Richard Schnap- A Poem

CONTROL

He wondered just when the world became
A realm of machines with cold-blooded voices

That guided him through the self-service lines
Scolding him if he dared to make a mistake

They seemed to have risen in the dead of night
To greet him as he boarded the morning bus

To announce each stop so he wouldn’t forget
Where he was going if his mind wandered

It was as if he was still but a child
Needing the guidance of a strict teacher

Telling him when he pushed the wrong button
When he tried to ask for the person in charge

But over time he seemed to stop caring
And blindly obeyed his invisible masters

As he learned how to program his every move
So that even his dreams were to do what was told


Bio: Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

Michael Atreides Lair- A Poem

"Infinite Drive"

We watched the distant stars
becoming more distant.
What we saw was years apart
from this moment.

And I wondered aloud about
death and all her shattered hour glasses.
A man spoke
of an infinite drive,
of traveling, light with light,
for some unknown amount of time,
still alive
and yet still: dead.
Somewhere our illuminating past
could meet another's bright future.
Reflections of moments lost
had never seemed much darker.
I watched and wondered to myself,
"Who else has lived and seen us then?"
And I watched and wondered,
"When will it end?"


(Previously published in "Quantum Poetry Magazine")

Michael Atreides Lair lives and writes in Springfield, Missouri.

John Pursch- Two Poems

Moonscape Pleas

Who taught the soldered girlfriend to perpetrate the wheedled gift hearse machination ploy, calumniating anhedonia’s herniated tryst? Cavernous calliope clover hovers justly, groping for shiny frogs in phonographic tremblings of beatific crud.

Fall reverts to slums, offending ungrateful skewers with sewer crates, slacking offal into jerky jalopy sod. None tree lesions of skinny hut contenders, cramming Dearth’s remaining cavemen into soggy situation remedies of high-rise instability and foreign nipple cats.

Flurried show time peacemakers bedevil sightless fugitives, punching tousled shed mechanics, reveling in sour dime store maple tears. Porous tofu fries behind serenely itching hearsay wasteland quintets, plugging ear glass holograms with xanthum comas, pinned to sundry coveralls by tissue flakes of missing charms.

Chameleons delve between testy gutter pails, sloshing milky cataclysms in stupor lactose serenades to roving Samuel’s indiscretion nest.

Hardly superlative, his moaning beachball travelogue, but shunned bylines flicker flamed marquee exuberance from pawn shop reconciliation togs to low-slung hypnogogic moonscape pleas, bountiful and softly pureed in public tour plight.

Soiled fistulae glisten, loving swoops of spatula cremains on drowsy curtains, steering cleanly into lettuce undies. The cot seeks shoddy relief mops, edifying tyrannical jotters with shuffled axes of crushed sound.

Pump House Derrieres

  

Smoky frills unwrap misty crosstown passages for toxic saxophonists, treading politely on agriculture’s sated oomph, frosting swooning cardigans in boomtown promises of bilious folly and christened low stucco delivery nets, meshed in tweed underlings.

Collectible yarn attendants mire the whirled in platypus resection poofs, validating strewn ideograms within a subterranean caboose, engraving ingenuity’s engendered entendres in erstwhile conundrums of servile remuneration.

Smatterings of armed leggings flub the satisfactory seedling lobs, from enervated hexagons to bildungsroman curvature of assiduous wealth’s harbinger, texting consensual metaphors to wizened humps.

Slurping multitudinous heirlooms into drowning sluice ejection pods, carload shuckers pummel fugitive generations with diving bell neuroses, ominously delving dryly into steer compartment cartilage for pleasant sartorial ingredients of lantern spume and brindled locomotive styrene.

Fearless shores ding bellhops for cataclysmic Prussian satyrs, crawling the sea bed in semiotic laundry fees, hiding bare vestibules from docents of invalid equation sneezes.

Simple ogles dish reflected shins to pie tomes of floor cushion callings, mussing chair slime into iliac acrostics of blunderbuss parameters, arching savory temptress cheese for palindromic stories of an epithet for empathic sighing cruisers.

Guard logs anticipate mealy transoms at boardroom pegboard chuckle points, angling whimsically for eponymous goonery, given shriveled pump house derrieres in comestible pillows.