gives me a bloodless victory
I do not wish such a pregnancy
As kills the blue whale .
But I wish such a kite
As touches the blue sky
And me with its shadow
At forenoon when I listlessly
Look at me to know my identity
As it is the time of crucifixion
And anyone can get crucified
And before getting crucified
Let me know me the real taste
Of bread, red wine and death.

---

Kevin Saving

Dog Otter

He senses danger and is gone,
the water bulging in his wake.
You needn’t ever count upon
this sight again, and so should take
the memory and then move on…

You’ll never know what rendezvous he’ll break
with liquid arabesques, nor how he’ll trawl
fresh eddys, find new shoals to dredge.
His underwater playgrounds call
within him, like a lover’s pledge.
He’ll wear the river like a shawl
in slicked-back freedom, near the water’s edge.

Kevin Saving is not at all proud of the fact that this poem won third prize in the 2006 National Poetry Competition;
nor that it appeared both in Poetry Review and the Independent on Sunday, at the time.

Ex-Patriot

One keeps in touch now via SkyNews:
it seems we’re still at war.
We both, habitually, peruse
the Sport for England’s score
(although it’s easy, here, to lose
track what these things stand for).

One learns of how it all went wrong
in emails from one’s friends.
I still don’t speak the native tongue –
the weather makes amends…
You ask me just where I belong
but that, I think, depends

as we harbour in our own style
(and where-ever we might roam)
the wholly obstinate denial
that things change from what we’ve known
– so we feel much more In Exile
when on holiday ‘back Home’.

Gordon Brown
(To be sung to the tune of The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’)

Gordon Brown eyed-up The Prize,
now he’s found it’s not his size.
Labour’s dead-beats
losing their seats,
giving up ground through Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown taxes the poor
(when they’re down) ten percent more.
Our ancient rights
sold over-night,
he’s gone to town, our Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown, when interviewed,
looks and sounds like he’s chewing food.
Not voted-in.
Nothing but “spin”.
History’s clown – THAT’S Gordon Brown.

Death of a Hedgehog
– some minutes after being hit by my car

Your small life, so ill-defended,
(in a ball you chose to cower)
was quite innocent. It ended
and you opened, like a flower.

Autumnal

Autumn is a time for truth,
when we see past seasons clear:
spring’s long-neutered, likewise youth,
hedges grin a gap-toothed sneer…
Are old walls still weather-proof?
Rummage out your winter gear.
As the glass falls faster, we’re
stalked by something like a wolf –
mangy, but of sharper tooth –
call it ‘cold’ or call it ‘fear’?

The Headland

There is a place we seldom go
which (usually) we’re loath to share –
somehow sufficient just to know
that it might still be there.

We think it marvellous – though strange –
how each time we return anew
so little ever seems to change
(it’s only us who do)

yet with the years we go there less
(how soon those years will hasten past!)
till we can only ever guess
which time will be the last.

Directions

We’re quite often asked directions
how to get to so-and-so
and we seldom take exception,
tell the stranger what we know
till they sever the connection,
judge the likelihood, and go.

Do they make their assignation
with a loved one? Do we care?
Do they meet assassination
in some ambush halfway there?
If we know the destination
a rough bearing’s all we’ll share.

False Spring

Fooled by our thermostat and light
a butterfly lands on the wall
just by our headboard, preens for night
and flaunts its colours, proud yet small.
I watch and want to clutch it tight
but that won’t do at all.

We sleep. Next morning snows swirl round
like snipped, white, pestilential string
and I find cold upon the ground
this insubstantial thing
which left its night-time perch and found
no summer, just false-spring.

No Equinimity

The started fox does not contend
the pack -but looks to flee.
I do not think I’ll meet my end
with equinity.

Led to the slaughterhouse, an ox
will die without a sound:
I’ll take the same view as that fox
and, when I’m round to ground

or held at bay (you may depend)
snarl at my enemy.
I do not think I’ll meet my end
with equinimity.

Six Epigrams

Absence

Absence can’t make hearts grow fonder –
that’s a poet’s dismal lie.
Love -just like our eyes- can wander,
time won’t serve to measure by.
Life’s a tad too short to squander,
memory so soon runs dry.

If, within a world of sorrow,
some affection comes your way,
love today and lapse tomorrow –
we were cast from fickle clay:
everything we have, we borrow;
no one ever came to stay.

Bounce

Most human knowledge is pretence,
most ‘Experts’ know Jack Squat –
when we’ve examined evidence
‘Fuck all’ is all we’ve got.

God’s comfort crumbs bob in our wake,
this ferry goes short-haul:
if asked what solace we might take
I’d answer you, ‘Fuck all’.

Shooting Match

It’s politicians who make wars
as ways of saving face –
they speak of ‘Honour’ or ‘Just cause’
and (sometimes) of ‘Disgrace’
though prudence, it seems, still ensures
others die in their place.

The pomp and majesty of State,
the sum of corporate fears,
a ‘free’-market inviolate,
a rigged assembly’s cheers:
the whole damned shooting-match can’t rate
one orphan’s abject tears.

Handkerchief

A trusty keepsafe to entrap
all that which secret cavities anoint,
illuminated treasure-map
of silver lakes and rugged points –
whole continents emerge, disjoint
to one galvanic thunderclap.
At pinch, a rustic tourniquet
which (knotted) pesters memory,
wipes cum and caramel away:
like life, a spotted tapestry.
We semaphor a quaint goodbye
to those left standing on the quay,
or wipe from optics smaller fry,
or pocket tears inexpertly.

For all we own and are

For all we own and are,
days narrow into night.
For all we note, compare
the light and the half-light
we’ll sniff the evening air
and still fall cowed, contrite.

For all we love and like,
foul seasons follow fair –
monsoon and earthquake strike
for all we do and dare.
And time ticks up the stair
for all we owe, and are.

Minotaur

King Bull, sluggish but proud,
a meadow for his court,
moves through the bovine crowd.
(His reign will prove quite short).
Though flies besiege his face
one consort’s undeterred –
he grapples for his place
to rise above the herd.

Walking in the Pinter Hinterland
(i.m. Harold Pinter, 1930-2008)

You gave our times a new expression,
challenged what you KNEW was wrong
and had the courage for compression,
longueurs, swear-words; staged a strong
rear-guard to cancer. Screw concession!
[…Pinter-patent pause…] So long.

This Is Not Depression

No. This is not ‘depression’ – the nightmare
miasma which infects each waking thought
with reparation’s price: the limb we’ve caught
and must gnaw through to free us from the snare.

And THIS is no ‘Depression’. We declare
our markets ‘weak’, watch dividends ‘decay’.
Our grandparents knew ‘Hardship’ in their day:
they would not think their world, and ours, compare.

We’ve fiddled whilst Rome burnt – we didn’t care –
(‘Adversity’s Old Serenade’). Our chins
are double, and they wedge cracked violins.
No: this is not ‘depression’… it’s ‘despair’.

Lonely Guy (The Gorilla)

I saw him, years ago, in London zoo.
He sat forlornly, grizzled by old-age
(most thought him all but ‘senile’ by that stage)
and, for a fleeting moment, just us two –
no crowds nearby. One fractious urchin who
had planned to goad him into primal rage
(yes, me -young then); one silverback; a cage –
with neither party ‘prepped’ for interview.

How many faces had those dark eyes seen
flit passed across that O-so-short divide?
Some six months after this, it would’ve been,
I’d read -in mock-obituaries- that he’d died,
but for those seconds (what can such things mean?)
eyes met in recognition…and he sighed.

Rejection Villanelle

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Frankly, our editor’s confessed
that (for ‘unknowns’) he ‘can’t be fussed’
to scan their work ‘with interest’.

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‘significant sums’ ‘out of Trust’
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Pro Patria

So many things you’ve done are wrong
and you’ve been doing them too long:
you rob the weak, reward the strong,
my country.

The British ‘Bobby’ – there he’ll stand
so brave (his riot shield in hand).
He ‘executes’ a Dick’s* command
‘for Country’.

I knew we’d ‘sold-out’ to the yanks
but now what’s left’s gone to the banks-
just don’t count on my vote of thanks,
‘my’ country.

The British population’s jeers
fall on the unrepenting ears
of con-men, ‘spivs’ and profiteers.
This country’s.

The H.M.G.’s ‘convenience’
is lordly life (at our expense)
– all we take in returns ‘Offence’.
Our Country!

And don’t think once we’re rid of Brown
his rotten house will tumble down
O look! – up pops another clown
for country.

It spies upon our every move,
it trades in ‘spin’ (and not in truth)
-these days, only a fool would love
their country.

* A reference to the (then) commander Cressida Dick -the ‘brains’ behind the botched July 2005 anti-terrorist operation that led to
the killing of the innocent un-armed Brazillian electrician, J.C. de Menezes, in Stockwell tube station. Dick was promoted after the incident.

Tony Blair

‘Trustworthy’ was NOT your strong suit:
Oily grins more your forte.
Nose pressed to the yankee jackboot,
You were not the dog to stray.

Bush-whacking the hands which fed you,
Licking blood-stains from your paws,
Arse-sniffing the rich – in-bred you
Issue-out your poodle roars,
Ripped-up Charters in your jaws.

Sonnet For Lost Innocence

There are some things we felt you ought to know…
The old guy dressed in red – him with the hood –
we knew he wasn’t up to any good:
‘Unlawful Entry’ (as our cameras show).
That fairy with a thing for children’s teeth
(or so he says) – we’ve taken D.N.A.:
it’s our belief he’ll soon be put away
(some alibis just beggar all belief!)
You see old hook-nose, giving us the eye?
An A.B.H., two ASBOs and a Tag
(‘Domestic Violence’) – but that old slag,
his ‘partner’, Judy, just won’t testify.

The State must claim us all sooner or later
where ‘innocence’ means ‘lack of current data’.

---

Gordon Scapens

Explaining Progress

This isn’t a supermarket
but a cathedral of stored blessings
awarded to those carrying
the appropriate purse.

This isn’t money you spend
it’s oil for the cogs of commerce,
something to ease contentment
to faceless companies.

This isn’t a queue to exit
only a ritual conga dance
to the tune called
‘the insolence of wealth’.

This isn’t a till receipt
just a page from a bible
saying something is hidden
that needs to be told.

This spreading of such places
doesn’t mean they breed
it’s just money is a religion
in certain quarters.

And the corner shop
being boarded up
is just learning
to live in the dark.

Life disguises itself,
tells the biggest lies.

Fading Away

The attitude towards her
is like she’s an inmate
but she feels separate
and belongs somewhere else,
but not sure where.

There are daily happenings
without her choosing,
and strangers visit,
talk like they know her.

Time interrupts silence
for group mealtimes,
group activities, group bedtimes.
She is always included
but wonders why she’s here,
why the past is a story
all about someone else.

She knows she’s individual
but remains silent
in the step she’s taken
in her life that wasn’t there,
knows she’s not a number
but does have a name.

If only she could recall it.

She Will Never Be Less

Hear her change minds,
undaunted mouth playing
with a poetry of conviction.

She can hold a moment
in the grip of a smile,
but wear your prejudice
like a worn-out medal
and there’s nowhere to hide.

Tears are freely offered
but only for emphasis,
especially when seeing herself
in discriminating eyes,
and the sensitive will discover
her lifetime’s secret ache.

She is the revelation
of an indefinable spirit
but has relentless faith
in her right to equality,
never to be reduced
to anything less.

She is worth more
than just her image,
and tries to realign attitudes,
but retains the belief
she can’t be classified.

Observe, take notes, learn.
She is Woman.

She is where man comes home.

Ukraine Conflict

The good guys:
When the war is over,
separate but together,
they’ll audition for clowns,
paint smiles on faces,
remember laughter,
scatter jokes about leaders.
They’ll dispense love again,
a daily ration of hugs.
They’ll remind themselves
of who they are,
and be able to look up
and speak only stars.

This is deserved progress.

The bad guys:
When they lurched
to the start of it,
separate thugs together,
rattling misread signs,
not knowing the distance
between them and consequences,
they were worse than fools
and were defined
by the good they hated
and the senseless butchery.
They would never have
their place in the world again.

This is deserved retardation.

Racial Prejudice

The depth of bitterness
blooming in blind opinion.

The language of bigotry
caught in its own trap.

The sound of phobia
trying to fool the world.

The empty promises
falling on deaf ears.

The shape of indignity
from yesterday’s lies.

The trick of blaming
prejudice on victims.

The interaction of ancestors
stalking us for years.

The ambiguity
of who we think we are.

We are our own enemies,
we just don’t know it yet.
Counting Nightmares

He sends men off to war
where he would not go,
marching towards horizons
they cannot see,

and they have no songs,
words dying like flowers,
buried behind the face
of an unknown clock.

There is no time to waste
only time to lose,
and man-made trouble
stares in all our faces,

writing the small print
at the bottom of plans
for forceful policies
perpetrated as peace missions.

This is an uneasy world.
Living is watching peace
walking off the page
and being unable to follow.

War is never over,
man has its measure.
They count soldiers going out,
count nightmares coming back.

This war slays little dragons
while the big one waits.

Helpline to the Gods

Hello, is that a god
I’m speaking to?
Stop looking inward,
forget the beautiful lie,
I have a complaint.

While you scrabble about
at the fringes of reality,
hiding behind fake news,
this planet of ours
is sinking in its history,
is not fit for the purpose
for which it was intended.
It’s hurrying to a mess,
will end up in a ruin.

Despite your indifference
reacquaint yourself
with your conscience.
We don’t even know
how to cry properly anymore
and have the right to ask
that you promise us
the right sort of tomorrow.

What was that?
Hello, are you still there?
Hello? Hello?

My Cremation

I won`t actually be there of course,
such is the nature of these events,
but my spirit will join you
to prove so many words useless.

Not that I`m looking for silence.
You may tell a few lies
if it stimulates communal smiles,
and sombre faces must be banished.

Just remember the knowing clock
and its reminder of stopped laughter.
Don`t shed your tears for me
and drink something intoxicating

to toast my inspired mediocrity.
Merge slowly with the early hours
to make a celebration worthy
of the warmth of my departure.

Please party until your eyes close,
dance until you drop.
I will just hope Death
is not catching.

Even after the end
I shall still be laughing
the other side of words
and juggling stars.

I’ll be less then, and more.

My Thoughts Are So Loud

You stroll a ‘meet the voters’
as though an art gallery,
lost in study, analysis
and comment made-to-measure.
I watch from the sidelines
your face with built- in curtains,
wishing you were worth more
than the words you play with.

Sophistry tries to reach out
seeking the lost smiles
that hide from phrases
that put a strain on trust.
You want an easy ride to approval
but lack belief in ordinary people
that could get you a ticket.

A window in your promises
is letting light shine on
what you’re not saying.
My hope is the public
will see the thread running
that’s all about you
and those surrounding you.

Politics: causing problems
and making things worse
by wrong solutions.

Maybe tomorrow won’t be
just another day.

Checklist

Think of a country
that breathes carefully,

of faces daily ageing
a thousand years,

of questions
booby-trapped,

of smiles
a regime property,

of blows
as the best to hope for,

of disappearance
a currency of protest,

of escape
as a hole in the ground.

So extracting yourself
from inherited immunity,

try to assume the terror
of living in their shoes.

Then make a promise
to your loved ones

without shedding a tear.

Reaching The End

Everybody reaches the end
and it’s a frayed time,
needs a new compass
for those close.

Family and friends
will be flints,
striking grief
from each other.

Life will discard us
like soiled clothing,
our souls flying away
to a different sky,
names just memories,
sorry left unsaid.

A semaphored future
will plunge to the past.

The outcome
is intent on itself,
beyond explanation,
but all will meet
whatever they want
their god to be,
to explain forcefully
they were framed.

A Simple Man

Father didn’t confront
but his quiet umbrage
homed sins of the world.
He wasn’t a fighter
and disrespect and sneers
made him unlearn himself.

Weakness in the workplace
produced laughter and insults
to his feeble overtures
to be one of them.
Even his name wasn’t safe
from twists of their amusement.

There were many incidents
of him standing alone
incapable of a retort
as he shouldered daily
the pain of rejection,
ostracism in time and place.

He wasn’t the whole story
and his suicide note
would never be the end.

But now I don’t know
if his death
was a way out
or a way in.

All That Jazz

The fusion of harmonies
is a question posed
on the nerves of my spine.

Mastery of improvisation
threads the audience
into a chained password,

time disappears
into an artistry of melody,
forgets knowing my life.

A soloist flirts notes
to pattern a platform
painted by rhythm,

such melodies expressing
the flair of kite flying
on an improvised string.

This music has a soft centre,
melts over a frame of silence,
pours a lesson for ears.

The meaning?
Listeners will recognize
poetry of sound.

Summing It All Up

Along the daisy chain
of unfulfilled days

we struggle for a light
in home-made darkness,

for just a touch
of honest human contact.

Life is spent up
unlocking temples,

searching for a faith
our desires invented.

Time plays the tune
as we dance aspirations.

Journey’s end is a song
nobody has yet written.

---

Eduard Schmidt-Zorner

Drowned in the Danube

On the embankment of the Danube,
in front of the Hungarian Parliament,
stand sixty pairs of iron shoes,
pointed towards the river,
a sad ornament
making hearts quiver.

20,000 were brutally killed
along the banks of the Danube,
forced to remove their shoes
to face their executioners
before they were slaughtered
without mercy in the early day,
falling over the edge
to be washed away
by the freezing waters.

Sixty pairs of 1940s-style shoes,
true to life in size and detail,
sculpted out of iron, so real,
a memorial simple yet chilling,
depicting the shoes left behind by
those murdered by the Arrow Cross,
fascist orders fulfilling.

The style of footwear –
a man’s work boots,
a businessman’s loafer,
a woman’s pair of heels,
tiny shoes of a child,
standing there
in a casual fashion,
as if the people
just stepped out of them;
little statues, a grim reminder
of souls who once occupied them.

That winter,
men, women, children,
voices of pain afar,
fell into the Danube –
one after the other –
on their coats
the Yellow Star.

At that day the Danube,
a grave the riverbed,
was neither blue nor grey
but red.

Bergen Belsen

Barbed wire as bitter ornament,
these butterflies of filament
do not fly away.
Water drops and tears
hanging from the thread.
The poles vibrate in the wind
memorials for the dead.

The ear pressed to the wall.
You hear the shadows in an empty hall?
Was it a sigh? A cry far away?

Above you, shuffling,
beneath you, marching,
never a response, silence is deafening.

Love could not stand it, hatred had nowhere to go,
grief vanished, replaced by woe.
All pleading in vain.

Did you suspect it? Have you been warned?
Were not dark birds on the branches?
Did they not dig a hole for you?
Was there no sign on the wall?

During the Blitz

Waiting in the dark, we dream of light;
deep, underground, we hear detonations,
vibrations of bombing causing fright,
impact of loads dropped on a town.

What awaits us outside is unknown,
when we inch to daylight (which we desire):
a day darkened by smoke
or a night glowing with fire?

Grasped by fear and helplessness,
by air raids and trembling walls,
recognising nightmare’s relentlessness
in the horror of today’s sundown
when night falls like a gown
and sirens sound the all-clear,
in these days of war and fear,
in shelters with neighbours and strangers.

Wherever we look into dark future’s night,
far from the here and now, flickering light,
far from home, hoping, and hearing
the word without knowing its meaning.

Did we see warnings looming up?
Signs on the wall, in Belshazzar’s hall?
Did we anticipate tyrants, invasion, depravity?
Victims, the dead, the bombs on Coventry?

Sons of the land clothe themselves with death,
arm themselves to kill their own kind
in the places of horror, up and down the land.
Dream weavers weave a wreath,
money counters count and pay in kind;
armourers forge, steel unsheathed;
soldiers kill; leave thousands bereaved:
we are all led like puppets on a string.

In the city of lost angels,
a masked man sharpens his black scythe,
saddles his mighty horse
for the very last fight.

Burn, Phoenix, that your ashes bear fruit,
keep your heart’s blood, Pelican, to feed us.
Grim Reaper has his harvest time.
We hear graveyard bells chime.

Almost filled is the hour-counting shadow glass;
nearly faded, are pottery shards with your name,
the Tree of Life, standing pale in the rain;
wilted, the rosebush that lived your love,
windblown breath that carries your words,
naked, featherless – lonely peace dove.
Go where you have never been before,
where yet so many wait.

---

Joel Schueler

Finding Form

The dose is finding form
it crept out of the dawn
the salt eye in the wind
upturned the bed and senses soared.
There are patterns in the chasms
and I don’t feel like cleaning
I’ve been jabbed and sold a rag stuffed with an army of green fibers

I’ve been thinking more of clinging –
dirtying incarnation,
it’s been such a long time with me
like a jet-stream summer crying

The breached banks
call the heron
whose angle manifests
it’s pleading with the world in a bid to get some rest.
The shots are pouring down, the throats are in their mouths
the East is up
and I’m so lucky
for healed ground

I’ve been drinking in the winning –
dirtying incarnation,
it’s been such a short time with me
no more equanimity.

---

James Scully

All That Is Solid

Gon: Here is everything advantageous to life.
Ant. True; save means to live. —The Tempest: II.i

1

all that is solid melts into air
the great globe itself
dissolves,
all that is holy is profaned

heavenly highs,
cloud-capped corporations,
idyllic Ponzi schemes,
the post-colonial seminars
of colonial regimes

all gone, kaput

so melancholy Prospero
retiring from the tiny island
that saved him it was
after all, only a stage
is reduced to living
in his own skin

there is no island,
no stage

no spirit slave

gone is Caliban,
bad breath gone,
excruciated teeth,
his disabused truth
no less self-absorbed
than the gobbledegoo
of Prospero’s motley crew

the whole bunch
went out & got
drowndéd in the icy waters
of egotistical calculation

2

. . . gone & left
drifting impassioned over them
the wrack of a still youthful Marx,
the species drama of the Manifesto
poignant in its nakedness, catching
a rhetorical lift on the long withdrawing
wash of The Tempest—

a grand gesture to usher in
the anguish of the age
we ourselves live & will surely
die in: compelled to face
the real conditions of our life
& our relations with our kind . . .

we who imagined no world
beyond the one we fell into,
stupefied hardly believing
what was happening is happening
even as we are even now

plunged

into the sea of wreckage & plunder
that long ago imagined us

---

LB Sedlacek

The Headache Room

Candy apples split
by a vote of absenteeism
and faded smiles. The loafers
crawl up on one another
and battle it out for insoles
or polish. Red fingers
flush back bitter morsels
and the eyes glow all schoolgirl
planetarium. We swirl our tongues
and talk of the liberation
of milk and juice, the
incarceration of applesauce,
the intricacies of matching
faces to stomachs, or code
names to bar glasses
served on silver trays
with a single stem rose
in a crystal clear vase.

---

John Seed

in time of “the breaking of nations”

1

Clatter and trail of
sparks in the twilight slow

wake of turn-wrest plough

a hillish and sliding country

only a horse and man
hungry on the flint clay

margins of profit

with brill-hook and hatchet
betting his hedges

dawn and dusk
heaving contrary creatures stiff loam

hazy hollows
empty frost pockets

---

Anthony Seidman

Two Allegiances

I hold two allegiances: this terrain, & the night.

Between them, falls the eternal:
sun, earth’s orbit, minerals,
vegetation, hibernation of bears.

These foothills, chaparral,
are my country, these gas stations,
these sub-par public schools, vacant
lots & miles of asphalt…

they are the sigil
I behold thru smog:

California, veiled
in black, passes by holding
a bloody carnation;

I click key in ignition, hear
engine turn-over with a groan,
then set
this hearse in motion.

The Trilobite

A Cambrian thru Permian
eras invertebrate, crawled

& burrowed in shallow ocean stretches
for millions of years,

feeding on organic ooze &
particles from the sea-floor,

legs pushing nutrients
into their mouths also propelled

them thru sediment.

They were lovely,
with a chitinous armor

that resembled the lines &
interstices on a Mondrian;

as with the modern lobster,
crab, they seasonally cast

off their shells, leaving
the amateur & paleontologist with

thousands of effigies like
abandoned cars overtaking a vacant lot.

Hugo Gutiérrez Vega
translated by Anthony Seidman

Crime Sheet Photo
For Cesare Pavese

To leave the house one morning
without having a coffee, without saying a word,
without kissing the wife or the children,
to ride that streetcar,
and cross the garden without seeing
how the sun hangs its small suns
along the tree’s branch.
To cross the garden
without seeing a boy is gazing at us,
without seeing the blondes, brunettes, and the ashen-haired.

To pass by, weighed down by a deathly smile,
with a mouth clamped shut until it aches.

To step inside hotel after
hotel until finding one that’s quiet and remote,
to stretch out in the washed sheets
and without saying a word, without opening the window so that
the sun may not lodge its hope,
to pull the trigger.

I’ve said nothing.
Neither has the sun,
nor the flower that the girls gave us.

Hugo Gutiérrez Vega: A leading poet from the generation of the 50s. He currently resides
in Mexico City where he edits the cultural supplement to La Jornada, Mexico’s major newspaper.

Carlos Martínez Rivas (1924-1998)
translated by Anthony Seidman

Dirge: On The Death of Joaquín Pasos

I

With a snare-drum’s rattling roll,
in the middle of a small Plaza de Armas,
as if for the obsequies honoring a hero… that’s
how I would wish to commence. For just as
Death’s Rite dictates that I forget his death,
I shall return to his life,–
and to those of other extinguished heroes who once
flared forth as he did down here.
For many are the young poets who have long since died.

Through the centuries they hail one another; we hear
their voices ignite, like roosters crowing then
answering from night’s umbrage.
We know little about them: that they were young and tread
upon this earth. That they knew how to pluck the strings of an instrument.

That they felt the sea-breeze tousle their hair,
and contemplated the hills. That they loved a girl,
and that they clung to this fancy so tenaciously as to forget her.
That they wrote of it all, far too late, revising much
and one day died. Already their voices flame at night.

II

However, Joaquín, we know
much about you. I know…I travel back
to that day when in the embrace of your nanny
you suddenly became aware you existed.
And through this self-discovery you and your eyes were,
and your vision was the clearest that as yet any
being had attained. But you merely observed
with a stupefied, fateful gaze,
never retaining people for love or for hate.
(Even your small hands were more capable than others
at grasping an object, and not dropping it.)
One morning they took you to the barber’s where
they solemnly sat you down; throughout the ordeal
your behavior was like a little gentleman’s…
even though the customers poked fun at you,
even though the close clippers snipped your curls,
transforming you.
Later you hit the street. That other street
and other age when you scribble
a mustache across Leonardo’s Mona Lisa,
when you’re unkempt and uncouth…
but radiant youth soon bursts forth.
Later, we all know the rest: the toll
things took on you. The flow of beings
that pressed to meet you, each in turn
posing their questions
you had to answer with a clear
name which would resonate distinctly in their ears
among all others, just as we know
that the darkest men visited
Iaokanann in order to receive a name
so that henceforth
God could call upon them in the desert.
Thereafter, your destiny was such that you
could never gaze upon the earth,–
a nasty business, Joaquín. You learned
that before all things you paused to contemplate,
all were meted out an allotted time, and you would tremble.
That merely looking at them for
a reasonable time was enough to turn them
into something dreadful:
the blinding flash of a lemon.
The dull weight of an apple.
The pensive face of man.
The two breasts, pale and panting, heaving
beneath the blouse of a girl who’s just run.
The hand that reaches out to touch her. Even words themselves…
everything had an essence inside itself. A sense
that resided at the core, unmoving, repeating itself,
neither waxing nor waning,
always full of its self, like a number.
And this list of names, this sum total you must
calculate for the day of reckoning,
and when you complete the calculation you shall become it.
Because they too gave you a name, so that
you would fill it with all, as in a crystal goblet.
So in such a manner you would include inside of you
starry nights, flowers,
village roofs seen from the road,
and that by uttering its name you would name yourself:
the sum total of all you saw.
To accomplish which they gave you only words,
verbs and some vague rules. Nothing tangible.
Not a single utensil like those that scrubbing
has made so shiny. And so I think
perhaps–just like me at times–you would’ve rather been a painter.
Painters at least have things. Brushes
to clean and keep in jars
of china and clay which they’ve purchased.
Paint-stained artifacts and all the objects
a simple man has devised for his own consolation.
Or to be a woodworker
carving a dancing nymph on furniture so that
the air actually ruffles her cloak.
But it’s certain no man
ever controlled his destiny. And that difficult
labor turned you into the most honorable
type I know. Granted,
you knew what you were getting yourself into.
You saw workers as they go to the store. You watched
how they examine tools, test blades,
finally choosing the only one among the many: the wife
for the high bed of the construction scaffold.
Such was how you chose an adjective,
a word, and how you scanned a line;
you stalked as you would an enemy.
To make a poem was to plan the perfect crime.
It was to scheme a stainless lie,
made true by dint of purity.

III
And now you have died. And the flow of grace along with you.
It is said God has never permitted what
burns brightly among mortals to splutter, and fade.
Because of that our hope endures.
It’s difficult to fight against the muddy
Olympus of the frogs. From earliest childhood they’re
trained in the practice of nothing.
It is a great toil that the rest
shall be discerned. And yet there are few who
recognize it amid the smoke and jeers.
But we shall persevere, my dear Joaquín. Never fear.
And if by dying you have committed any treason,
that’s your affair;
I shall not be one to judge you,
myself a frequent traitor.
Therefore,
I don’t raise my voice against Death.
Poor maiden, always overwhelmed by her own power,
and embarrassed by the lamentations bursting over the corpse.
Only you can know your own death.
Its enigma doesn’t concern the living, only life does.
While we are alive let Her be forgotten as if we were eternal.
And let us strive.
You, rooster of the Orco, awaken us.

IV
And just as the bees of Thebes flew–
as old Elyan tells the tale–to suck honey from young Pindar’s lips,
let this song stretch, touching your pallid head;
let it light on your breasts, piercing
your mouth with its own, quenching its fire-thirst;
let it flutter around your brow, weaving an
invisible crown upon your head.
Let its wings beat with increasing force, soaring
to greater heights with majestic turns.
Let it urge forth. Once more, and again,
describing greater and greater circles
in its flight towards empyrean.

Carlos Martínez Rivas (1924-1998), author of La insurrección solitaria (1953), is one of the supreme poets from Nicaragua,
and offers an interesting alternative to the poetries of Cuadra and Ernesto Cardenal; whereas Cuadra and Cardenal offered
a collage of voices from Nicaraguan society, and where Cardenal opted for the open sequence form and aesthetics of Pound
in his most ambitious poems, Martínez Rivas’ voice was intensely solitary, precise with his wording, more interested in the
poetry of a Dylan Thomas or a Hart Crane, in order to foment in his poetry and intellectual life a “solitary insurrection,” the
title for the one collection of poetry he published in various editions, with various additions and revisions, throughout the decades.
As with Paz, an admirer of Martínez Rivas, Martínez Rivas revised his poetry even after publication, and lines have been modified,
added and dropped from poems,–“Canto funebre a la muerte de Joaquín Pasos” being no exception. These slight changes are
maddening to any translator, and what I have done is approach the task of translation as imitation and dialogue with the poet,
in a Lowell-sort of way, in order to produce a poem that echoes the textures of vocabulary and tone in Martínez Rivas’ poetry.
For example, my usage of such a word as “empyrean” is intentional, and alludes to the poet’s absorption of Milton, most strikingly
in “El paraíso recobrado” (1944) and in other long poems. Martínez Rivas’ poetry, though always controlled and conceived with
amazing architecture, can switch from the colloquial to a Spanish rich with allusions to the poetry of the Siglo de Oro; thus, the
reader will notice my intentional usage of words such as “dirge” and “obsequies” (used also for the allusion to Crane’s playful
twisting of the word in his “Chaplinesque”), alongside slang expressions such as “later you hit the street,” as well as incorporations
of images and lines in contemporary North-American poetry, such as Levine’s “close clippers” from his “To A Child Trapped In
A Barber Shop”. It is my “fancy,” to use a term that Martínez Rivas loved, that these eccentricities would have been pleasing to
Martínez Rivas. The title of the poem, one that is both an In Memoriam and an Ars Poetica, addresses the death of Martinez
Rivas’ friend and fellow poet who died young, leaving behind work that includes “Canto de guerra de las cosas,” a poem that
has become widely read and is regarded as being as innovative and as important as the longer poems by Huidobro or Neruda.

Pancho Nácar (b. 1909)
translated by Anthony Seidman

Daybreak Flowering

With splendor, the day is born;
a cooling breeze flutters;
the eye perceives how the sun is reddened as
it unleashes its light.

By the pond, the blackbirds preen;
a boy, whistling, draws water;
perched atop the fence, a red-
plumed bird peers for someplace to flit off.

Some, upon awakening, fetch water;
others, set off to the fields,
and with drinking gourd hanging from their shoulders,
they go, stirring dust over the road.

First Offering

Today is the first visit from your soul;
though I am here in this house, you
are in a distant tomb; in memory
of you, I light two candles to the saints.

I would set a great offering
in your memory if I lived in my pueblo;
how it aches in these moments to be
alone, to live in a foreign land.

If I were in my pueblo, I would raise an altar,
and with sacred palm leaves, sew stars
to adorn the walls, and I would set fruit
and tobacco on the sacred table, and offer liquor.

And the women, they would come and help;
those who were your friends would offer their hands;
as in a home where there is corn to be ground you would see
how we devoutly prepare this first offering for your soul.

Pancho Nácar: Born in 1909, Nácar, along with Macario Matus and Andrés Hinestroza, is considered as one of the
leading poets who wrote in the Zapotec language, known as Diidxazá, as spoken in the culturally vibrant region of
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and Juchitán, Mexico. He is especially recognized for interpolating Spanish meter and
poetics with the oral traditions of Zapotec song and story-telling. His one book Ti gueela’ nacahuido’, A Dark Night,
was first published in 1973, and has remained a legendary books among poets who continue to write in their native
tongue, rather than in the language of the conquerors.

Siadó’ guíe’

Sicarú rindani gubidxa,
naga’nda; riguiñe ti bi huiini’
rihuinni gubidxa naxiñárini,
naxiñrini rucheeche xpiaani.

Cayaze bigote ruaa bizé,
ti xcuidi cabee nisa ne cutiipi,
guguhuiini’ zuba íque le’
cuyubilú neza guipapa.

Nuu tu riasa ma’ zecaa nisa,
ne nuu tu neza ra ñaa ma’ze’
nanda xi’ que’ ti xigabá,
zeyasa yu dé neza ze’.

Xandú’ Yaa

Cayaca xandú’ yaa stiu’ yanadxí,
Stubelu’cha’ zuba ndaani’ yoo;
Neca zitu ra ba’ napa’ lii,
Chupa xquíri’lu’ caguí lu bidó’.

Nandxó’ ñanda ñune’ lii xandú yaa,
Pa ñaca ndaani’ xquidxe’ nibeza’;
Dunabé huaxa naná rácani naa
Ti zitu nuaa ne xquidxi binni nabeza’.

Pa ñuaa’ ndaani’ xquidxe’ nugaanda’ biyé,
Nicaa’ bichiisa nuzuchaahui’ ndaani’ yoo;
Guirá’ cuananaxhi ña’ta’ lu bidó,
Ñaazi’ gueza, nisa dxu’ni’ nudiee’.

Guirá huna huiini’ nidxiña ñacané,
Ca ni bidxaagu’ nidxiña nudii ná’;
Sica ti yoo, ra cayuutu’ binni dé
Nihuinni ra yoo, casaca xandú’ yaa.
(Original Zapotec text)

César Silva (b. 1974)
translated by Anthony Seidman

The Anguish of What’s Born

in a cheap bar i watch a movie about convicts
and the screen is like a sun though it’s 10 o’clock
at nite
a squandering of light, a stunning dove
like the woman tending the bar
whiskey embraces the scene and in the movie
everything smells like new
no one eats or drinks because everything is
circumstantial
because nobody will die during dinner
and nobody will escape when the convicts are drinking
everyone’s like a centipede squeezing at danger,
the sumptuous rib that god immediately cloisters in
a bubbling spring
and which in the evening nourishes birds in the patio
and nourishes the danger of a razor’s edge into the
astute brow
everyday they remember
those who once again will be important
they speak about the anguish of what’s born
and guess that everything’s alright
in the movie you can inexplicably hear an orchestra
you hear the ill-fated funereal dilate at the foot of
the screen
but here on the outside Sinatra sings just for us
12 years have passed on T.V. and the actors are old
the same thing happened here
my woman grew out her hair, and the drapes are
drab
fate is a lifeless body
and my cup drags in the years
i drink

César Silva: b. Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 1974. Silva is the author of several collections, among them ABCDario,
published by Tierra Adentro, and currently in its second edition. He is one of the leading, younger poets in
Mexico, and is partly responsible for a loosening of breath in some contemporary Mexican poetry, a sense of
play and utilization of the vernacular, in reaction to the official aesthetics imposed for so many years by poets
imitating Paz. He is also an award winning novelist and his work has appeared in diverse journals in Mexico,
the United States and Spain.

Inscriptions

I like not uttering your name, squeezing it within,
maintaining it in that continuous tumble toward my bones;

the tense arch of your name,
the sting of each letter shriveling, not making a sound:

first the sign
to first write the sign and never pronounce it;

to assemble the resurrection of the world’s silences
in the voyage of your name.

Fire

phosphor of the world,
necklace of words:

the fingers loosen,
the fingers write;

they dictate what I think,

they forge what I dictate.

Werewolf

i’m a grappling iron
i’m the miracle in which fear crosses itself
the wound sniffing its own blood and devouring itself
i’m a thread that catches on fire vertically
open up the door

---

Sanjeev Sethi

Knock About

In brio of white heat
we miss memorializing
the portion is dwindling.
When patterns unfold
realization dawns:
we are spear carriers
of our sagas.

If we see ourselves
as viatores
on prolonged sallies,
proprietorial instincts
will be clipped.
This will foster
greater equitability.

Ballot

A flurry of footloose word-armies,
unleashed in makeshift assemblies,
impress at first blush. On jelling
for gravitas, one realizes, empty
words leave us unfurnished.

The familiarity of promise is like
an earworm. Takeoff on truism?
I wish I could urge them to hustle
with a new hook, bunko with a buss.
Lure me with unusual lies.

Terigiversation

The Net makes it handy to clear
one’s history
yesteryears aren’t that yielding.
Shirttailed conversations
sometimes leave us
with souvenirs
unlike pleasantries
indulged in over pick-me-ups.

Conscious of his wife’s condition
the inevitability of her withdrawal
from public life,
the gifted actor who has more bombs
than boffs
pegged on erroneous choices spoke against
the high man on the totem pole
in a telly interview.

Marginalia

On his forty-fourth, I am the first
ever to wish him, not his mate,
not his mother, nor his son or siblings.
In his cloche, there never was any cake.
No potlatch on his red-letter day.

His dreams subvocalize his failings,
fantasies are mute expressions
of potent fears. Somewhere in him
there is a bomb whose button he cannot find.
Even the robes he borrows have cuts bigger
than the foxholes, he longs for.

Lifeblood

A prinker engages with temporal superficies. This
is a middling slip-up in tourbillion of earthly spice.
Why niggle? There are myriad graver misdeeds.
Each has to charter an internal codification identi-
fying with their whatness.

Whether in heather, ebony, or ivory the exogenous
heads our selection. Someone may be a posthumous
baby but no-one is born days after the demise of his
or her birth mother. All this as polemics of equality
are as old as Methuselah.

---

Sam Silva

2020

Death by bloody asthma
in years smoked by racism
inhaled in the innards
with a final infection
ready for the respirator
and waiting for election.

Children of An Evil Calling

But we are, in a sense, much like him somehow
insanely and ignorantly narcissistic in our greed.

We would eat everything alive.
Destroy ourselves
and also
everyone

on a lazy bet.

The Plague

A thousand times older and more afraid
in washing disease
of guilt and fleas
in the care and desire
of beloved kin
in a world burning up
in our passion’s fire
beyond even the scope of our sin.

The Holocaust of the Many

They sent billowing soot skyward,
slaughtered
ten billion hogs and cattle

…made cages of steel
for the wind to rattle

for gold
which was paper
with abstract wealth

where meaning in math
were engines in stealth

And a tomb of charges
lit fire
with mind

….for Babylon!
and human kind…

During My Wild Twenties

Smooth out my bebop…give me
a soft California sound
like grapes on sweet air
all dark bottle bound
…you Frisco peach!
…you L. A. eclair
on a counter too high
for a child to reach.

My California daydreams
took place in the mental
hygiene approach
to snuffing a roach

the psycho ward
of the clearly insane
where all virgins go
to clean up the brain

to sauce up the nose

with blood and snow

softer joints
much like
a rubber hose!

Finally Looking Eastward

When the arms ache
and the thirst is strong
from the dead dry dust
of factories in Bangladesh
where thread and water so enmesh
the clothes which Europeans wear

…I watch TV…and on and on
the image flickers wicked song
moist and pregnant with stillbirth, unaware

the bones of Asians buried there
become that death for which we long
…become that face into which we stare!

Prelude To An Oriental Caesar

True to Russian form
Stravinsky with his existential genius
…his brilliantly choreographed strands of atonal
musical tissue
…threw a pagan relic
at his poshly decadent Orthodox Christian audience

…unlike Molotov enjoying a cocktail
all that they could muster back
was a rotten tomato or two

about the time of Europe’s imperial peek
when the gods of War came together in friendship
and celebrated such wealth

by butchering young men and boys
with machine guns
where in a slightly earlier age
they were sent down holes
to extract minerals
for the gods of money
for factories
of tin
and beef!

In the New portion
of the white World
Hollywood
gave up a coarser art

celebrating such things
as love
and racism

…and quite soon thereafter assembly lines
of machine driven cars all painted black
and boxed formulaic

redirected the machinery
of a Midwestern city
where non human mules
became obsolete

till fascism gave way to hamburgers
in that kind of unrestricted gluttony
which may now
by all accounts
cause the planet to warm
and suffocate.

The Rise and Fall of Lonely Men

Once again then, China! cold blooded
Confucian decency…a smattering of good will
causing prosperity to be general and genuine
but without tolerance
for extravagant thought.

Art
has its place
…poems and art perfume History’s scheme
but the story of eastern palaces
and their poetic hovels
is often
unabashedly
brutal…

Three Haiku For The Lonely

Nights flickering lights
…TV’s stage!…human horrors!
We sleep!…wait for Spring!

Sleep walking we stare!
…while dreaming a ham sandwich
Where is our hunger?

Tragedies unfold.
We are desperate for sleep!
To wake up elsewhere.

At the Charity Lunch

After Christmas, a baked soliloquy
…over charred words leftover
from the slow celebration
of orphaned gods, spewed from the virgin’s
frigid orifice

…I and my lyrical chant
are lukewarm to cold
vegetables and bird meat heaped
and surrounded in the doughy plate
to be redone
and sent out to you

oh mass
forgiven
by death!

End of a New South Story

Wind away from the knotted spring
…twisted wire
and nerves on fire

…let’s dissipate to smoke and ash
and buy some booze
and drain some cash
on pleasantries all cheap with smiles

…till lingering in the trailer home
we warm the last few days of cold
till Spring comes like a crucifix of peace

and we grow toothless wan and old
…our few hairs left,
all slicked with grease!

Crosses Made of Plastic

The human who would lead us
is full of shallow rage!

A dull depression
the feelings of an endless age
spent in Hells furnace
in Stalin’s Siberia

but really just an air conditioned apartment
in a rented house or trailer
where the cell phone or TV
is the company such fools must keep

…who failed to find the source
of simple sweet humanity
in this map without a compass
in this jail without a jailer
or communion like divorce

flying in the face of it
toward that which was prophetic
in ruin quite pathetic

We are weaker in the mind
than the weakest kind of force
whose commercials make us blind
till we finally fall … asleep!

Whitman’s Babylon

On the frigid winter lawn
icicles cling
to browning leaves

the man in mass
having grown tired and decadent
in natures ice cold rape of nature

where factories carved the human soul
in the manufacture of precise washers
to keep the diesel engines running
and the bricks laid square
with electric power.

Whitman, you were so honest and hopeful
…like any gay hippie in love
with the arts
and their attendant desire and love
and their joy and gravitas
brought forth by the city’s willful passion
and such wisdom born of carnality

…but now what we have
is the wounded ghost
of sex
…dim voices echoing
in a schizophrenic Internet
of art and trash
and virtual hallucination

where money and democracy
became synonymous
in the minds of most

and the commoner’s city
became a whore.

Lovers

We still make jazz, we mad blind workers
of words and sex
of passion and cathedrals
layered in wood
and bled onto a canvass

….we still…stupefy
in that drugged dumb glare
of our hearts…and there is still
fine jazz
piped in this time
on lullaby laptops…we babes
of two a.m.

I hear the dusty drum roll
done down then to brushes
or synthesized near a horn

…and I pride myself
on the holes in my jacket

my kisses are toothless now
but worshipful!

My tongue takes his cue
from the heat of your redness
and my fire burns low
till I feel what you have done

whether with the pure crush of paint that you layer
or the crush of my fingers
against your flanks

or in that private place where I pray
for your center…

Words As A Strange Religion

We live!
for the eloquence which adorns
these endless days
on Earth

…shiver among the paintings and stars!
…the nudes and their twilights

though nakedness and despair
cling to such lips like alcohol
and drip
like morphine, like laudanum
from a flask.

We die!
without ever knowing
that dark act
though the tears for our dead lovers
baptize and suffuse us
and mortal imminence
bathes us with meaning.

And the end of this thing
is only as brief as a weeping sigh

…and then the bawdy laughter!
…the toast
to the king
and queen
in our midst!

Dream Land

Like few other things
this synthetic morphine
makes that dead pleasure
which feels so much
like love
to the broken orphans
lost in alleyways and caves

…in heartless places. Oh mama!
the mind learns to nod and sleep.

Like a Tired Child at the Circus

I’m sorry but I cannot help my sleep!
dreary fatigue
piled on for years
by the manure of lesser lies

slowly erased
a passion for all truth
in the midst of this evil comedy.

Late at night, the talk shows
help the worn out head unwind
and sweeten enough such hearts
already bruised by lower forms

of insanity

Two Things That Never Change

I hobble on my lame left leg
and sit a suck my furtive smoke
…my will is weak
…my senses, dull.
I read too little…sleep too long
and everything is just a joke.

And yet, I long
for human justice, not
just for the likes of me

and spend my passion
all on you.

A world that crucifies my mind
and a woman
like eternity…

these cause my furtive poetry
when nothing else

is true!

Valuing the Soul

A few green bills
to pay for cigarettes and pills

and sandwiches and soda pops
and all of this marginal kingdom which
the lonely travel without cars
transcends by draining all of the bars

….for we are the world’s pedestrians,
we dwarves who sightfully succeed
or blindly screams that huge cyclops

…such wars of cunning we have lost
as dwarves and giants always do
in spiritual things that money bought
and lacking that we pay the cost
of being less than human too

just like those animals of greed
ascending the sky on wings of blue!

The Music of the Lost

Composers of the great Romantic symphonies
made dreams which always sweep the universal heart

so that pure of pulse I sit
near sounds
of sweet and reasoned passion

and light a cigarette
near manured fields of tobacco
and inhale a deep regret
where an air conditioned shack
hooks up the Internet.

A hundred some odd years of Nietzsche
and such a God is surely dead by now

who moved the fountains and cathedrals,
the cities and their art.

Westward went the star
toward an old Las Vegas bar

whereas the soul has traveled south
to that strange chaotic mouth

waiting for the dryness
waiting for the floods
of jerky and of milk
come from a cow.

Things Becoming Academic

Slow and lazy jazz entombs
those psychic flowers
of thought

brought
in afternoon
to dark and shady
summer rooms
in these quiet hours

among the new south college ivory towers
computer logic delegates

to a poetry of ruined lives
in these southern most
United States.

On the Safer Side of Madness

Fear and passion mix
and cause
a journey in the River Styx
in contemplating moral laws
that tend toward days as stale
and dry
as medicines for the ruined mind.

Therefore do cowards cling to lighted
areas against the dark
when night encroaches on the eye

in places close to Central Park
…say a radius of thirty miles
containing all Manhattan

…and these will neither live nor die
but hide within a lighted place
and snore awake
and sip their draught
surviving with the a well placed lie
and shivering yet satisfied
that they’ve done everything they ought…

The Illness

Sweetly sick
horns and violins
bleed to a crescendo

…that Mahler piece I saved
to the music box software
milks and bathes
contentment in my idiot mind

during the soft
lamplight of a computer midnight

till the soprano screams high pitched
the vocal part as climax.

And at least since our modern beginnings
of iron bread and steam

there has always been a time
among the neo nazis
who surround History’s carriage

for one or another
collective mental illness
born of a decadent spirit

to burn alive with nothing
but the facts

of iron bread and money

and eat well
and drink well

and blow the world apart
in the cup of such fermentation.

Money

The practical life eludes me
…the dishes to be washed
are plastic or paper
stuck with crust
in a rubbish bin

…when buds give forth
their bloody eruptions
or in winter’s icicles
frozen at the drip

…either way…I stuff my head in a pillow
watch the garden’s window
through the corner of my eye

and dream those dreams of a soulful heaven
and rise at two
and lie down at eleven

and fall asleep
to a lullaby.

A Symphony for the New World

Huge expressive violins
in symphonies of meat and work
and struggle
on the farm
or in the factory

made for the record player
to spin in sin
against tobacco smoke
perfuming night

while wrinkled newspapers
lie therein
in terrible centuries
born of expansive hope
and limitless neurosis
doubt has fueled.

Skyscrapers line the way
…spread thin
toward the suburbs
and their shopping malls
on walkways littered with plastic
aluminum or tin

…huge and dense banalities
…such symbols for the radio or TV

monstrously romantic
cheap and sentimental

and yet
the serious symphony still stands
as a poignant reminder
of our hollow grief
sent skyward
like a funnelling leaf…

All of These Too Young Crosses

Spring bursts out its painful buds
..the rose thorns slice green
around a bloodiness of new born thought.

Especially for an old man
trying to regain a sense of reason
after years and winters
of frost drugged sleep

where the parallels run deep…

The New American Century

The air itself grows thick!
This city, this town, this beast
…it’s a heavy world!, it consumes
the soul
and lets loose garbage
and grows fat
in its sick pollution.

When the plants lose their leaves
in Autumn
I feel a more thin and natural season

than this baroque
and grotesque
dark age
…this disease of excess
without
reason…

The Anorexic Christian

A hot shower once a week!
Fall’s cocoon begins
in the small room’s central heat.
…a computer’s neutral sins
…a diet of tinned meat
white bread
and pimiento spread
and rationed nicotine
that we would smoke, instead
of eat
and read good things among the dead
…the literary web sites
give a clue to what we mean!
Vampires of the later days
virginal
and clean.

The Virgin Plans Her Abortion

Europe and China
have long been in love
with the dollar economy!

The Mahler piece trips along
its scratchy recording

…the cat shits in his box
and Winter

is sickly cold outside.

The first month
of an ancient year
coming

with its icicle tear.

For All of Our Soft Drink Nihilisms

It is a negative thing about me
that my bones ache
spiritually
and that like anyone
walking dead
they have in my human memory.

Mahler and his opera lady
give me their sweet atonalities
late at night
on a decent computer

and I continue my mild
paranoias
about Fascism
following a decadent age

…the right wing
with its typical pseudo spiritual nostalgias
from Wagner operas
to winged tailed Fords
and gospel rock

those same little places, crevices, holes,
which I might have fallen into myself
as, say, an English teacher in a small private high school

if the very madness which moves us all
had not simply
made that

impossible.

Modern Melodies In China

After the boom years
the money in the bank
is top heavy, propped
on the frail oblivion
of man
and nature failing.

And things in their course
get too hot or too cold
…swirling in hurricane disease
above the lukewarm center.

Therefore sitting
in a restaurant in Shanghai
before things get too bad
there is a feeling of unease
in all of us here

and we no longer enjoy
these modern melodies
…these tapestries of bright new color
which for a few years
seemed so brilliant
and so new.

Muses of Infinity

Computer classical music radio
plays a strange song
on a dim cloudy night
but burning within
with a flickering light
…in a gentle cold, like snow.

Rachel paints these things as well
…the shuffled grays!
…the obtuse days!
…the medicated hell
where souls go stumbling off
all doped with prayers and pills
…go stumbling off in dullard praise to God
…the same God they might nail and kill
in less identifiable ways.

The music cries a Christmas tear.
I see my lovers painting on the wall
a little more inclined to look through and beyond
what is an endless twilight edge
…toward morning and the dawn!

The Litter of the Abandoned

A sick and terrible life!
Feral and sick
…torn at the ears
and eaten by viruses.

These cats and children
camped out in the suburbs
and slogging the day
in ferocious sunlight
…temporary
path to the cites

…autumn sunlight
turning to winter
…eyes grown ancient
before their time.

Oh hiss in the dark when nighttime comes.
Oh love of the lovers
grown pregnant with death.

China

The calm beast
with its ancient wisdom!
…cold and stoic on the northern wall
or hot and deep
in the Port of Shanghai
…everything! even religion
is a matter of diplomacy!,
finding the mystical mean
and ushering calligraphy
with the body and its soul
and knowing
in human things
the those twin values
of art and commerce
but never forgetting
such an animal spirit
as leads us back
to an ancestor’s seed
in the oldest living city on Earth
…the oldest empire of truth and cunning!

The Romantics

Greig in the wild woods!
Beethoven’s city of God
hailing that same
historical nature!

Byron and Shelly sang as well
among the herald hopes
of natural man

…these things
were such a beautiful lie.

Hawthorne’s noble savage
does not reflect
nor give credit to the depth
of those dark races
oppressed and put upon

…scourged like animals for work
or simply annihilated!
And blood thirsty pillage
for commercial lusts
and wealthy tastes
for which the dilettantes who celebrated
the common man
in agricultural communion

tilted pen and lectern in high ideal
while the empire subjects were utterly degraded
and workers filled factories
with their brown lung
and potato diets.

What we learned in this original birth of liberalism
was a wonderful way to tell a lie
to ourselves
and not just to others….

The Art And All Of Its Glory

Romantic symphony of wind abating flight
…flutes and violins!
…poetry and sins!
…the art of huge cathedrals
and the tragedy of day

descending
into night

…the sweeper comes
and pours
the content into bins
in a different kind of passion
made of alleyways
and drunken luted prayers
cheap wine and ruined whores
who found a different way

where night turns into day…

The Educated Spirit

Classical and expressive
…the notes which climb this way
into my room
at the end of a late Autumn day

and spread themselves
about my ancient ache.
I will sleep for an hour
and perhaps

…I’ll never wake…

In A Building Where Appointments Are Made
after Alan’s Dragons

What strange telepathy caused you
to unravel the mind of God
in all of its mad disjointed lost desire?
Dead breath of fire
and lingering
twitching
cold source of colder heat
…in the winter of our meat.

Like the attendants you walked the corridors
…shadows of mundane books
…their hearts were hung on hooks
well above the abyss where madmen fall
too far to tell

…a million fools to tend to ten million whores
with all of the depth of sophomoric looks
guiding passion’s kiss

…they know not a thing, not one!,
knew neither you nor any other
passing reptile or shadow
under the stars
or under the Sun

…in a building where appointments are made
causing such shadows to walk or run
while the ghosts of such shadows look on afraid

…in a madhouse made for the dead

some part of you understood
and knew them well.
Come see the writhing serpent beneath the feet of the maid!
Come see Venus and her blithering child
no longer fit for spring’s renewal and murder
while men drink blood like wine
and devour flesh

like bread!

WHAT THE SHY COWARD THINKS OF EVENING

1.
(FOR THE SLEEP OF THE UPRIGHT)

War is terrible and evil
…it is a nightmare
like the “word”
sowing a seed of cold metal thoughts
for some perceived idea of love and justice.

And sometimes
although rarely
love and justice are born that way!

Something became of me long ago
and I wandered places
where my thoughts themselves
caused offense among the upright.

Something did not happen;
it failed to happen.
I am different. I never woke
and the darkness was true
and the truth was dark

and the truth and darkness
became my condition
and it slowly ceased to terrify me

…what terrified me
was the thought of waking
and the lies that men told themselves
bright
and vivid
and spicy with color

not a modernist painting
in formless shadow
…no, no, more like
a color TV
where battle planes drone
in the silence of midnight
with the sound turned off
for the sleep of the upright.

2.

(WE COULD TALK ABOUT THE EVIL OF MONEY)

We could likewise talk about sex and its evil.
It is beautiful! It is what money buys
or money enslaves

…it magnifies our need for other beauty
because it always promises love

it weeps for love
and tears fill its eyes
…it moans and it raves
with one hand on the shackle
and one for the dove
in the children’s eyes
and the children yearn
for mindless adventure
(a vision of war)
for which cities burn
on the great TV.
And sex turns away
from the child’s game it plays
and settles
for dull
morality.

3.

(SEX IS NOT WHAT THE DARKNESS YEARS FOR)

Except that human warmth when friendly
touches blind anguish
and storms are born forth
like laughter
or tears
however quiet
…quiet storms
come down to the patient
in distant, ever so distant, years.

A Different Kind of Judgement

I spent years
silent
in my abuse,
yet reaching out concerned
for all of the love and friendship
in our souls
which was not there.

Time comes a million ways
you see
…success is also poverty
…the seeds you sowed
wreaked havoc
on a proud, but weekend state.

You learned from my humility
…I learned from my indignity
…the separate apples which we ate
…you imagine some communion which we share!

And the truth
about a certain state of grace
is the painful self forgiveness
in a vain and tearful mirror image
in a mildly anguished face

…not that you were saved
nor even damned
by the golden paths so paved

but that long ago
I simply
ceased to care.

Jesus Dies On A Park Bench Somewhere

How in the blue sky did they not know me?!!!
…my mind pours out like wine
opens on to the mouth of the grasses. How
did they think me evil? I was so like them
but with primitive honesty
feeling the grief’s of iniquity, guilelessly Christian
and democratic, in love with the cities
and in awe of the huge heartland

…for I have also waited
till knowing that unfortunate subject
of colder hearts than mine

…waited and pondered
till smoky time
finally stole
my breath.

Unto the Third Generation

Look at those like him! Those adolescent trolls
in huge and mystifying ignorance
shaping with hands too large the dumb photogenic statue
of themselves
and blowing it up with hot air
or what seems like hot air
in virtual computer anima!

It goes without saying
that the souls of dogs
were more intelligent and honest
eg. the pet frenzy
among single moms and dads
who finally find a cuddly mate
or companion
who would respond with goodness
…light in the eyes!….the angel load!
running in joy
akin to sex.

Look at the sport in those like him!
The happy meanness in spraying contempt
at their eternal birthday party!
The graceless, mindless, satiate
use of drugs
and alcohol
and cigarettes
…eventually to feel good
…but at first….simply to be cool.

Look at the art of those like him!
They took the baby out
of every serious social and artistic movement
…splayed its genitals and threw it away
…savoring only
the delicious bath water
…opium and piss.

Look at their science and religion!
Instead of a search for God
…what calls the fascists
down on the clown.

The clown! The Judas kiss!

Song of the Private First Class

The thugerie of swampy summers
…drudgery to scrub the damp
suburb of an army camp
and place where mills
once filled and fueled

…and further on
tobacco muled
the furrows of the tenant farms

till prostitutes and soldiers came
to divvy up a nation’s gains
and rinse this Carolina sky
of smog

all the way back to native blue!
The TV and the war-machine

…such pretty, pristine, things
for every dog
…like me
and you…

Judas as the Silver Messiah

What frosty hearts look beyond the dead man
in late April
after a freezing shower
ruins the warmth and the Easter hallelujahs!
…forgone now to whatever ice age comes
with its frozen tears.

As a man
or as a crowd

the movement toward bliss
is shamed and embittered

and was more honestly laid out
in it’s cold original poverty
among the beggars and sheep of Bethlehem

among the whores and sinners
at Jerusalem’s core.

A man with holes in his pockets
and ashamed to live on

beyond the festival of fools
once the lumpish parade is gone.

In the Lonely Winter of This Strange Nation

The weak flesh longs to fall asleep,
to nod and doze in somnambulant seepage
in a room like a forest, dark and deep
…computer and moon
…night sky and screen
…windows to worlds
of ideas
that flicker
and dance
in forbidden hallucination.

Yet frozen and mean…this ideation,
for sleep is always denied this weak flesh.

Awake in the ice of tired creation,
in the lonely winter of this strange nation.

Snow and ice…and a winter cresh.

The Voices of Christian Men Out There

What do I think of the world out there?
Of the Christian city’s metallic expanse?
It’s plastic suburbs
…the weight of our mutual gluttony
and likewise lust
in this worldly dance?

I do little…much less too much wrong.
I harbor a song
and try to present my thoughts
like shavings from a wooden statuette!

And…the voices of Christian men
view so easily the demonic
…see the devil in everything
including me.

So that a day like Christmas or Easter come
or in some remarkable evening solitude
and I try
within my mind, to posit a simple prayer.

They interrupt my thoughts
…they call with wild and blasphemous insult
’til such meditation leads to regret.

Not even Heaven and faithful bliss
….but a simple prayer.
They deny me this
…the voices of Christian men out there….

For All the May Day Fools

Though I love late winter rain
and those mindless ways
in which I swim

dousing all the pain
rattling the tin
and pouring out the days
like coffee in a mug.

Brother innocence
so soon is beaten down
by jealous, angry, hate

…cheap sentiment…you teary thug!
Rock-hard and loud
and kissing flags and pissing beer!
Murdering each earnest clown
too blind to know your sin.

…oh we await
that sickened judgment
holding up the angry crowd.

Come a Spring like bitter April!
…every bully
and his leer…!

Quick Mart Evangelicals

As born again mercy day by day
witnessing to Jude the Insane,

We say “Despair, not depression, attacks the brain,”
squeezes the brain through cheesecloth
…a moral residue of despair, this rain,
these rainy times
and this weepy war.

“Terrorists attack the flag!”
But it all just seems like a head cold. Sneezes
fill the paper bag.
Tissues wipe away the pain.

She says “But money can cause a real depression;
Think about that
for a minute, Jack.”

Yeah “The sausage was fat
with a full six pack
at Sunday night’s convenience store.”

Now everything is as skinny as Jeezes
and we pray all night
for a tall delight

“and we spend like a bum
and feel like a whore”

Waking Up To Haiti

Those lean dark figures crushed to bone
by seismic clouds of dust
made out of stone
and art and rust
and anguish
strained from anguish
of a somewhat lesser kind.

“The mercy of my credit card…”
this drop of blood intoned
…and God said “in a pig’s ass!
do I know you
…I was never known.”

So I fatten up my different kind of corpse
and weep
and watch TV

…and sex is a means
to go to sleep
without that nightmare of bad dreams
which constitutes a literal Hell
for those more physically inclined
to live eternally…

Children of a Different Yule

In patient dim foreboding does the poor man tremble.
There was an Autumn of the heart which lasted years!
Congested yawns and tired breathing
…the destiny of pawns
among those diaries of uninspired tears.

Call it the love of the wicked
that a poor man does not feel
while he feels instead
the fact that Autumn rains
upon the ache and numbness
of old arthritic pains
…the difference between
the living and the dead…

…even so!,
the word upon the soul
is dry, indifferent, cold.
Huddling-in from wind and mold
and beaten down
by all of the brats of power
just to get this heart of coal
to learn the wonders of decadence
and its desire.

Desire among the fools…but wait.
He finally lights the millionth cigarette
or some such smoky
focuser of fate
and all of the tired tears
are frozen in a shout…

…and this strange and freezing fire
transforms the Autumn rains to snow
…magical snow!…covering
the city and its state.

A fire colder than the cold!
Someone wanted such a thing
but what is it
…this craven mantel,
this coward’s blade,
this evil sorcerer’s ring
which the elevated heart could never know..?

…call it “hate!”
The word you put there!
When the light of the world
went out…and Autumn rain
was finally turned to snow.

---

Ken Simpson

Anger

The irrationality
of rage
is as logical
as lunacy.

The Cost of Constant War

Cluster bombs
proudly made in America
for sale to Saudi Arabia
guaranteed
to efficiently kill children
more profitably
than traditional shrapnel.

---

Fiona Sinclair

Inshallah

suffixes some sentences here,
its soft consonants and vowels caressing like a zephyr.
So, I interpret it as a blessing that sanctions
the ducking and weaving that will bring us back next year.
Instead I find it translates as a provisional If God Wills;
An acceptance that he must rubber stamp such plans,
that turns the word sour in my mouth.

Because I would rather put my trust in
that spiritual junk mail posted on Facebook
which offers at least an illusion of free will,
or take my chances with fate’s roll of the dice
than put my faith again in a God
I found to be a partial parent taking against
certain children he cannot love-

Gypsies

They must have bought the ground from a farmer
with rolls of readies and a handshake;
the rest of us baring mortgages like overburdened donkeys
or just managing to scrape together robber baron rents.
A bit of spent land discarded like some fly tipped old carpet,
partially tucked away beneath the dual carriageway’s overhang,
nevertheless, I spot them from the passenger seat;
their caravans circled against the old bill, tax man, planning officers,
smoke puffing from chimneys, suspended in the dank atmosphere
like tiny grey clouds; some nights the red rag of a bonfire waved,
environmental protection limiting us to November 5th.
Fridays, they overrun Tesco’s, voices at full volume,
laughing in the faces of our dirty looks,
their blood line, in fact, pure as British aristocracy.
In spring a digger claws at the earth to plant another van,
a wedding gift for engaged offspring, or to keep an eye on
aging grandparents, no word I think for ‘lonely’ in the Romany lexis.
Of course, I realise; only a smattering of literacy,
not on the mains, and Victorian attitudes
to a woman’s place, yet still grin when they shake
their heads at council semis, refusing to be domesticated.

girl’s best friend.

Her Do you buy diamonds please? in Eastern European accent
startles like a hold up. I look round expecting hard case in hoody
instead get pretty young woman with toddler and cumbrous pram.

The assistant explains with shop’s liveried politeness that they buy jewellery
not gems. Her reverse ceremony slipping white gold engagement and
wedding bands from finger, proffering in palm I wish to sell these please.

Rings are popped on digital scales strict as diet weigh in. Diamond is
quizzed under Jeweller’s monocle. She jiggles pram, strains a smile at the child;
begetting stories in us like a script writers’ brain storm session.

£200. The girl beams as if a surprise scratch card win, A lot of money.
His Hallmark card cheeriness Buy yourself something nice. She goes
off to translate the twenties into nappies, fish fingers, fuel key top up…

Debt and death lurk behind his We see it all, manager countering
with the good stuff too, weddings and birthdays . But the glitter
has been heisted from the £500 pendent I have ducked and dived to buy.

As I leave, the rings, their past exorcised by cloth and polish,
are set in the shop’s spangled window display. Their second hand
status rebranded for superstitious customers as pre-loved.

Sheffield Steel

Even in the 70s Sheffield’s steel crucible
forged only macho men.
So you witness protected your identity
behind long strides in black Doc Martens,
wiping dirty hands on brown overalls,
hunching over roll ups in navy donkey jacket.
But weekends deployed gay spy-craft:
whispered Polari ,
keys coyly slung from belt loops,
gold neck-chain’s glint,
leading to stomach churning cottageing in gents,
palm prickling pick- ups in blind eye pubs,
heart racing rendezvous in suburban bedsits.
Hastily pulling back on your butchness
for the late bus home,
drunken lads still saw beneath
to the pansy, queer, fairy,
crouching inside and dealt with you.

Then the flit to London, in Soho’s sanctuary
released inner camp gene genie,
with nature Kohled eyes, mocha skin, lean body
you swanked in tight white tops and tight white jeans,
watering mouths following your Marilyn wiggle
down Old Compton Street.
And shaking your booty in ‘Bang’
added rock star notches to your bed post.
Kept your tongue Sheffield steel sharpened
as you deposed killer Queens.
Outside the Soho ghetto still set upon on underground,
but took your beating with ‘Whatever’ bravado.
And weekends in 6 inch pink diamante stilettos,
scarlet mini dress, Blondie wig,
you waved your purple feather Boa in society’s face
sprinting across the concourse of Victoria Station
en route to find heaven in ‘Heaven’.

Clothed in Memories

He recalls favourite garments with
same transcendental gaze into past
as remembering Norton, Ducati, Triumph.
At 17, a Here be Dragons trip north of Watford gap
to course in Manchester. Only land mark that registered,
clothes market under railway arches
colourful as Sgt Pepper album cover,
where he found herringbone Oxford bags,
with flares, high waist, indigo dandy twist.
And on a rainbow rail of afghan coats
one cobalt suede with white coney trim.

Was it just you so foppish?
but all his mates took inspiration from favourite front men:
hunting down in indie boutiques, Hendrix hussar Jackets,
Bowie spangled stacks, Jagger velvet flares,
Accessorized by hair so long your Granddad
Thought he was a girl from the back.
But no girly squeamishness in face of a ruck,
rather platform boots ideal for crotch crippling,
shared tips for getting blood out of a shirt,
becoming as adapt with needle and thread as a spanner.

Now Marc Bolan, Rod Stewart, Bryan Ferry
are replaced by memory slipping lead singers
who come and go like office temps.
And young men whose warrior avatars fantasy fight
whilst they online skim shop Matalan for polo shirts,
for whom under the bonnet is unfathomable as
brain surgery so leave cars at Kwikfit,
killing time in Burtons buying another pair of jeans,
lunch time dash into Next to grab they’ll do brown lace ups ;
every garment forgettable as a drunken one night stand.

Satan spends Sunday at a boot sale

His devil’s face is like a prank played
with indelible ink by mates as he dozed,
but hair trained into two budding horns
whole body pigmented toadstool red
suggests he savours with theatrical relish
the shudders, shaken heads, stares that follow
his Sunday stroll with wife and grandkids,
inwardly ‘Ha! Ha! Ha s! ’ as stall holders pray he does not
pause to browse for tools, electrical goods, souls.

Of course the real Satan would disguise
as the grey haired gent in beige fleece, brown cords,
twinkling as his table is mobbed by women
eager for his home grown organic apples.

---

Ron Singer

Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts

The God of war is

the God of boilers,
Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts,
God of wrath,
God of moilers.

Lord of plane and drone,
smashing hearth and home,
Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts,
God of wrath,
God of roilers.

Fueled by greed,
fueled by creed,
Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts,
God of wrath,
God of spoilers.

---

George Slone

The Capitalist University
Professors—by their collegial
silence and acquiescence,
as well as unquestioning
adherence to diversity as an
evident diversion from
ubiquitous fraudulence
—had permitted universities
to become co-opted by the
business model—white, black,
female, male, what difference?
—where speaking truth,
rather than widespread,
constituted a rare act of
whistleblowing.

Thus was the Capitalist University.

Apostate

As a man, poet and, when employed, professor, I’d
played their game poorly—backslapping, trivia,
educationist inanity, and the muzzle of cowardice
had never succeeded becoming me.
Failed I had at fitting in and playing in their teams,
dog-eat-dog ever looming behind their backs—I
could not, for the life of me, flourish in their
ambience of small-talk collegiality,
always at the expense of free expression and dignity.
Why I’d wonder was I the only one on campus
with a Socratic daemon in his gut?

Why I’d wonder did the system attract so many
ostriches, rats, and teddy bears, instead of men?
Did they not even realize how harmful their cocoons
to students, the nation, and democracy?
Sure, I’d stepped up to the plate and provoked
vigorous debate, but always got nothing in return,
except free days, unemployment checks, and scorn.

You might wonder whether or not I’d do it all again,
if given such a chance, but if you’ve gotten this far,
you wouldn’t, for you already know the response.

A Teaching Philosophy That Ought to Be Banal in Higher Education,
But Instead Is Evidently Quite Rare*

Go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Speak truth, write truth,
be aware of the blinders you adorn!

Speak truth, write truth,
dare remove them, here and there!

Speak truth, write truth,
be aware of the muzzle you have on!

Speak truth, write truth,
risk taking it off, now and then!

Speak truth, write truth,
toughen up
—don’t be so easily offended—
democracy depends on it!

Speak truth, write truth,
open your arms to criticism,
learn from it, create from it, and grow!

Speak truth, write truth,
never quell the speech you hate,
always welcome vigorous debate!

Speak truth, write truth,
thrive on logical argumentation
and supporting illustration
—tread always upon ad hominem!

Know what you gain from not heeding
these simple tenets—career, salary, friends,
invitations, publications, and grants—,
know also what you just might lose—
integrity, veracity, dignity, and self!

Speak truth, write truth,
question and challenge all dictums, ideologies,
and philosophies—and don’t ever forget
to question and challenge me!
………………………………..

*This poem was inspired by an application requisite for a visiting assistant professor of American Literature position
at Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University. It was sent to that college with the thought that if students at
an honors college could not be taught thusly, then democracy was likely already a system of the past. Never would I
hear from anyone with its regard.

Mind-Blowing
Poem #9 for the Edification of Lit Cogs

Criticize the overfed—
their writing, art,
poetry reviews, or
whatever—
and
inevitably they’ll resort
to ad hominem rhetoric.

Criticize them with
irrefutable logic, and
they’ll become
irrevocably offended,
might oddly even argue
“the validity of your views”*
“pretty worthy,”
though will
entirely avoid the
criticism, assert that you
“come off as
extremely sanctimonious,”
and that the “smugness
and elitism inherent”
in what you’d written
to be no less than
“mind-blowing.”
……………………………………………..
*Words in quotes are remarks made by Ty Burr, Boston Globe columnist, RE my criticism of one of his columns.

---

Barry Smith

Strictly X-factor: The Return of Dirty Den

Is that you, Dirty? Can that be you
Up to your old ways and dirty tricks
Shiftily loping out of Walworth
With a sack of swag to flog in the streets?

And have you been out in the green belt
In your wax jacket and designer wellies
Weighing up stacks of designer specs
For quick-build housing and village retail parks?

And do we want a lorry load of lumber,
Beech and oak, hazel and ash firewood logs
Freshly cut from newly privatised,
Hedge-fund managed, ex-national forestland?

Oh, that’s never you, is it Dirty,
Sneaking round the corner with an armful
Of kiddies’ books whisked from gaping shelves
Loitering outside the old library?

And have you taken up lawyers’ work
With that bulging briefcase of welfare cuts
Sliced from housing and child benefit,
Legal aid, the playgroup and the arts?

And are you togged-up for a country supper
Or cruising the Med on Rupert’s new yacht,
Glad-handing brown envelopes with the Met
Or hacking blackberries with lots of love?

Is that you, Dirty? Is that really you
Leaving behind a trail of broken hearts,
Broken homes and broken hospitals,
Broken schools, broken cities and lives?

Is that smiling, jack-the-lad charming,
Nattily dressed, niftily shod, oh so
Plausible bloke-next-door wielding that axe?
Is that you, Dirty? Is that you?

---

Ian C. Smith

When as a boy

I sat, a survivor, back to forlorn graffiti
I had studied, my body’s inferno cooled
after a winter’s night dressed thinly,
the only thing in the cell apart from me
was an overlooked mat of worn raffia
I had wrapped around the hurry of pain
trying to sleep, so cold, dozing, drifting awake
turning carefully, bone-cold, wrists together
between my thighs, seeking small warmth.

I daydreamed of my girl’s pink velvety bedroom
blearily aware her world was never mine,
daydream now, about a time I keep close,
a story of hurt, half-lit, I enter sometimes,
dreamed of freight trains moaning in the night
to distant places I might reach some day
for I was, remember, still a boy,
my aching heart now in a cage of old ribs
as unlikely as walking free that bleak morning.

Walking our cold road after your overnight stay
a waft of morning wood smoke tang
suggested our distant zesty arrival here,
the attendant blind faith in happenstance,
true of my cell time, a scraped scarred day
when I sat, guardian angel exhausted,
as the crash of opened doors drew ever closer,
faith, the flame in our cells that feeds dreams,
youthful hope unfurling the murmur of days.

The Spirit of Progress
The Spirit of Progress was the Melbourne – Sydney train until c.1960

As paddocks of silvery grass shiver past
I wear a long overcoat of sadness
watching this wan morning light break
over the ashes of campfires of desperadoes.
My tale of riding back to an arse-whipping
will be embellished for my school mates,
bolstering my status as a rebel.

Across the border I sensed the cop’s shadow
as I stooped to a drinking fountain
after confessing in a weak moment
to a chatty driver who had stopped
for a kid who felt like a fleeing warrior.
Nearly broke, I ration stolen cigarettes,
wish I arrowed the other way, to Sydney.

I dreamt last night in an unlocked cell.
Escorting me onto the famous train
the cop whispered to the buffet car lady.
No handcuffs, but a free meal on railway china,
the condemned ordering whatever he fancies.
Under garish mascara, lipstick, dyed hair,
her face overflows with sympathy.

Telling her, I nearly choke into tears,
pretend I swallowed food the wrong way
when she tells me if I were hers, oh
how she would love me, love me,
her voice swooning with pity, for me,
for herself, for the boy she never had,
as we speed towards what was then the future.

The things we did for money

The boss acts as if gripped by Tourette’s,
his foul constant hectoring so ludicrous
we almost succeed in ignoring it.
Our pay for these irregular days’ labour
takes a week to earn in most casual jobs.

When his packed containers leave the docks
he summons us abruptly by phone.
You need only the time, your own transport,
a healthy body, plus the hide of an immigrant
to unload ceramic tiles at galley-slave pace.

The driver watches, smoking, waiting
while our Cerberus snarls at his toiling scum,
three of us sweating at the double, rattling
solid boxes along a scenic railway of rollers
into the gloom of his cavernous storehouse.

Students, our favourite books as yet unread,
think musk sticks rather than marijuana,
our horizons are still endless with distance,
wise-guys unaware of the clock’s stealth.
Perhaps the boss has haemorrhoids
or resents our loud laughing bonhomie
stretching, languid, chests glistening in the sun
on neat grass outside his headquarters
waiting between deliveries for our hectic future
as we are only employed to unload.

Sitting here all these years on I think,
trees swimming in the last winds of afternoon,
that apoplectic man surely long dead,
how his abuse was deflected because shared,
surprised by this cry from the past, his presence.

---

Felino Soriano

Painters’ Exhalations 21
—after Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players

Tandem of wit, intellectual jousting
assaulting the throat of
adequate mistakes.  Stares
of stones’ bodies buried
within the cold of dirt’s
deepened pockets—

leave the cards’ kingdom
long enough only to proclaim
a winning lover, blood
licked by flipping cards

and the healing, ego and wound
bound by name ripening
atop the vines of the next
wishful hand.

Painters’ Exhalations 22
— after Joseph Mallord William Turner’s
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight

Regimented dome of dust
bodies floating in sporadic
parallels with moon’s planted
stalks of light. Needed augments,
workers’ rose-tipped torches
forming necessary eyes and
tattooed images atop
the rivers’ expanded belly.  Coals’
shape of miniature nights
symbolize a more accurate
deposit of light’s delineated
death before a darkness hinders
elastic vision, the needed for work
to be ascertained as complete.  Some
afraid of being employed in such
experimental light:
ships lead by reason and leash,
landing where lighted hands
more easily dismantle a brand
of darkness, related to the noon
sun’s copasetic rising.

Painters’ Exhalations 128
—after Ki Yoon Ko’s Distraught

Life arrives differently.

Thread of yesterday’s pattern routine,
the obligated experience
upon walking certain times
into emotional smiles

unravel mystery onto ground
in a dust mirror
gone awry.

Your piano tuned to pitches in the tongue of tonal screech.

Family absent
a silence mugging solace.

Panic a face, splayed nostrils allegory
tears sipped from unbelieving eyes.

Tomorrow can be a death time.

Or, a blanket of soothe understanding
now is a focal point preference into
changing pace of obligatory actions.

Painters’ Exhalations 129
—after Tom Levine’s Epiphany

Sky’s stained-glass arc
undoes parallel wishes
of absolute, universal descriptions.
Etched
on
windows
by
wind
malleable
fingers

sorted colors by delineated aspectual tone preference
of imaginational shape content.

Tiles we see arranged in hardened bouquets.
Where
from the formed do they burgeon into
escape
a mouth prison humid contact
tongue cannot define thus declines?  Bodies

not only walking or the flying too agreeable stint
on air lines invisible or floss thin,
sky unmasks
most beautifully after dark

dissipates a cordial leave
leaving dusted off shapes to decorate the eyes of
new formations.

Painters’ Exhalations 131
—after Grace Borgenicht’s White Beach

The language of sand
foreign to the manmade tongue
slippery to the vernacular with
bare fundamentals.  Thus, dear
sand in unfocused distance, a brand of whisper
delegated to beneath the lid of suppressed
depression.

So thick the texture of the moment.

Movement disallows rest for the observant
meditator forming the specific sound near alphabet’s end
with curved, unstressed legs.

Watching, the mountains with solid black
eyes.

Water’s elastic skin shining a bulb of nighttime
extinction.

Peace, for elsewhere silence is deaf to suffering, suffering
among the screaming whose day attaches to a disposition of
meandering distrust.

---

Serena Spinello

Recreant Ruler

Arctic meat disguised
in ashes of decency.
Ventricles heaving treachery;
rash chops rumbling
grounds for vengeance.

I frequent his sorry mouth;
scuttling amid craters, provoking caps and alluring molars.
Resting my head upon his plaque I listen
as he petitions pathetic tactics.
A corrupt tongue thrashes my internal abrasions;
before spitting me out to dry
next to our stained flag.
I heave dogma and doctrines
at his decaying gums.

Spotted reclining on a chase in Texas ,
as innocent feet continue to march in quicksand.
Petroleum can’t purify a desecrated core.
Atop his maw I’ll strip bare-
shedding my veil of compliance,
advertising my decorum for every one to see.

---

Constance Stadler

washing machine

i fill the still concavity till
brimming
see the water frothing
promise
as
i pour viscous blue
and there i hear it:

“let me in.”

if only i could climb deep low
curling around
the rhythmic agitation of purification
and bleach these wounds white.

in the tossing turbulence my soul
scabs would be loostened
drifting to bubbling scum
and every hole would be scoured
infection gone, abcesses punctured.

cleansed.

oh, the holes would still be there
in pock-marked display
of all my amputated life.

but i would be disinfected
billowing sweet in heat of noon
twisting joyously in the lilting gusts.

i would, of course, be ugly and ravaged to the
sensitive eye, and so i would avoid
such decimating probes.

but just the thought of a
moment of lilting freshness,
an easement of self-damnation.

would make it all worthwhile.

The Slam

I. Lay that paper down, Girl.
Tonight you need free arms,
and that tee-Ease of a hip sway.
You Celebrate Us. Proclaim our We.
Ass plant on our family tree.
Smiles trickle and course on out
hands are pushed together in rhythmic shout
A young woman, a young poet
sheds her chrysalis of doubt.
Embraces her song.

II. Damn! you were percolatin’
in perfect syncopation’
and fine articulation
of brutality.
The room was ablaze in
po-ly-syllabic haze
we roared at
your gaze
on humanity.

III. Suited fine, with bandana-ed dreads
The Eloquent Elephant filled the air
with truths, that only Bed-Stuy can forge
and a humble wise man utter.
Oh yes, I, too know, have been carved up
by that blindness in the Cit-eh.
But in lyric affirmation of its human
Degradation.
You make war, you speak love, and

You slam me, free.

Connotative Parlay

I. abandonné

The clouds are far too soft.
The sea is far too blue.
The poppy infects with red
The child’s innocence
assaults anew.

Back to my threaded corner now
Of silken needlepoint travail
Your absence is a symphony
That overwhelms each stitch …
… syncopates each wail.

Dust and ashes strew my soil
Incense of Niobe’s fate
My sister of cavernous life
I remain in catacombs of wait

…and laugh, no one will ever come
for this withered heartless shell.
You left your ghost to torture it
‘neath its carapace I dwell.

II. Sheer Abandonment

The thinnest of tin whistles, an earthen bodran,
the harp of Dagda that makes angels weep,
carries me through prismatic landscapes
rolling on high and so low
in torrents of heather and green.

Oh, fill my arms with bedstraw heath and Allison sweet,

Let us dance as Connemaras caper and neigh,

Not a thought, not a plan

Not a thought, not a plan
I           Am       Feeling
Aye, come Breeze kiss me
Lamb
On this beatific day of all days!

Dendrochronology

For all of my life,
Eight whole years
You were.

If I were triplicated
I could never have
Wrapped my arms
Around you
Or reached even your lowest
Branch.

But I ate tomato sandwiches
In the cavern at
Your trunk
Just big enough for me.

And you saved me from a slush ball massacre
As I hugged you and hid in that
Hollow you had made
Just for me.

Five years later
I came back to you
You were famous,
Miss Chumlin said.

But all that was left
Was this huge stump
With a deeply lined face
Like the old man
who smokes Camels
and does nothing else.

How important you were!
Born at the time of the Plague
And all the wet years and dry years
And fiery scaring years
Were there to behold!

So now we know weather past,
Have tracings of attempted kills.

And
I know not why we needed
To know such things.
I only know

You are gone.

Insomniac

The divisor
between numb
and spare proficiency

White August sky
saturates
beclouded purpose.

Diurnal driftings denied
tick-tock accomplishment
clocked.
The
verifiable worth,
of
precise
punctuated
animus.

Repudiation is evident
For the cognizant

For the listless

Inutile
Gibberish.

Ymdaith         

You stand by the shore
At Swansea.
Looking to glimpse the horizon
Of your Dreams
As
Bluster of March,
reminds you
of form,       yet
You revel and unfurl
To its winnowing bite, whirling
In magick metaphysical Flight.

You wander through Cobble
And tarmac
And suddenly you see
Who     you       are

You see
The totality
Of enmeshed Gossamer
Spread free, set aloft,
You see
Where you began and have gone
The Lattice of all of your choices
Spun soft
And suddenly,

The Doubt
for once
is silent.

You wander on Friend, riverbank
to the Church
Of your Ancestors, where
Stone cherubim attend as they
Perish.
So intent, such the Pilgrim
You blithely forget
You do not read a piddling
Of Welch.

But as you re-enter stone home
You know you have gone
Somewhere as never before.

And your soul sweeps softly
O’er the brim of your hearth
Scooping your babes
Smiling
At Floor.

*Journey          

---

Derek Stanford

For Julie Whitby

“You look,” he told her “like the little scholar.”
A loving jest.                        One hand upon the door.
And her green eyes –
which he thought sometimes blue –
smile back at him confidingly.

She settled back in bed as he departed.
Took up her book.
Trevelyan’s Social History,
adjusting her new glasses.
Alas, she had a cold
but bore it well.
They had made love –
a medicine of cherries;
and in his eyes
she saw herself reflected.
Could she be dearer than she hoped to be?
“You have a talent for intimacy –
the very essence of your genius,”
he told her. “Wonderful.”
Like l’eau de vie,
his fortifying praise.
Evident, too,
his bride in her
his muse, his Beatrice and his troubadour.
Yes, all this came about, without a doubt,
because she seemed and was his little scholar.

---

Geoff Stevens

Bugbear: the lost age of the folding pushchair

buggy can you spare
a partial dismantling
a few simple movements
that will render you
friendly to other passengers
and will your cell-phoned owner
currently telling someone that she is on the bus
bend her ego enough
to assist you
in this community relations exercise
or will she bawl loudly in annoyance
like her baby
at the very suggestion

Home Help

There are bruises on the window panes
where despite an aggressive city landscape
of boarded-up grandeur and tacky boxed glass
my thumbs have pressed my own views in.

I’m living in the luxury of a fertile imagination
my outlook modified by experience and memory.

You visit me like a courier crossing through a check-point border
bringing a solution no longer available here
to isolated men of my generation.

You take your clothes off with routine no frills efficiency
and I draw the curtains to cover my inadequacy.

Merry Isthmus

We are two islands that hold hands
joined by a tidal spit of sand.
I am the ancient and unspoilt
you the beneficiary of loft insulation and double glazing
and everything that is new and amazing
the internet and telephone communication
central heating and a freezer
electricity for your vacuum cleaner.
Life for me is much leaner
uninhabited and undeveloped am I
save for ancient tumuli.
And while you are well informed from radio and TV
DNA is my latest news, my history.
We communicate with flags and flashing eyes, by signs
by our posture, by semaphore, the way we stand upon the sea.
The lay-lines laid beneath the flooding sward
bring us the word.
Silence sometime shouts across the sound
shall I come to you or you to me
and though basically we are free and there’s no tears
Islands do drift together across the years.

---

Paul Stevens

The suicide bomber who loved me

I am the wide eyed dreamer on
the table of the elements,
whose provenance
gutters as a ribald candle
pinging empty code across
volumes of encrypted hair,
or seaweed swung by wireless
resin burnt to virtual
extraordinary rendition.
You have sole-authored me
with your ehanced interrogation of
my hard core poetry,
and I will wear the orange jump suit,
the leather hoods and cuffs
all our days, no habeus
to limit or confine my corpus
delecti and dna.
Valency and ultra violet,
stark in your spectrometer,
wash insurgent stellar tides,
towers tumbling, mahdis rising,
tanks in checkerboard formation,
collateral locust-clouds of dust
shot through with lost american idols
in the Walmart of emotions. Springer
liberates us: dance and offer
flowers: the dictator’s dead,
all the deserts freaked with shreds
and whisps of plastic sheeting, queer
or straight or just arriving.
Ride the L inhale the anthrax,
strange fruit strapped against your breast;
press the martyr button now:
your pelvis dopplered into redshift light
righteous, lazy flower-burst—

---

Peter Street

Sheep Inheritance

I am a sheep
that’s what the family call me
a black one. I have tried painting myself
a colour they want me to be

gone through all the rainbow
each one just seems to slide off
like its not meant, not suited

worst still I’ve dripped all over their best
carpets, stained, for everyone to see,
talk about, while they chew and swig down

a bit more bigotry

War Poems
Peter was poet on the biggest humanitarian convoy travelling to war torn Croatia in 1993.
These are some of the poems recounting this experience.

Zagreb: Eating Sog

A concrete road segregates
those shoppers in crocodile shoes
from a hedge of refugees pushing prams

who change at the flick of a red light
into swarms of bees around
Mercedes and B.M.W.s,
which rev up, ready for the escape.

A young mother dodging cars:
like a duck in a shooting range chancing her luck
for the dead dog whose eyes bulge its last look
and its crimson tongue
tastes a final lick.

Mouths to feed, she humps it back
to her pram.

Homeward Bound

We collapse our tents,
we’ve borrowed for two weeks,
roll and squeeze out the last drops of war
leaving behind patches of grass
still asleep from the heat of our bodies.

We swap worst and best stories,
listen to interpreters
reading out the day’s headlines

and watch a young woman,
a sparrow in a red dress,
glean and fill a see-through
plastic bag with bits of food
for her kids.

Throwing our rucksacks into empty trucks
we’re ready for home;
bacon butties, chocolate digestives
and our traumatised wives.

Snipers

Isolated in a war world
standing between sandbags
stacked in bedroom windows
now blanking out all those lovers

who once pressed their hot faces
onto cold glass looking down
the narrow street
where sniper slits are now the only light
shooting through.

I’m in the wrong zone,
an inch tall in a valley
of stone buildings
where only the odd tree stands.

They are watching me
I can feel their minds,
that yes or no,
fingers ready to trigger.

It’s now real: men and women
in a second flopping dead on the pavement

I step over, trying my best
to be invisible
walking home to Wigan ….

For the Cameras

A Civic Dinner “Thank You”
for the relief we’ve brought,
waited on by nurses, teachers
with mongrel cutlery
scrounged from those houses still standing –
we tuck into steak and chips.

Later we shuffle our bloated bellies out
around the town.
A fire engine is pissing itself in the square,
some little girl with an English balloon
is being told by photographers
to pat-pat-pat it up into the sky
in front of a bullet-cratered wall.

A Scorcher

Zagreb in the nineties!
Except in this camp
stinking wet-dog and cabbage,

where men line up and lean against
wooden huts, faces gone
to other places, other times,

where women take control
of who-has-what and where-it-goes.

The kids boast pictures: Gazza, Cantona,
Schumacher, Mansell, bartering
a different hero every week.

One of them takes us to a congested stream
they share with a corpse.
We watch ripples round
its frame, aground like the hulk
of a battered galleon.

Zagreb Camp

Our wagons rock, jerk
through lines of pot-holes
a foot deep in a cinder path
where children walk barefoot.

It’s a ride down
into something I don’t understand;
a dog shelter where at least
one hundred families live,

who beg out their hands
and cough loud barking coughs.

Naked kids swapping boredom
for disease under a tap
that’s splashing cold silver
into mud pies.

Our interpreter – an English Lit. student,
his family wiped out,
is talking of Shelley in a waste land
such as Eliot never saw.

---

Ray Succre

Vigor

The real pros pencil their
names on arranged bodies—
preferable the bride or monster,
taken by snakey prods of troubadors—
horns blared from wet lips
still stung from laps amid delilah thighs.

Small and innocent—no no, targeted.
Collosal. The sex is not jellies and bellies,
words and warm spots, as the
now bald once young loves
fiddle their prunes in a stall.

The first five books of poetry
were on crops, gods, government,
legend, and sexy women:
the woman of the crops,
the goddess over government,
the legendary heroine with
the sword and the looks—
history has fondled the swat dangles,
pinched asses, and
sapped, flitless springs of tits and else,
in a menstrual fashion,
and with sporadic jaunts into
prurience, puritanism, and kink.
History is shocked by the real pros,
as bifurcated dicks unroll like fern leaves,
and every last barter stands still.

---

Paul Summers

the age of mediocrity

it came by stealth
though some invited
it came disguised
as friend & kin
it walked right in
& crept like plague
through all the rooms
we’d kept as sacred
each town consumed
each citadel complicit
no cell immune
the cure redacted
all grace usurped
all hope infected
the mediocre’s
bleak contagion
each fertile thought
remapped as fallow
each mind re-drawn
in bland enclosures
their promise stacked
in putrid piles
bequeath the meek
this palsied earth

fish quay fugues

i. doggerland

the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born:
now is the time of monsters. antonio gramsci

& the way will be perilous;
black ice & shark-eyed smiles,
several heaps of hogmanay vomit,
a vacant pizza-box draped with hoar,
its palimpsest of feast & greed,
bleak litany of the new & old,
dog-shit & fag-ends & crumbling roads,
the hours’ lash, the pains of labour,
the endless cycle of peddled fact.
& then the sanctuary of frozen sand;
its confluence of salt & wind-whipped crows,
the hymn of a sea cathedral hollow.
kick off your shoes my love & walk;
due east, towards the burgeoning sun.
plough on through the grave mounds
of haddock-frames & listless kelp,
tread slowly on the pebble field,
avoid the triggers of its toad-back traps;
then walk & wade & catch your breath,
beyond the bar where codling lurk,
let swell becalm your troubled blood,
squeeze shut your jaded eyes & dream;
the rapture of tectonic plates entwined
in acts of violence & of love, the red raw
ooze of magma’s birthing, each push,
each jolt, each breathless force exerted
sees citadels emergent from these waves,
a glimpse of doggerland’s trembling plains,
its strongholds of hope re-rendered
now un-drowned, their beacons still charged,
their gates agape, their monsters slain;
each edifice an altar awaiting our faith.

ii. the dreamers’ ark
(for tony king)

the oak is seasoned
the sawyers done

each board & beam
is shaved & steamed

rendered immaculate
in barrel curves

planed & polished
to perfect laps

the wrights slip-
glazed by noble toil

each limb in balance
each peg set tight

like lovers’ vows
immoveable in situ

caulked with hope
& dogma pitched

our lines are tied
the mast is set

beyond the lash
of briny rain

the sirens call
a kelpie chorus

in refrain beseeches
us to join them

on their barricade
of angry waves

then truths & lies
file two by two

the ghosts of all
our champions too

then faith & doubt
complete the crew

the flexing muscle
of a lunatic tide

will raise us off
our silt-kissed keel

our petards primed
the mainsail draped

we’ll voyage toward
some promised land

towards a haven
of our communion

this ark of gesture
& good intent

within the warp
& weft of oily sheets

the reek of sheep
the thrill of transit

its canvas chest
heaved out in pride

repels the barrage
of this storm

its swell embellished
with gilded words

nihil nocent
do no harm

iii. the searcher
(for nev clay & walter benjamin)

the stakes are raised on days of hope
beyond a yard or two of fraying rope,

beyond the frames of flesh-stripped fish,
a sliver of a willow-pattern dish,

beyond the jet of wave-hewn coals,
the tumbled glass of mussel shoals.

today, an optimism demands of me
a fist-sized lump of ambergris

infused with an ocean’s sacred musk,
the blackest pearl, a narwhal’s tusk,

a celtic cross, a golden fob,
the trident of a nightmare’s hob.

through flow & slack, advancing with the ebb’s retreat,
i sift & scan the tesserae of sand & weed beneath my feet.

the more stringent my scrutiny, the graver the finds;
these bloodless hands exhume the crypts of clerics’ minds,

& beyond the silt bar’s radiant clarts,
uncover a hoard of wordless grief & splintered hearts:

the angel remiel’s discarded wings,
the aria of lies the siren sings,

the storm cleft tiller of a stricken barque,
the corpse of the ascending lark,

a font of black basalt fine-polished by tides
brimming with the tears of drowned sailors’ brides.

the sleeper wakes

it is almost
inaudible

drown out
by the drone

of our shopping
channel juicers

the bleat of our trauma
our narcissist blurt

the quiet slaughter
of the fattened poor

*

welcome
to my kingdom

to the fag-end
of its progress

a slow-mo flash-fire
of bubbling tar

consuming the fibres
of jaundiced filters

this autumn air
our breath incendiary

we live off fear
& borrowed hate

*

& nothing
will grow

in the shadow
of our romance

*

way off-camera
beyond the reach

of news cycles
& investigative minds

the death toll is rising
the body count grows

bruised hearts
& airless lungs

clogged arteries
& petrified tongues

passion corroded
empathy eroded

asphyxiated dreams
statistics & lies

& god is dead
the faithful fucked

their currency
devalued or defunct

our father. oh father
grant us each day

our daily pills
our snidey tabs

our red-tops
& the strongest drink

our multipack crisps
our poundshop ket

our smack & crack
our coke & skunk

deliver us our bargain hunt
& the great british bake-off

imprison us with labels
cage us in our minds

we live off fear
& borrowed hate

i will smear my cell
with dogma & lard

unleash a plague
of thankless hope

*

it is almost
inaudible

through the drone
of this chatter

the movement of traffic
the transit of hours

the rumble of hunger
the hiss of the rain

the dirge of defeat’s
monotonous refrain

dürer’s horsemen
braying at the door

the quiet slaughter
of the fattened poor

lots of things which rhyme that i would not take
with me in the event of a planetary evacuation

capitalism / cataclysm /narcissism / catechism / the march of neo-
liberalism / the anuretic embolism /the new managerial / anything
imperial / confederate flags /louis vuitton bags / received
pronunciation / blatant acts of ingratiation / starvation / stagnation
/ exploitation / alienation / deforestation / non-consensual
penetration / vacuous wankers / merchant bankers /homeopaths /
psychopaths / intolerance / ignorance / sycophants / fire ants /
leopard print nylon underpants / jewellery made from elephants /
sebaceous cysts / misogynists / cultural colonialists / predatory
recidivists / ukes / nukes / tv cooks / martin amis books /eating
disorders / constructed borders / child abuse / the hangman’s
noose / the original soundtrack of footloose / poetry’s recourse to
the needlessly obtuse / domestic violence / that awkward silence
/posh physicians / teenage magicians /endless conversations about
yoga positions / inane blogs / yappy dogs / referring to the french
as frogs / ads for hot ukrainian brides / unrelenting genocides /
murdering bees with pesticides / klu klux klans / obsessions with
le creuset pans / royal babies / rabies / quorn /porn / the mediocre
/ online poker / chicken pox / botox / vox pops/ gm crops / death /
bad breath / crystal meth / every tory shibboleth / orange pith /the
beauty myth / fracking / hacking / smacking / academies with
corporate backing / dementia / involuntary indenture / racial
tension / condescension / slaves to convention/ middle class
pretension / hipster poseurs / brown nosers / various cancers /
politicians’ non-answers / sweat shops /racist cops / bullington
club fops/ red tops /chieftain tanks / food-banks / alt right cranks /
voluminous yanks / endless war / geordie shore / assassin drones /
mobile phones / marble-gobbed sloans / pay day loans / holocaust
deniers / bearded messiahs / fake news / high heeled shoes /
herpes/ fleas / processed cheese/ unregulated monopolies /
extortionate tuition fees / the inhumane treatment of refugees /
crippling debt / buy to let / innumerable offensive smells /
pharmaceutical cartels / sleeping rough / acting tough / gratuitous
swearers / rolex wearers / judgemental starers/ the burden endured
by unpaid carers / apartheid regimes/ facebook memes / suburban
semis with fake tudor beams / boulevards of broken dreams /
bilious spite / the supremacy of white / posturing with military
might / rupert murdoch peddling shite / the unfree state / stifled
debate / the ugliness of wanton hate / our continued subservience
to the notion of fate

hamstrung

there are ghosts
in the safety glass,

obese & smile-less,
& vaguely familiar;

trapped like fossils
in cages of nostalgia.

choking on nuggets
of lethargic vowels,

a brood of pale biddies
moan about weather,

a toddler is hamstrung
by the weight of a nappy;

& somewhere between
them, an irreparable union.

haven
christmas island, december 2010

heavy now as ballast lead, a weightless
baby drifts from vision. wide-eyed but

lifeless, melting in the twilight of expanding
depth. she waves in the drag of undertow &

saturated lungs. each gilded globe of fleeing
breath seeks refuge in the cusp of sky & sea.

each fragile bauble of misplaced hope exploded
in the tensions of a rolling swell. & heavy now

as ballast lead, their empty hearts grow cold
& dead. all dreams defunct in waking terror.

they melt into expanding depth. their muted
eyes accuse, though lacking any focus; they fix

like cadavers on points of consensus, their pupils
pulled like moths towards the light upon the hill.

ouroboros
woorabinda, central queensland

beware the magi bearing gifts;
their votive grog & lavish guilt.

the former, laced; the latter,
the spike. shame & the shame

of shame. death & the death of
death. the snake will bite its tail;

& these mothers, their tongues.
a silence forged, a flawless edge

to hamstring progress. the birds
have flown. the kangaroos have

seen the light. the brumby bolted
to the downs. three score years &

ten of drought & flame, of blood &
shit congealing on this bitter earth.

---

John Sweet

among the crippled and without grace

wherever you are is
the edge of the forest
and this man there with no face
no past
and when he holds out his hands
they are never quite empty

they are filled with fire
or with dust
and there is a phone ringing in
another room in a
different house

there is snow falling on the
bones of forgotten gods

it only seems fair
that some of us will starve

Noyes

and all summer long
dogs digging up the bones of forgotten children and
always the threat of rain that never arrives

silver sun in a grey sky

the idea of love held up against the
idea of fucking and
found to be less and she says
no pity for the failed magicians

she says no mercy for the suicides and
both of us sit in the back seat knowing that
the driver has to die first

and all of us believe in the
failure of democracy

no end to the raped and the starving singing
songs of freedom and hope out
in your back yard and
who are you to
fight back against the age of greed?

who am i to argue against the
wisdom of jackals and crows?

doesn’t take a genius to see that
the enemy will always win

---

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