Poetry S – The Recusant

Poetry S

CHILDREN OF AN EVIL CALLING

But we are, in a sense, much like him somehow

insanely and ignorantly narcissis#c in our greed.

We would eat everything alive.

Destroy ourselves

and also

everyone

on a lazy bet.

CHILDREN OF AN EVIL CALLING

But we are, in a sense, much like him somehow

insanely and ignorantly narcissis#c in our greed.

We would eat everything alive.

Destroy ourselves

and also

everyone

on a lazy bet.

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.

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.

Partha Sarkar © 2023

Partha Sarkar

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.

Partha Sarkar © 2023

Gordon Scapens

Bio:- Widely published over many years in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and competitions, most recently

first prize in the Brian Nisbet poetry award.

D O B !8. 11 1934.

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.

Partha Sarkar

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.

Gordon Scapens

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.

Vanessa 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.

Gordon Scapens

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.

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.

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.

John Seed

in time of “the breaking of nations”

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

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’

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’

Bernard Saint

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.

Sam Silva

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.

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!

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.

An Australian essayist and poet – educated at Scotch College and Swinburne Art School – taught – began writing short stories – switched to writing free verse poetry and essays – with a collection – Patterns of Perception – published by Augur Press (UK) in January 2015.

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 5^th.

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.

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.

Bernard Saint

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

Bernard Saint. born 1950. son of a miner who studied local Roman history. Edited a satirical magazine at Grammar School. Left at 16 as poems began to appear in print, and worked on the fringes of publishing before a Jungian training in Arts Therapy. Worked in NHS psychiatry and substance dependency. 5 books of poetry, most notably ‘Roma’ from Smokestack Books 2016 vividly re-inventing The Eternal City over time as symbol of the psyche, modern civilization and its current condition. All with a wry ‘Roman’ lyricism, elegy, and comedy.

Sam Silva

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!

Partha Sarkar

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 .

Partha Sarkar was born on 17.12.68 and is from West Bengal, India.

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

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

does it say what’s the point I have no rhyme

or reason the daffodils are here

I’m for the spring

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

is it for standing still and doing nothing to

for shouting out loud at the obscenity,

the obscenity of certain well…obscenities

for jumping into someone else’s skin

and running off with it

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.

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

(im 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.

Sam Silva

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!

Sam Silva

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.

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

Sam Silva

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…

Fiona Sinclair

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.

Sam Silva

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!

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

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.

Sam Silva

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…

Sam Silva

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.

Sam Silva

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.

By Kalyani Thakur

Translated from Bangla by Jaydeep Sarangi

Poem number: 33

My grandfather was prohibited

From stepping into the tol premises.

My father became literate

Using palm leaf and ink of charcoal

After a long struggle.

My mother visited Durga bari

With cowdung on her left hand

To paste the place where she was standing.

Oh! God! Cowdung is holier

Than the touch of a dalit!

My genteel colleagues enjoy

Using abusive terms—

Chamar, Charal and dom—daily!

They have forgotten

That these terms are names

of different castes and communities.

With all these

I’ll have to remember

There is no dalit in Bengal!

Dalits are everywhere in the world

NOT HERE!

Caste discrimination exists everywhere

NOT HERE!

They throttle our throat,

Train us to say–

We are all equal, no caste stratification here.

By trickery

They are taking away

Provision s for reservation after one generation.

They force us and say,

“If you claim reservations in the private sector

We shall erase your father’s name from your memory.

Repeat

We need no more.

We’ve got everything.”

—————————-

Glossary:

tol : Sanskrit primary school

Durga bari: A house where an idol of Goddess Durga is installed.

Chamar, Charal and dom : Three professions considered outcastes in different parts of India.

This poem is taken from Thakur’s collection, Chandalinir Kobita (2011)

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.

*******

Ian C Smith, 340 Settlement Rd., Calulu, 3875, Australia

Sam Silva

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…

Clare Saponia

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.

Sam Silva

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…

Ron Singer

1. The Lazy Animals

Not just the obvious –lazy dog, wallowing hog, eponymous sloth– but the porcupine who gnawed our porch three nights running, instead of sticking to the trees, with their tough bark and other stuff. (I’m told they’re after the glue, but never mind.) It took a bucket of water on his head to convince this fussy eater to waddle off into the woods.

Not just the porcupine, renowned for neither sloth nor (like the beaver) industry. Consider the honeybee, watchword for busy-ness. Myriads of workers buzz all over the place, signaling each other via the bee telegraph as to the exact location of the nectar. Meanwhile, back at the hive, the big fat queen sits on her stinger, dropping eggs, while she waits for dinner to be served.

Then, there are the human queens, not the working kind, the Catherine’s and Elizabeth’s (both “Great”), but the purely decorative, noted not for production, but consumption: rich cakes, wines, emeralds, rubies, silk, cloth of gold. And not just queens, it’s monarchs I mean (human beings, not butterflies).

Far below these kings and queens, you come upon those watchwords for sloth, recipients of public aid. Here, too, there are distinctions to be made. For every welfare queen, for every other cheat, there are legions of single moms, and of the unemployable and the un-and-underemployed, struggling to make ends meet.

So, when it comes to laziness, why not lose the clichés (sluggish surrogates for thought)? Be careful not to cast the first stone at humans or other animals, or you could find yourself sweeping up the shards from a glass house, and then, from the ground up, laboring to build a new one. Casting stones… building glass houses… wasting energy.

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.

Sam Silva

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.

Benjamin Smith

Mouth.

Over in the tall grass,

Where nettles sting like jelly-

Fish, I found a cave, open

Mouth of eerie pitch.

I crept the patch of grass,

Sleeve gloved, dodging stingers like

A mine-field. Not welcome –

Read a stake stuck at the

Entrance – Enter

At your own Risk! Inside night reigned,

Light slivers creeping

Fault-lines in the ceiling.

I slipped through the nocturne, groping

Wet walls, smooth cold rock –

Its dormant oesophagus.

I slid down its throat

And entered the stomach;

Honeycomb catacombs

Strewn with dead,

Lost men, desperate

Skeletons clutching

At bottles; one last gulp

For courage; one last

Gulp for all time. They

Must have crawled in there,

Roofless, searching out a

Sleep-hole. Never

Found a way out.

Today the sirens

Came to collect them.

Fluoxetine Visions.

Fluoxetine visions visit me

At my scrambled desk; fleeing

Thoughts fall by the wayside.

Match flare flashes half-formed

Faces, crashes the computer screen,

While somewhere over there,

Though I don’t know where there is,

I feel them whispering: The Council –

Foreign voices formed for my

Destruction. I fight them off; cling

To my desk, keep breathing, deep,

Keep staring at the screen,

Tell them that they’re not real.

When my tongue tingles with pins

And needles- that means they’re gone,

That means, Back to work…

Pond-life.

The pond is a maelstrom;

Mad swirl of red cap orandas,

Bubble-eyed black moors and

Multi-coloured calicoes.

Moustachioed coy carp

Glide the olive chamber

While glinting silver fish

Disturb the water-boatmen.

Down in the darkness,

Where the algae eats the sunlight,

Fat sucker-fish hoover skeletons,

Caracols eat the algae,

The turtles eat the caracols;

Everything eats each other.

Fish Supper by the Fire.

Heavy drops splash, crash the boundary

As slippery citizens slither to the shadows

Shivering in the cloud-burst.

Crushed petals cling to the ceiling tarp

While disoriented deck-chairs lay stranded on the lawn

And freckled frogspawn ripples the chambers surface.

The garden is a ship-wreck, this pond

Pandemonium. Water leaks the guttering.

You won’t be home for hours

With your raw kisses and your

Pink-white streaks of bacon to

Fatten me up – make me ripe for the picking.

When winter falls the sky freezes;

Black silhouettes solidified in icebergs.

But you come with your ice-picks

And crack open the surface.

Bony fingers plumb turbulent murk

Searching out fresh meat: something for the hunger.

Silk City.

In the moonlight spiders wince,

Spin cobwebs to catch it.

Hollowed bodies litter

The brilliant threads; glimmering

Like twilight graveyards.

Cast out to the canopy

These eight-legged vampires

Drain marrow from the bone moon, suck

The city into darkness.

We live in their shadow,

We live with their blood-lust,

Or do we? Sometimes we die, get

Digested by the system.

Next time you see them, hiding

In the darkness – Stomp them.

Sam Silva

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.

James Scully

All That Is Solid

Gon: Here is everything advantageous to life.

Ant. True; save means to live. —The Tempest: II.i

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

. . . 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

Sam Silva

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.

Sam Silva

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!

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?

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….

Paul Summers

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.

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!

Sam Silva

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.

(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.

(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.

Sam Silva

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.

Sam Silva

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!

Sam Silva

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…

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.

Derek Stanford ©

the estate of Derek Stanford © Julie (Stanford) Whitby 2010

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.

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.

An American Dissident Broadside (distributed 09/26/09)

The American Dissident, A 501 (c) 3 Nonprofit Semiannual Literary Journal Offering a Forum for Vigorous Debate, Cornerstone of Democracy

G. Tod Slone, Founding Editor (todslone@yahoo.com) (www.theamericandissident.org)

An Experiment in Democracy: Yale University, Boston University, and Williams College

The question which naturally arises in some minds is: “What is the relationship between the writers who function within the system and the writers who challenge the system?” And there are several points to be made here. The first one to note is that there is almost no dialogue at all, no communication at all—with negligible exceptions—between these two groups of writers.

—Dennis Brutus, “Literature and commitment in South Africa” and political prisoner on Robbins Island

In the context of testing the waters of democracy, an initial draft of this broadside was sent several weeks ago to about 100 English Department professors of Yale University, Boston University, and Williams College because they employ or employed poet Louise Glück. They were encouraged to respond in the spirit of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. As a questioning and challenging citizen, I’ve been performing similar experiments on the established order over the past several decades. Data continues to confirm the disturbing premise that academics, poets, editors, and others, in large part, do not really give a damn about democracy. When challenged, most prefer not replying at all… unless forced to. A few will respond with visceral indignation. Cite Professor Diane Price Herndl (Iowa State University): “You expect us to write and support you in attacking our colleague? That’s rich.” Cite also Professor J T Skerrett, Jr. (University of Massachusetts): “Do you really think that insulting and reviling the faculty is the way to persuade us to read your publication?” In a sense, how could outside criticism of the “faculty” not be considered “attacking” and “insulting and reviling” by the faculty in question? A few others will simply resort to base ad hominem, as in “you loser” (Professor William Nelles, University of Massachusetts). Rarely, if ever, have I received cogent counter-argumentation as a retort. On one occasion, I actually received a surprising touché. Cite William Pierce, Senior Editor of Agni: “I like it [i.e., the cartoon I’d sketched on him]—in that stomach-sinking way of a good jab. Thanks, George. I agree that we all—everyone, anyone—need to push back against the meaningless and effete.”

Alison Case was the only professor regarding this broadside to respond, though she chose to dismiss my arguments with epithets: “I thought your argumentation was circular and sloppy.” Yet since when did straightforward come to mean “circular”? She also stated “Poetry is, in my view, not sufficiently important to the maintenance of the established order that they [sic] can be bothered policing.” Yet, clearly, those poets being rewarded by the established order were themselves of that order and helped maintain it by always presenting unthreatening verse. In Osip Mandelstam’s time and place, POETRY WAS OF EXTREME IMPORTANCE. Mandelstam died because of a poem he wrote; Saro-Wiwa was hung because of his criticism; and Villon spent time in a dungeon for his poetry. Sadly, Case did not even care to ponder the question, which had a simple (circular?) answer: Established-order academics like her and Glück had managed to castrate poetry and otherwise render it perfectly acceptable to bourgeois society. The so-called “friends” of public libraries across the nation act as gatekeepers (i.e., discretionary censors) of the established order, would rather library patrons not be exposed to “all points of view” in direct contradiction to the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights (see www.theamericandissident.org/ALA.htm), and thus have also been contributing to poetry’s castration.

Revolutionary Concord Welcomes Established-Order Poet Louise Glück

The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library do not possess the ability to intellectually question and challenge that which is handed to them on the established-order silver spoon. Indeed, they only invite the kind of well-known literary machine cogs Thoreau (“let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine”) and Emerson would have (hopefully) detested. Such cogs are the least likely to, in Emerson’s words, “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.” Indeed, heeding both those famous historical citizens of Concord, promoted today in absolute aberrancy by the Concord Chamber of Commerce, would likely destroy ones literary/academic career. But should a poet be a careerist… or a truth teller? The educated herd tends to be mesmerized by prize-winning poets—those court jesters of the established order, laureates of good taste and, usually, careerist academics. The educational system spawning herd members is clearly a failed one because it has not taught or encouraged them to question and challenge, especially those things stemming from the established order itself (e.g., prizes, laurels, tenure, invitations, and grants). For the herd, careerism, ingrained fear, and collegiality must always trump the mind, truth, and risk taking. Indeed, the poets invited by the Friends never go against the established-order grain… they are the grain! And what kind of poetry might one expect from someone not in the least on the edge of society? How does inviting only “safe” poets honor the revolutionary patriots and writers of historic Concord? How does it benefit democracy? I am not arguing against Glück-type poetry. However, we need to be exposing citizens to and teaching students much more than Glück-type poetry… and clearly we are not doing that. We need to be teaching students that poetry can be “sufficiently important,” especially when it actually RISKS something on the part of the poet, and thus raise poetry out of the “not sufficiently important” mire of academe, which controls the very direction of poetry today with its millions of dollars. Glück is one of academe’s well-paid versifying entertainers and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, which censored all my comments and banned me from participating in its forums (see www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmericanPoets.htm). Would she openly condemn such overt censorship, risking the ire of her high-brow enablers? Likely not, for out of the 16 chancellors I’d contacted, not one disapproved of such censorship. Not even one of the 100 English professors contacted would condemn it. Likely, not one of you would rise up to do so either. Proponents of censorship (filtering and whatever other euphemisms they prefer calling it), after all, can be master rationalizers. Thus is the sad state of democracy today. Thank you for your attention.

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—

Gargoyle

He crouches on the rim of the bath, pink feet
Flopped across the enamel edge, gargoyle
Face grinning down towards the suds and flesh.
Lines of light vector from his grimace
Towards her isle of foamy bush, risen
Fresh from the steaming, tame Sargasso Sea.

What murderous radiance leaks away from his smile?
What virginal pleasure beams in the stretch of his leer?
Violins drag arpeggios out from the tiles.
The water, plucked to pizzicato peaks,
Shimmies against her body’s littoral.

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.

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.

Sam Silva

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….

Sam Silva

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.

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

windows

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

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.

Constance Stadler

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

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,

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

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

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.

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.

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

Peter Street

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.

Anthony Seidman

Prose Poems

Runoff

There are pollutants above this dog, above us all, and brush fires on the San Fernando foothills; crows perch on telephone cables, crows my dog hears cawing, crows who know the vacant lots where bones of murder victims sink among jimson weed, grass, and the narrow tunnels leading to the ant queen’s den and the sinews of this desert. As always, night arrives: this dog looks up, and only a grey darkness, like that of dishwater, night pressing through smog, through clumps

of weed and burr, coagulant of night, dulling the heat the way salt and fats slow the nervous ticking of circulation. Dog thinks summer will never end; an ecstasy of sniffing and dozing, and men who sit on the sidewalk drinking beer, sowing the pavement with peanut shells. This dog has fangs chiseled for meat, and irises that dilate; but, at last, night swells, overflows, a sewage-tide of shadow, and both dog and poet will witness hillside and hearth washing away, the way a red taillight throbs in rainfall, diminishes in size, then turns onto a darker street where one can only hear the roar, decrescendo, of the engine.

High Frequency

When I left her at the loom in order to shack up with the Maenad, I walked out with a pile of clothes covering my eyes so that I couldn’t see what I was abandoning: my son clinging to my leg. Everything was sunlight, honey on bread, salt. We slept until noon those summer months; her breasts, bruised from my teeth, and I was basted with her sweat, spit. At night, the moon seemed less a temptress, and more like a promise. When I thought of Venus, I remembered Percival Lowell who predicted star-sailors would find her tropical and lush with flora and fauna. Snoring, spent from sex, shades of Ishtar and Aphrodite crackled in my sleep with the hearth-fire, and taste of milk. When the rainy season started, the Maenad locked herself in the bathroom with pills and bubbles, while I sat at the kitchen table, listening to the radio. One night, I heard what others like me had only thought they heard: whistling that turned

into a tea-kettle’s pitch, which then deepened, trembled, leaves shattered in a gust, or

gushing water. Is that the wind? I asked myself silently. Or the sirens outside? “No, no.”

I said aloud; “it’s your son crying.”

Why Don’t They

Why don’t they notice, as I mop sweat off my forehead with a paper napkin, as my teeth chatter in the glaring heat, why don’t they notice how I speak louder to not hear the siren within? Don’t they see my hand trembles when I lift a forkful of eggs to my whiskers? Don’t

they pause when I tremble before the aperture in the pavement? I won’t listen to his tidbit about fares or phosphor, to her tale of tinsel and terror; I stare at the passersby out the window, and jolt when I hear the snarling motorcycles or trucks downshifting, as if I were awaiting locusts, earthquakes, or brimstone. Night comes,–I can’t shake it off,–and I lock

myself behind this red door, and hear the silence that throbs, drowning my pulse in a darkness that is crimson like the light glimpsed behind clenched eyelids; and I cough, cough louder, I laugh to smother that siren’s call, the sizzle of tires on black asphalt, this rocking gurney,

these headlights beaming on the curve, the shoulder, and the precipice.

Pentecostal Neon

From my motel window, I read: Templo de Dios…crackling in crimson at noon, when the heat jaggedly rises like an eight cylinder jalopy reaching the speed limit; at evening, the neon is a premonition of dusk and judgment; the tambourines hiss at me as I walk back from the liquor store with a six pack, and the congregation is howling God espíritu santo, while the children play in the parking lot; their ties and dresses itch them as they kick a blue beach ball until it bursts. Crimson neon is more than a buzzing, it is an ominous wash of noise, like the shushing from an air-conditioner that is mistaken for silence, yet once the traffic stops, and it is midnight, it’s the sound that throbs in my ears, the first light I see as I open to the darkness encroaching me when I can’t sleep, but stare out the window at a locked temple, the moon, but no constellation to spell out the red babble of my paganism.

*L*I*Q*U*O*R*&*I*C*E*C*O*L*D*B*E*E*R*

The bell rings as I open the door; two men dressed in overalls are getting their checks cashed from the Syrian owner; each is holding a twelve pack of Bud. Laughter and boasting will crackle as they will later sit drinking in a truck in an apartment building parking lot, listening to norteño ballads. I walk to the glass doors humming from refrigeration; my holdings, five dollars. My aim, to slake this thirst that has bludgeoned me since coming back from unemployment. The heat

has been unbearable; nothing has burgeoned from my efforts, from the long lines and paperwork. I leave the door open for a couple of minutes, letting the cold air glaze my reddened forehead, until the owner whistles, and gestures: You buying or what? I pull out two tall cans, pay for them, and walk into the scalding dusk. In the Liquor store parking lot, the two workers have already ripped open a twelve pack. Faintly, from the truck stereo: an accordion, a guitar strumming chord changes in 3/4, and an out of kilter singer numerating revenge and betrayals. A dusty wind rushes across the parking lot, and I look up in perfect silence at the constellations, sense the vastness, fossilization of dead light, and new water on Mars. I sit, my back against the store wall. One streetlamp crackles faintly. Two yards from me, I notice a vacant lot, and while I take a sip, I see the ant-crawl, the swarm and tracery of black lines and swirls by the mound: persistence, labor so perfect because it is conducted with equanimity. And I sit here, engrandeured in the belittlement of myself under the moon, the wind, beneath the ants.

Ferry Token’s Obverse

I am the boy locked outside when your door is blue. You, too, are this boy when you enter

the party, yet stand in a corner, so self-conscious you hear your neck-bones creak. You are

he when you cry, when your grip loosens and you taste vomit, and crumble among sheets that itch of insomnia. When you weigh the stone, the shell, as more than the gold ingot, though

the price of gas may rise, and the corner coffee shop sells fried eggs and boiled milk for dollars. Your mother is always dying,–cancer eats into her left breast though her heart is a puddle of roses; your father is always calling for you,–but from behind a pillar that casts it shadow on a dark plaza, and in the distance a freight train shoots across the horizon, its horn reaching out to you from so far that you find yourself outside the blue door, where you gaze at a coin with its obverse of ferry and hooded rower… the oleanders in the vacant lot behind you rustle

dryly, and a breeze rises, foul with carrion, with the tinkle of empty cans.

Ferry Token’s Obverse (II)

A coin each for those, like I, born in 1973: for the dental hygienist, for those in auto-wrecks

and plastic surgery, for amputees, the toothless from crack, the accountant, wizard of data entry, mini-mart zombies or ghouls of neon bars where coke is worshiped atop the bathroom counter… all the buffalo-wings and beer you desire. All the debt, botched manicures, all the children, transubstantiation of hearth into mortgage, public education into the sophistry of debating binge-shopping or binge-eating. A coin for the podiatrist who looks at high-heels and shudders, for the dentist who loves the oral hygiene of his assistant, for the merchant of software, smoothies, or other coolants; they will tender their bonus in the Kingdom that doesn’t exist. We are funneling into the dark, and our sleep is a rumor of cancer, our vows yellowed like newspaper clippings, our God perched with angels atop a needle’s tip. Now the stale glory of hypocrisy awaits us; now the traffic on the freeway parts for the staff of my middle finger, but only after the baby-sitter has put the kid to sleep, and the last party is sputtering. It will be at the bar Las Playas where the silver tooth of the barmaid glistens with my reflection, as she laughs and slaps my last dollars from the counter, hands me a club-soda, because the cops are prowling, and I’m slurring my glossolalia.

Motel Room With Red Door

This is where I boil Top Ramen on a kitchenette’s stove. This is where I sit reading Ritsos and his doxology: praise the sun that cannot be burned. Nightfall, I pace the room: the television newscaster recites the daily famine and fads with the encouraging pitch of a Pilates coach. Hours later, I pull back the sheets, and I stretch out in bed. This is the room with a red door, where every night I struggle, as my Mistress of Insomnia mounts me, pins my arms in between her thighs, then stitches my eyelids open, thread spooled from embers, needle chipped from ice.

Peter Street

Flamenco Dancer

His auntie Liz always read the obituaries. So she will have seen it. But to make sure he sent a letter. Then a phone-call. Robert had argued with himself but in the end he thought he had to inform her about his mother’s death. There had never been love lost between them, even at grandma’s funeral twenty years previously. The two of them, sisters, had stood on opposite sides of the grave, refusing to touch the same sifted soil to sprinkle over their mother’s coffin.

So he was surprised but not shocked, when she asked about the arrangements. “Is she being buried a Catholic?” She wasn’t interested in how she had died or what kind of death it was.

He answered her question with a question, “Are you coming?”

“Where is she being buried, then?”

“They’re leaving her house at nine-thirty, then it’s ten o’ clock at Astley Bridge Cemetery, Bolton. Do you know where it is? Do you know where she lives?”

The phone went dead.

……

There were waxy faces with sunken eyes, peeking round the net curtain, thin breath misting the window of next-door neighbours’ at number thirteen. On the lawn under the front room window there was an assortment of wreaths and flowers. She wouldn’t have liked those. Waste of money! She would have said plastic anytime. He smiled as he remembered her at the sink, paisley apron round her waist, washing her array of plastic flowers, using an old toothbrush to get between the gaudy colours.

It was 9.20. Robert, chain smoking, stepped into the front room of the bungalow where her black coat still slumped over the arm of a red-and -green settee. Her red purse, with her bus-pass photo face up, was sticking out from under one of the cushions. A half-empty bottle of olive oil stood next to a hairbrush still misted with strands of white hair. On the sideboard alongside an old faded prayer book were various coins, a picture of himself as a ten-year-old in a black leather jacket with a white stripe across the chest. Black hair plastered down, his smile showed the gap he could fit a half-crown between. There were picturesque Christmas and birthday cards on the wall in plastic frames. He walked around remembering each one, the way she used to fill her tiny front room with old Christmas cards going back to just after the war. The dish of water she swore kept away sore throats was still next to the two-bar electric fire.

Hand-sewn, home-made knickers, skirts, blouses and tea towels straggled over the rods of her clothes-rack hanging a foot from the kitchen ceiling.

He stood at the door of her walk-in larder, recalling the conversations he had had with her about the advantages of a fridge. She wouldn’t budge. It was her way and that’s how she wanted it to stay. The marble slab for her meats. The damp tea-towel for keeping bread fresh, and the various enamel basins she used for steeping peas and pulses. On the kitchenette table alongside her tea strainer was her one cup and saucer, next to his “I love mum” mug.

He went into the bedroom. Through the half-closed curtains a yellow oblong of sun slid over the bedroom carpet. The forty-watt bulb made no real difference to the light. There was a whiff of Lifebouy Soap mingled with a smell of hospital. There were boxes of bandages, surgical stockings, and enough medicines to open a chemist’s shop. A pair of clogs underneath a mahogany wardrobe stood next to a pair of sandals and a pair of flat walking-out shoes. The walls were white, bare, except for a small black crucifix. The bed had been made. He smiled, thinking of the times she had shouted to him, “I can’t leave the house without making the bed. What will they say if someone breaks in!”

He remembered her waxed face, when he first saw her dead the undignified way her head had fallen back, mouth open, cheeks sucked in. She would have hated it. He remembered gently lipsticking her thin lips with her favourite bright red lipstick, careful not to smudge. Then leaning over her he lightly powered her nose to hide the many freckles she had hated for as long as he could remember. He combed her hair, gently feeling every white strand sliding through her blue comb, tucking some strands behind her ears, the way she herself did whenever she had to meet someone. She would tuck it back ever so gently, almost flirtatious. He fiddled around with the collar of her nightie, straight, neat. He moisturised her hands with Ponds Cold Cream. She would have liked all of it. Being made presentable for the undertakers. He squeezed her hand and tasted his last kiss, watching the pain of several lifetimes drain from her eighty-two-year-old face.

A tiny, dark blue, empty bottle of Evening in Paris stood on the walnut dressing-table Social Services had given her. He lifted and dabbed the tiny gold lid on his wrist, the way she used to. It had been empty for as long as he could remember. He started crying.

Kate Riley was walking round the dimly lit bedroom she shared with her sister. There was a navy blue A line dress laid out on the bed. Kate was clipping her hair up, when her sister Liz stormed in, “So you’re going then?” Kate ignored her and slid in the final clip. “I don’t know what you’re doing all this for? said Liz, “Nobody can be that hard up that they would want to dance with you!”

It was three years on V.E. Night, since she had visited The Empress Ballroom. The globe in the middle was sparkling over two dancers demonstrating the Flamenco. It was the sexiest thing Kate Riley had ever witnessed. She could feel herself blushing. Their bodies touched and wrapped around each other. She couldn’t take her eyes off the male dancer as he twisted and twirled. She had never seen such tight trousers on a man before. She blushed even more as she imagined him holding her tight, her breast squeezing into his chest and those tight trousers pressing into her. She made the sign of the cross, “Oh, God forgive me for my impure thoughts.”

She was the last one to leave the edge of the dance floor. Chewing her nails down to the wick. She fixed her eyes on the slim figure of the Spanish dancer. Her friend, Betty Mailey, tried to pull her away. But Kate was hypnotised. He came over. “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen,” he said in broken English. “ They are brighter than any star.”

She fell, hook line and sinker.

“You wait for me, while I change into my other clothes, yes?”

As he walked away, she was inching her eyes over every part of him. Betty said, “We’ll miss the ten o’clock bus.”

“I’ll walk home.”

“Come on, Kate, let’s go.”

“He said I have the most beautiful eyes he has ever seen.”

Betty was slipping her coat on, checking her handbag. “They all say that.”

There were people pushing past them giving them dirty looks for being in the way.

“Nobody has ever said that to me before.” Kate was wrapping her handkerchief around her fingers. Her face was flushed, mouth dry. She pushed her way back to Betty. “Honest, kid, he said brighter than any star.”

“Listen, Kate, I can’t stop, Frank will kill me if I don’t catch that bus!”

“ It’s alright, don’t worry.”

They stepped out of the warmth of the ballroom, into the cold evening air of Wigan. Betty pulled her friend to a halt, “My God, Kate, you’ve never walked home alone in your life!”

“I’ll be alright, see you on Monday. ”

“You’re joking! I’ll come round tomorrow. I want to hear everything.” She nudged Kate, winked, “You lucky bugger!” she said.

Kate’s body was tingling, she found herself wringing her hands, shifting from one foot to the other. “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.” Over and over those same words. His accent. His deep Spanish voice.

(Diary entry 20th March. For my thoughts I will have to say four Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s… But I don’t care. I feel so alive.)

She waited at the Exit. He appeared wearing things she had only seen in the movies: kid gloves, a silver-topped cane, handmade shoes. When Tomas Guerreo asked her if he could take her home she didn’t refuse.

He kissed her hand on the corner of St. Peter’s Avenue. She felt a giddiness and tingling she’d never felt before. It was almost eleven o’ clock. She had never been out so late. “You will meet me next Saturday, at the Finger-post, no? We will walk out together. Two o clock!” She nodded, kissed him on the cheek and ran up the street into her house as fast as her excitement would carry her. Her heart was bumping out of her chest, she imagined herself holding his tight body and kissing his heart-shaped lips.

That night she couldn’t sleep, turning over and over, again tasting his cheek, his sweat, that kiss on her hand

On Monday morning she was the talk of Langdales Cotton Mill. She blushed as the mill girls gathered around her: “ Did anything happen?”

“How long did it take him to get your knickers off?” They cackled around her. Someone shouted outside of the group: “ I hope he lasts longer than my Bill does! Is it right those Latin lads can do it all night?”

“Thank Christ mine’s from Bolton then.”

“Don’t be so rude.” said Kate.

They laughed again. It was the first time she had been the centre of so much attention. She both loved and hated it. In the afternoon she mimed to Betty over the deafening noise of the card-room machines how his deep Spanish voice made her go all funny. “Don’t forget, ” mimed Betty, “ he just wants to get into your knickers.”

Kate blushed.

When she climbed on the work’s bus for home, the other mill girls were still cackling about Cathleen Riley finding a man. She was deaf to their taunts; she was in some other world, where all she could think and talk about was Tomas, his Spain, his dancing, his body. The bus arrived at her stop: the Finger-post in Aspull. Arm-in-arm, she and Betty walked through the heavy rain, jumping over the large puddles in the narrow cinder path as they crossed the moor to home in St Peter’s Avenue. Stopping outside number three, Kate hugged her friend, “ Please don’t say anything to anyone around here, promise me?”

“Why?” asked Betty. “You’re thirty-two, not some young kid.”

Kate stood back. “ I just don’t want anyone to know. You know what they’re like.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

Betty couldn’t contain herself any longer. “ What was he like?”

Kate twirled around like a teenage girl.

“He kissed my hand just like they do in the pictures.”

Betty waited for more.

“Is that all?”

Kate looked at her. “He’s not like that, he’s a Catholic.”

“No desert disease?”

“What do you mean?”

“Wandering palms.”

“I told you he’s not like that…He’s perfect. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I wish I had half-a-crown for every time I’d heard that.”

With that, Kate ran down the flagged path and into the red-bricked council house,

to a cry of “Wake me up when you’ve made the tea!”

(Diary entry: 26th March. I’ve not slept properly. I’ll die if he doesn’t turn up. Oh God please make him turn up.)

During the next five days she planned everything down to the last detail.

But it was Tuesday evening when she went to Karen, next door at number five, who was her size, a size fourteen. “ Listen, kid, could you lend me that grey two-piece suit with the pencil skirt? The one you had at Sandra’s wedding. You looked lovely in it.”

On the way back she popped into Betty’s for a green blouse to go with it. She couldn’t afford to buy the latest shoes with the Cuban heels. It would either be the clogs she wore at work or a pair of brown leather sandals (Never borrow anyone’s shoes, her mother had told her. You never know what you might catch) She washed her red locks with a block of green Fairy Soap

(Diary entry for the 27th March read: No one in our street had a sachet of shampoo. I’d kill for real shampoo.) She stood in her dimly-lit bedroom wearing just a full-length white cotton slip, looking at herself in a small mirror and leaning back on the spindles of her bedroom chair. Her arms fell to her side; “You are going to look the best anyone has ever seen.” Brushing her dank hair back, she lifted the mirror to arm’s-length, looked, turned her head to one side, and checked the other side. Shaking her head, she brushed her hair forward, looked, then brushed it sideways. In a fit of frustration, she threw the pink brush across the room onto her sister’s bed. She fell into her bedside chair, head in hands, crying, “Not today, please, not today!”

She picked up the brush again and drew her hair back, then pinned in the sides, brushing again, “He’s going to hate it, I know he’s going to hate it!”

She checked herself in the mirror. Dissatisfied, she threw that onto the bed too. She unclipped her hair, starting again, brushing it forward, back, brushing the sides. With a fringe, without a fringe. With clips, without clips. Eventually, brushing it straight back, she clipped it at the sides and patted her thick red waves forward. She sighed and sat on the green eiderdown, exhausted.

She dabbed Californian Poppy on her wrist. “He won’t like that!” She ran into the bathroom and washed it off. “I’m going to look awful. I’m going to smell awful!” She sat on the side of the bath, her head in her hands, imagining his slim, taut body turning around and around, her fingers running through his hair. She was his partner under that sparkling globe. His arms were holding her, her breast pressed into his chest, their lips inches apart. She stood up, swilled her face with cold water. Taking a deep breath she walked back into the bedroom.

Kate confronted the borrowed clothes hanging neatly over the back of her chair.

“ Please, God, let him like me.” Carefully she began to move them from chair to bed, holding her breath; she smoothed out creases as she lay the suit on the bed. Checking the time, “An hour! I’m never going to be ready.”

With half-an-hour to go, she pressed her little finger into the last of her deep red lipstick, smoothed it over her top lip, rolling her lips together. She checked herself, smiling. She match-sticked the last bit of lipstick out of the tube, to rouge her cheeks. She perfumed herself with ‘Evening In Paris,’ dabbing the light perfume on her wrist, neck and behind her knees.

She was breathless not so much with running but through the whole experience of going out courting. It was the excitement that was taking her breath away. It had been a dream she never thought would be realised. But it was, and it was happening now, today. Ok, she was ten minutes early. That was more to do with her father than anything else, that she should never be late for anything. It was something he had drummed in her since childhood.

If she had have planned it a bit better she would have waited around the clinic before walking down to the Finger-post were everyone would see her dressed to the nines. She never gave it a thought why should she? There were more important things on her mind than the men who hung around the Finger-post. The excitement of her date had pushed almost everything to the back of her mind. Including the Saturday men as they were known. They were men with flat lives who had nothing better to do that ridicule the women passer byes just for the fun of it. They were men in clogs or working boots, off-white collar-less shirts and grubby walking-out clothes. Some were kneeling, or squatting, waiting, just waiting, half-a-fag behind their ears. They were under-fed men of her own age, pale, from too many hours underground. They were men whom she had grown up with.

“Hello,” she said. She didn’t know why she blushed. But she felt as if she was on fire. She peeped sideways at the elderly rumour-mongers dressed in clogs and shawls, their whispers and prying eyes fuelling the flames in her neck and face. Kate felt every eye ball inch over every part of her, mostly from the women. Who had never seen her dressed like this before, she had never experienced anything like it. Just for a few minutes she wasn’t Kate Riley who hadn’t two pennies to rub together. This wasn’t Kate Riley who had never been kissed. Or kissed so passionately her legs buckled.

She gave a half-hearted wave to some people she knew waiting across the road at the Cenotaph. She wanted to be invisible except to Tomas. “ Where is he?” Her hand again would only lift shoulder high. She waved again. She had to. Everyone always waved.

“Why is everyone gawping?” she asked herself.

Old Mrs Thomson, from the new bungalows, a friend of her mother’s stopped and asked her, “Where did you get them clothes from?”

Kate just smiled. “ I’m going to a wedding.”

“I’ve not heard of a wedding. Who’s getting married?”

“Some one from the mill,” she replied. “She’s from Bolton”

The old woman trundled off, turned and shouted back, “Wait till I see your mam! Fancy not telling me about a wedding!”

She turned to more footsteps. More people she knew were walking down the steps behind her. Girls she had nursed as babies were running down with their friends.

“Hello Auntie Catherine!”

She forced a smile. Waved.

“Where is he?”

(Diary entry for the 27th March read: Everyone on the estate saw me waiting for Tomas. Old Mrs Jones will tell mum. What do I say? They won’t believe me. No point in telling them. They’ll spoil it anyway. )

She stepped back into the dank bus shelter away from the prying eyes and wagging tongues. In the dark of the shelter she became a little more at ease with herself. Even though the floor was covered in fag ends and there was a strong smell of urine and vomit. She stood as far back as the concrete walls and her clothes would allow. She changed her mind. “He won’t see me! Besides why should I hide from them, I’ve done nothing wrong”

There were moments of shear delight. At everyone talking about her, seeing her dressed-up for the first time. She felt so proud of herself. An exhilaration she had never felt before surged through her body. She wanted to strut but didn’t dare.

It wasn’t her. She wished it to be. But she had never rubbed anyone’s faces in anything. Least of all those who were waiting at the Finger-post. But what if he doesn’t turn up? I’ll be a laughing stock. Kate paced to and fro, willing the bus to arrive. She willed the bus to arrive before him. She walked to the edge of the pavement looking down the road, past the hawthorn hedge, and the rugby pitch on the left. In the corner of her eye she caught people watching her. She looked up Haigh Lane. More faces she knew. She walked back to the front of the shelter.

A black car, like the one the mill manager drives, pulled up Her heart felt as if it was bumping out of her chest. Her mouth became dry, she wet her lips. Butterflies were bombarding her stomach. She wanted to run over to him, kiss him, feel every part of his body. But she daren’t. She wanted to strut out like some model on a cat walk and give them all something to talk about. It wasn’t her. But if there was ever going to be a red carpet moment in her life, this would be it.

His shoes were black soft-shoes, so shiny they glinted. His wore black trousers with a razor-sharp crease . His hair was brylcreemed down; his parting had been axed on the right hand side. In the daylight, he looked more handsome than ever.

( Diary entry for 27th: Everyone made fun of me, but it was worth it. He looked just like Tyrone Power. He is Tyrone Power)

“Catherine!” he shouted.

Men started chanting: “ Catherine’s got a swank! Catherine’s got a swank, ee- aye-addy- o, Catherine’s got a swank!”

She had never dressed to the nines before but she felt so confident when she saw Tomas beckon her to his car. Head high Kate took a deep breath, and stepped out into the sunshine. This was her moment. OK, it was a slight exaggerated walk, a movie star walk, but only slightly, she didn’t, would never want to rub their noses in it. She savoured every foot-step. She had never felt like this before, confused, elated, out of this world. Everyone at the Cenotaph glued their eyes to both of them, and the gossip-mongering began. She didn’t care. This was her moment. It was right. She knew it was. They were just jealous old men with nothing else to do except

“Que mujer mas bonita!” he said as she walked to his black Humber Hawk, Mk 11, glinting, new. She hadn’t a clue what it meant, but it sounded nice.

“Thank you,” she said as he opened the front door. The sweet musky smell of car leather was strong. Sliding her bottom in first, knees together, she swung her legs in. The black leather seats were soft, but not too soft. The back of her bare legs experienced the cold leather. As he pulled away, driving down Bolton Road, those waiting around the Finger post gawked and punctured the air with their fingers, pointing and giving V signs. Kate, waved and smiled a cheeky smile. She sat erect, frozen, peeking sideways at him, wondering what to say. She pressed her hands and knees together. She held in the scream of delight she wanted to belt out.

This was her time. God knows she had waited long enough. For the first time in her thirty-two years she felt alive, normal, a woman. She glanced sideways, just to make sure it was real. She pinched herself. Took in again the smell of leather, how posh it was and Tomas the gentleman.

In stroking movements he gently moved his leather kid gloves backwards and forwards over the thin gear stick on the steering column. Then round and round the steering wheel. There was silence, except for the drone of the engine. He searched his inside pocket, taking out a silver cigarette case. He clicked it open. Senior Service were strapped in, packed tight, behind two sets of gold-coloured elastic bands. He held it open, V shape, between his fingers and offered it to her.

“I don’t smoke,”

“I do not smoke either.” She looked puzzled.

“Why do you carry them about, then?”

He laughed, “In case anyone wants one.”

Kate shifted in her seat. “That’s daft.”

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly.

He took a yellow rag from the side of his seat and wiped his side window. He turned to her and smiled a perfect white-teeth smile. His eyes were black, sparkling, against an olive-coloured skin. She rested her hot face against the cool window, watching the farmers’ fields and the red brick building of St. Elizabeth’s Junior School whizz by.

(Diary entry for 28th of March: I made a mess of it before we started. Fancy calling him daft. Nobody with a silver cig case could be daft. He’s very posh. His voice just melted me.)

She wanted to say something, anything. She stared at the afternoon sun sliding over the tops of the brown cobbles in the road. She laughed. “Don’t they look like loaves of Hovis.” He looked puzzled.

“I do not know Hovis?”

“Do you not have Hovis in Spain?”

He laughed. “ What is Hovis?”

“It’s brown bread! It’s best with blackcurrant jam. I have it every day”

“Ah, bread, si, si we have bread in Spain, but no Hovis.”

They both laughed at the silly conversation.

Watching the sun bouncing along the rooftops of the terraced house along Bolton road, she began to feel at ease. She half turned and saw on the back seat a large picnic basket and a tweed car-rug. She clapped her hands in delight.

“Are we going for a picnic?”

“Si, somewhere quiet I think, do you know anywhere quiet?”

“I like the quiet.” she said. “Those machines in the mill drive me batty.”

“What machines? Where you work?”

“I work at Langdales. It’s a cotton mill. It’s so loud in the card-room you have to mime everything. It’s where I learned how to lip-read,” she said

His gentle smile eased her more.

“Rivington Pike,” she suggested. “Let’s go to Rivington Pike.”

“It is quiet, yes?”

“Yes, it’s very quiet. We could lay everything out on the car-rug. Next to all the other picnickers. I’ve never been on a proper picnic.”

“No, Catherine, I mean somewhere where there is no-one.”

“What for? We could have a chin-wag with people, while we eat our butties. Then we can all go down to the Chinese Gardens”

He shifted in his seat. His hands slid around the steering wheel.

“What church do you go to?” she asked.

“St. Luke’s in, er, Doncaster…Do you know it?”

“I’ve never been out of Wigan.”

“It is a beautiful church like the one my mother took me to as a child in Seville. I take you someday. But you won’t know St. Luke’s. It is in Doncaster, yes?”

A motorbike and side-car growled past. Kate let the splutter of the bike melt into the distance before she announced: “ I’ve been to all the churches around here…It’s Father Barr at St. Mary’s. It’s Father John at the Holy Family. That’s where I go, every morning before work. Some times on Sundays I go to St. Mary’s. Father John’s the nicest. Not like Father Barr…he’s a right old so-and-so. For the very littlest sin he gives you five Hail Mary’s and four Our Father’s.”

He smiled, nodded. “That is very good. Do you sometimes get fed up with Confession? I do,”

“We shall go to Belmont. It is beautiful there.”

“I’m sure Father Barr was drunk last Saturday. He fell out of the Confessional. God knows what he was doing there in the first place like that.” She laughed. “When I saw him I wanted to say your penance Father is ten Hail Mary’s and twenty Our Father’s. But I just ran out of the church laughing. No-one would believe me.”

He forced a laugh. Kate checked her hair. She tugged the tight skirt further over her knees. Resting her hands on her lap, looking straight ahead, she imagined that woman, his partner, dancing with him, and the way she lifted her leg up onto his thigh. “Who was the woman you were dancing with?”

She started squeezing her fingers. Before he could answer, she butted in, “Was it your girlfriend?”

“Ah, you mean Consuela? She is my sister.”

Kate sighed, laughed.

She turned and looked through the side window, watching the sun racing them over the roof tops up Dickenson Lane and on towards the A6 towards Belmont Moors.

“Are you doing a turn in all the Dance Halls?”

“Only around the North West. The travelling is too much.”

She interrupted him. “You’re brilliant.” She wanted to tell him how sexy he looked, but that would be at least five Hail Mary’s! Just thinking of it would be three Our Father’s! Instead, she snuggled her feet into the grey car mat that was plusher than the threadbare one stretched across her own front room. The one she has to wrestle with and thrutch over the washing line every Saturday morning to beat the week’s dust out. ( Diary entry for 27th of March: What you do for love! Got up for six. Lizzy shouted at me for switching on the alarm this morning. Beat out the carpet and mopped the floor before making the breakfast. They could have helped me out for once. Probably jealous. Missed Mass. Missed Mass. Said four Our Fathers and two Hail Mary’s.)

“The Flamenco is in my blood, my father taught me and Consuela. I think she is the better of us, yes?”

“Oh no, I think you could knock spots off anyone when it comes to dancing. Do you think you could teach me to Flamenco?”

“Of course I teach you the Flamenco. I can tell you are a natural, your red hair tells me you are a passionate woman.”

She laughed, a schoolgirl laugh. “It’s red for anger! So everyone in our house says”.

“Does everyone do the Flamenco in Spain? What’s Spain like? What’s your mother like? Where about in Spain do you come from?”

She closed her eyes as he told her about Spain, his home in Seville.

“It is beautiful and fiery like you my little princess. The food, the heat and the colours it is all of Spain, Magnifico!

Anger. Not really, she thought. It’s them. My sister makes me angry when she comes in with her boyfriends and they kiss and cuddle after mum’s gone to bed. Squeezing their ears into the radio, my radio, my 2/6p Radio Rentals radio. There’s never room for me. Then she wonders why I play holy-hell with them. She gave a wry smile. I will never have to run out crying again when they say the only man I’ve ever found is Jesus! Well now I’ve got myself a man. A better man than they could ever find, and he’s got a car. They’ll be dribbling.

They turned onto the A6. On her distant left a series of hills humped up and down the horizon with a tiny cone-shaped building on the top of one of them. She pointed, then shouted. “I’ve seen Rivington Pike first!”

He laughed. “Rivington Pike. What is Rivington Pike?”

In front of them were droves of people, four women in their grey or black Sunday clothes- black or grey, pushing their babies in second hand Silver Cross prams. Husbands walking behind in their best suits. Kate remembered the Monday evenings after work, when it was her job to take her father’s suit to the Pawnbroker who gave her 1/6d for it until Friday. The night after, she would take his collar to be starched for his Friday night drinking session.

A hundred yards in front of them a group of cyclists riding in two’s passed a rag-and-bone man, resting his horse and cart on the side of the road.

“Pip your horn,” said Kate. The loud honking made everyone turn. She waved to them all as they passed. “ I bet they’re all going to Rivington Pike.” She settled back into her plush leather seat.

“I’ve never heard of Belmont,” she said.

There was a strained silence. He smiled. “ Outside of Spain, Belmont is the best picnicking place I have been to!”

“What’s it like?” Before he could answer, she said, “No, don’t tell me, I love surprises.”

“I must, I cannot hold in the beauty. It is like being on top of the world. You can see for miles right over the tops of Bolton.”

“Will I be able to see Langdales?”

“On a clear day you even see as far as Manchester.”

“Manchester. God I’d love to go to Manchester. Is it right they have trams in Manchester?”

“I have danced many nights in Manchester. Even when it is dark it is bright from all the overhead electric cables flickering.” As he described Manchester, she closed her eyes imagining a fairy-tale land of posh houses and fancy cars.

__________________

They had arrived. She stared through the window at the bleak but beautiful landscape of Belmont, its mass of fields packed tight inside blocks of dry stonewalling. She soon became aware that there was no-one about.

“Where are you taking me?”

He touched her knee. It was the first time he had touched her. She moved her leg away and said, “Can we go to Rivington? Everyone will be at Rivington.” She pressed her hands into the seat, holding on tight to its edges.

“Scout Road, my pretty one, is just up here.” He slowed the car down, turning left. It was a steep climb. He manoeuvred the tight bends slowly in second gear. Up past the nothingness of a place she had never been to. On one side there were huge blocks of sand-stone, which had fallen, or had been rolled from wagons too weak for the arduous climb. She dug her nails into the leather seat as she watched the road below them falling, further and further away. The car bonnet seemed to lift up and point to the blue sky. Her nails dug deeper. “Where are you taking me?” she shouted.

“Venga con migo al paraiso.”

“What?” she asked nervously.

“Do not be worried, my Princess, I will take you!”

As they levelled out on Scout Road, her panic subsided. She looked to her left, down onto the tall chimneys and factories of Bolton and the hundreds of heavy grey chains of smoke linking sky and earth. She pin-pointed the mill where she had spent most of her working life, “Langdales!” she shouted. “I can see Langdales!”

He stopped the car on the side of the road. There was a long drop on Kate’s side. “I tell you we would be on top of the world.”

She shielded her eyes. She could see a horse and cart moving further and further away from them in the distance. She turned to her left.

“I can’t get out this side. It must be a ten foot drop!”

She moved her head looking for people, but they were alone. The only movement was from a clump of ferns, green skeletons bobbing from side to side, bumping into each other next to a dry stone wall on the other side of the road.

“Where is everyone?” she asked. “There’s no grass to lay out our picnic!”

“We shall begin our picnic, yes?” He opened the door. A gust of wind tried to lift up her tight skirt. She tugged it down back over her knees.

She tried shouting, “There’s no grass!” The wind grabbed her words before they could reach his ears and carried them over the heathered moors.

He opened the back door, lifting the picnic basket out.

“There’s nowhere to sit” she said.

He leaned over the back seat, whispering in her ear,

“We picnic in the car.”

He stepped out carrying the basket with him, and laid it next to the open front door, unclipping the leather straps. Flipping the lid open, he pulled out a bottle of wine.

Kate leaned over, looking into the basket, “Where’s all the butties?” she asked

“What’s butties? he asked.

“You don’t know anything do you? They are sandwiches. You know, food!”

“Who needs food? When we have love.”

He carefully lifted out two wine glasses, sliding back into the seat next to her, “You like wine, no?”

She took a moment to answer, then she said, “ We have an egg cup on birthdays and Christmas.”

She laughed nervously. “I think it would be better up Rivington, we could lay the rug out and have a chat with everyone . That’s what we do. It’s great. Come on let’s go over there. I don’t like it here.”

Kate tried opening the door, but she realised the drop on her side was…

The only sounds were the wind and the gurgling of wine splashing into the glasses. She hesitated as he handed her the glass, “I’ve never had a full glass of wine before!” She took it, sipped a tiny sip.

“No, no,!” he said. “ In Spain you take a gulp of the wine, like this, no.”

His eyes sparkled. His smile beamed. She gulped a large gulp.

“There,” he said. “that is not so bad.” He moved in close to her, his left arm moving higher up, until it was level with her shoulders. She edged away a little. It didn’t feel right. They should be talking and laughing. He tried to steel a kiss. She gently pushed him away.

He had another drink.

“I don’t think I should drink anymore,” she said apologetically, holding her hand over the top of her glass.

He drew away.

“You are right, I am sorry if I make you feel uncomfortable. We will have no more drink.”

Her hand moved away from her glass. She ran her fingers from thigh to knee tucking in her skirt. “How often do you do demonstrate your dancing?”

He was looking straight at the smoke rising from the chimneys of Bolton, “Friday, and Saturday. No Sundays?”

“Do you go back to Spain – sorry, Doncaster every Monday morning?”

“No, yes, sometimes.”

“What is your mother like?”

“Beautiful.”

“Your sister is a good dancer. Your father must have been a good teacher?”

“Yes.”

Kate looked across the fields and at the two reservoirs holding blocks of sky. She turned to him. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you not talking?”

He held up his bottle of wine, “I pay two pounds for this and you don’t want to drink it. It is a good wine.”

She looked again across the Bolton landscape. He was sulking, wearing a sad puppy look. “Alright,” she said. “But just one glass. I’ve had nothing to eat.”

He filled her glass.

She took a sip, “It’s lovely, honest, but I don’t usually drink, honest, cross my heart”

“You are so beautiful,” he said. She took another gulp, and caught with the corner of her eye the red flags flapping at the entrance of the Army Practice Range. She took another gulp and a warm comfortable feeling began to move through her chest and into her legs. She giggled and he laughed and poured again and then again. Her knees relaxed, parting a little, her shoulders fell, she rested one side of her face on her left shoulder The red flags were waving frantically.

The blustery wind on Scout Road gently rocked the car. His hand moved onto her knee. She went to knock it away but her floppity arm missed it altogether. She tried again but missed again. “Oh my Lord,” she said as his other hand moved onto her breast. She started reciting “Hail Mary Full of Grace….” He came back onto her… Kate tried holding her skirt down but her strength had left her. She lifted her arms in the air, but they somehow fell over his shoulders. As the pink home-made knickers came down she started saying her Confessional……..

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Geoff Stevens

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.