Paul Tristram- Two Poems & Sketch

Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published
in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging
empty graves for innocence at midnight; this too may pass, yet.
 
Buy his books ‘Scribblings Of A Madman’ (Lit Fest Press)  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1943170096
 
‘Poetry From The Nearest Barstool’ at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326241036
 
And a split poetry book ‘The Raven And The Vagabond Heart’ with Bethany W Pope
at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326415204
You can also read his poems and stories here! http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/

I Warn You Away

She is extra-terrestrial
on the inside,
a predatory changeling
with powers
forged in the dark side.


She is only capable
of selfish feelings
so her weaknesses
are strange and many,
they are indeed a sticky web.


I have felt the force,
tasted the flame,
survived the nightmare
and now a half-being
I warn you away.


© Paul Tristram 2006


Published in Handshake (The Newsletter Of The Eight Hand Gang) No 68, December 2006

Not My Type

Still she knocked at my door
tormenting the wood with her aggression,
squaring up like a boxer
to the wrong side of the spy hole,
flipping the letter box with her fingers
as if annoyed by it being there.
She usually sat out there for hours,
I telephoned for strippers,
flowers, balloons and food.
Placing my feet into starting blocks
I menaced the hallway, sucking on my gimp mask
and waiting for the door to come alive.


© Paul Tristram 2006


Published in Instant Pussy (USA) Numero Tres, 2008

                                                                 "Moonshine"

Jason Constantine Ford- Three Poems

Biography: Jason Constantine Ford is from Perth in W.A, Australia. He works at a book shop and has over a hundred publications of poetry and fiction in various literary magazine, ezines and journals from around the world. Bram Stroker, Phillip K. Dick, Edgar Alan Poe and William Blake are his main influences. 

Dream Woman

After having spent a day in desert heat

Harsh enough to erode an ordinary will

Inclining itself towards the dryness of defeat,

I look ahead with desires that cannot be still.

I walk to a sign among bushes with words obscure

And cannot grasp a word that is written down

Before noticing a woman with features demure

Adorned with an orange, red and yellow gown.

After friendly greetings are exchanged between

Her and I, I ask her a question as to where

I am among bushes previously unseen

And receive silence as a response unfair.

Without a warning, her body splinters apart

Into fragments the desert air consumes.

Her non-existence is hitting me like a dart

As my search for reality resumes.

Morning Hangover

Images are flashing back as sparks ignite

Delusions I suffered from the other night.

The girls I encountered at a party appear

To be here as they speak with words I endear.

They are talking about values I evoked

Within the span of sharing weed we smoked.

I leave my bed desiring to embrace

A girl until she is gone without a trace.

In that moment, all the others have left

As I devolve with emotions bereft.

The boundary separating fiction from fact

Appears obscured in a manner most exact.

I cannot even tell the difference between

Reals girls and those who have never been.

Flashback of Pain

Images of her return within my sleep

As a set of brittle memories entering deep

Into both conscious and unconscious thought

Until images are gone away to status nought.

One image returns with bitterness immense

From the day she cruelly chose to withdraw

Her love resulting in affliction of each sense

Of mine unto a state of me being sore.

Memory of how she pulled her hand away

Is a form of bitterness that decides to stay.

Although I attempt to remove this image,

Chambers of thought suffer from the damage

This image brings into my state of mind

As effects of bitter years which always grind.

Each year which is dissolved into the dust

Of sadness is sprinkled with the pain of knowing

How I am simply left with less than the crust

Of years of bitterness that are still blowing.

In my sleep, the wind blows against my back

With the full force of an emotional attack.

Ford, Jason Constantine, Dream Woman, Morning Hangover, Flashback of Pain, The Tower of Illusion and Entrance into the Tower of Illusion, posted on October 19, 2014 at Mel BrakE Press website, http://melbrakepress.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/jason-constantine-ford-poetry.html , October 2014.

Ayaz Daryl Nielsen- Two Poems

VERDICT

You come to us through word and deed,

those without a trace of redemption.  

Your incontinence, weeping, sobbing, 

a mental coupling to an endless embrace 

within the knowledge of your true name.

south-bound wind

shamans of earthen folklore 

geese overhead

ayaz daryl nielsen, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (26+ years/130+ issues), homes for his poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, Dead Snakes, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane, and!   online at:  bear creek haiku  poetry, poems and info

Alan Catlin- Three Poems

 A New Life, Maybe

 He was the kid who used to live

 across the street none of us live on

 anymore.  What I read in The Gazette

 told me he was up for a Felony DWI‑

 what he told me was it was the third one

 in a year and he was facing serious time

 and it wouldn't be in County Jail where

 his father the cop could stop by and look

 at him as if he were the most disgusting

 thing on earth with a junior after his name.

 I always felt he was a good kid going

 in the wrong direction on dope and alcohol,

 he said he was off for good at the halfway

 house he was staying at.  At least, when

 he blew the 2.6 they caught him for,

 he wasn't driving up an exit ramp of a major

 highway as one of my friends was from college

 who might have blown more if he could still

 breathe.  There wasn't enough of him left

 to stuff in a plastic garbage bag, at least,

 junior was flying low now, keeping the yellow

 double lines in place instead of watching

 them jumping from one hemisphere to the next,

 the oncoming headlights closing in, too close

 to avoid.

 An Evil Genius

 I looked around for the camera when

 they came in. Their being here could

 have been a documentary news thing

 and I would regret punching out the

 camera man, later, for filming it when

 law suits started being filed. 

 These guys had to be invented

 by an evil genius working the Welfare Rolls

 in lower Albany.  It's not often you

 get guys dressed in stolen clothes you

 would have had to mug a bum for,

 that smelled as if they had been sleeping

 in the Albany Landfill for seven years

 with one eye open for the rats.

 I wondered what the cabbie thought

 when they told him:"Just take us

 to Rapp Road, we live by the Landfill."

 I saw the guy from Duffy's rolling down

 windows as he pulled out from the curb,

 cursing me every inch of the way.

 I didn't ask those guys into the bar,

 hell, it was the first of the month;

 all the thawed out crazies were on the streets

 with hundreds of dollars they would blow

 by Thursday.  If the cabbie  thought

 the Stenchmen were bad, they should have

 been prepped for the guy I would give

 them after last call, the schizoid, alien

 hunchback of Western Avenue.

 A Song Without Words for a Soprano Who Has Forsaken Sleep

          

 She was singing an aria from

 an opera in a language she

 didn't have.  The initial signatures

 were transcribed by a madman

 and had a logic that didn't

 translate into Russian .

 She was changing languages from

 month to month that year, the next

 one would be Serbo-Croatian,

 an idea no one would recognize

 in Cyrillic although she attempted

 to augment her voice with Vodka

 and caviar. What emerged was a

 vision of a dust devil bursting out

 of a fault line saying unknowable

 words that break the skin, forming

 caverns the bats of her mind would

 fill and breed in, spreading an

 otherworldly sound, once heard,

 no one would ever forget.

John Pursch- A Poem

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, his work has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. Check out his experimental lit-rap video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.

Into Speeding Dawn

The watershed has lifted, its stellar sigh imbued with teetering companionship, championed by wrought-iron gusts of yesterday’s stormy passion. Today’s already breeding immutable intent, flowing from dimpled cheeks of newborn babes to qualities unrecognized in everyday routine.

Creatures settle into voice of natural habitats, blend silently in deep-sea yearnings, perfectly suited to surround. A frozen hand emerges, deep in thought, to scratch an ear of corn from fertile soil, feeding untold stories back to surging power’s eminently grateful maw. Distant sheen of working man rescinds elusive slumber’s quiet bliss.

Storage vacates elemental ways for municipal tides, sweating into swarming quotidian gel. A balled pellucid coil, immersed in wisdom, turns thematic motives into play, tapping on replicated footfalls, pumping with controlled ferocity.

Urban eyes and ears, excited in tandem, respond in kindred respiration’s ambitious haze, stumble into shower cocoon of warm impending ambience, erotica erased for now. Byways already filled, coursing night continues into speeding dawn.

Linda M. Crate- Two Poems

burning hell

sitting in the pouring rain
doesn't seem so bad
all the sadness
seems to vanish when i let it
wash away,
and all your condescending voices
of judgment and scorn
are silenced by the
roar of
thunder;
all your demons come out in the open
so i know which hearts to slay
on the jagged edge of
my angry tongue—
you think you've seen my
temper?
you've yet to see me truly unkind,
but when you see the fire
in my eyes it's too late
to stop heaven
from burning away every piece of your hell.



monsters, beware, should you not be good

i love it when it rains
and thunders and lightnings
hard in my soul
because i see all the masks fall off
all the villains come out
running, trying to hide their faces
but i always knew;
i'm good at seeing through people
and all their guises
it is the honest people you have to fear
for we house all your secrets in our
bones
we know your true nature,
and will slay you
if you become the vile monster—
evil monsters have no place living among the
innocent,
and so when the rain falls
i dance
because my light will forever even shine
even on the darkest days because my
joy and hope isn't in the sunshine but in life and love
and laughter and all the things that make my
heart and soul smile—
flowers can't grow without rain
so i'll embrace it all
good and bad,
but all the evil monsters will be stricken down.

Jennifer Lagier- A Poem & Photo

                                                         "Valley Oak at Sunset"

Sentinel

 

A scrap of Artemis floats

above filigree limbs,

hangs in icy sky,

glimpsed between

witchy branches.

Anorexic moon dwindles

to white, glowing rib.

 

In the house beneath ancient oak,

human deconstruction persists –

relentless slide into dementia.

Names of objects,

familiar recipes,

sense of time vanish,

family history erased.

 

Night is chill,

growing darker.

Sinister storm clouds

coagulate overhead.

David J. Thompson- A Photo

                                                             "Mystic Skates"

Denny E. Marshall- Two Poems & Art

                                                                  "The Birth"


Bang, Bang

Universe the great time machine
The pyrotechnics of the big bang
Celestial eruptions of the stars
Shoot lava-like across the voids
Echoing the eternal flame
Some explosions remain divine




Sailing

The big bang of the immense universe
Travels onward like a ship of dreams
Forever on the expanding ocean
Full sails navigate the cosmic winds
Distant calls of newborn passengers
Hoping to catch a ride

Adam Swift- A Poem

Adam Swift lives in Massachusetts, where he has been a reporter for a number of local newspapers. He has previously been published in Lollipop and Rattle. He first read about UFOs when he swiped a copy of his uncle's Flying Saucers, Serious Business. Every time Adam tries to listen to Art Bell, Art Bell retires again.

Cryptozoopoetry

Flying Saucers are real.

The Loch Ness Monster is in

my bathtub.

Bigfoot wants to know if this record store

carries any Townes Van Zant.

Chupacabra needs his flu shot again.

Really, has it been a year already?

There's a special deal on memory foam mattresses

in the Bermuda Triangle. One hundred percent

American made.

Champy for president,

2016.

The Jersey Devil, still mad Martin Brodeur

retired before bringing home one more

Cup.

Frankenstein's Monster

was never real.

David J. Thompson- A Photo

                                                                  "Babylon"

Tamara Turner- A Poem

A Chocolate Tale

In days of old

A princess fair

Could never get enough

Chocolate

T’was her greatest craving

Nothing would satisfy

Her chocolate desire

Demon of the woods

Helped her well

To create a spell  

For more more more 

First it was milk and peas

Then the dinner spoon

Roses in the courtyard

Family parrot next

Soon her chocolate touch

Nothing it wouldn’t effect

The more she touched

More she ate

No cure for chocolate lust

Agony was it to be without

To that demon she did shout

Unable to control

Chocolate magic

Demon laughed and watched

As she found herself

Chocolatized

Yummy treat for a troll

Gnawing into her belly

Chocolate blood spewed

Running down his chin

As he bit again

Her chocolate guts were soft

Spilling and getting caught

Within black jagged teeth

He lapped it all up

Crunching her chocolate bones

And as he licked a chocolate tear

From her chocolate face

He took his last bite

Savoring her chocolatey taste

Denny E. Marshall- Three Poems

Three Haiku

Eyes flowed, like her hair
Felt her electricity
Wonderful aching

Feel her beating heart
Pumps the mind with images
Veins flow with her pulse

Radiation of her
Radiation of stars, like glass
Mirrored images

Lana Grey- A Poem

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Metal heart thrumming beneath synthetic skin,

crisscrossing wires winding a web of veins,

arteries, capillaries.

I am alive.

Whispered words from creators’ tongues—

“Can she feel?” “Can she fear?”

“Artificial Intelligence,” they call it.

To her, it is simply “thought.”

I am alive.

The notion is inexplicable, stranger than the nanites

igniting like finite suns to endow her with strength

enough to snap these fleshy gods.

Lana Grey was born and raised in Illinois, and she currently studies English/Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She intends to pursue an MFA and teach writing at the university level while continuing to write and publish her own poetry and prose.

Tricia Marcella Cimera- A Poem

Galaxy

 

My father is in his bed.

He has died and the Hospice

Nurse is washing him.

I stay close.

She tells me my father

was very sweet. I agree.

He was, but not always.

He was many, many things.

She doesn’t know.

She didn’t know him.

What he meant to me.

I help her move him so

she can bathe his back.

Then she washes

his hands, slowly.  Later

the funeral home people come

in a hearse, with a stretcher.

My mother, my sister, we say

goodbye to my father.

I follow the stretcher out the door,

down the walkway,

watch him slide into the hearse.

You see,

I was always the little planet

that circled him. He was the sun

of my world. I want to stay

near him. But he moves away,

headed towards a clean, new

galaxy.

Tricia Marcella Cimera is an obsessed reader and lover of words. Her work is, or will be, in these diverse places: the Buddhist Poetry Review, Foliate Oak, Hedgerow, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Mad Swirl, Prairie Light Review, Reverie Fair, Silver Birch Press, Stepping Stones and Yellow Chair Review.  Tricia volunteers locally, believes there's no place like her own backyard, and has traveled the world.  She lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois/in a town called St. Charles/by a river named Fox.

 

 

Stefanie Bennett- A Poem

Stefanie Bennett has published several poetry books, a libretto & a novel & has poems appearing in The Fib Journal, The Kalyna Review, Illya’s Honey Journal, Message in a Bottle, Shot Glass Journal, The Provo Canyon Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mad Swirl, Galway Review, The Camel Saloon & others. Of mixed ancestry [Irish/Italian/Paugussett-Shawnee] she was born in Qld., Australia – & her latest poetry title “The Vanishing” [2015] was published by Walleah Press ... available at Walleah, Amazon & Fishpond Books.

 

 

 

LIFE STILLS       

 

Mistaking this love

Would mean

That the air has

No rhythm

 

To beat its wings

Upon...

Jennifer Juneau- A Photo

                                                         "Creatures in the Mist"

Sudeep Adhikari- Three Poems

Sudeep Adhikari, from Kathmandu Nepal, considers poetry to be an impersonal act, largely deriving its content from unconscious psychic undergrounds. His works have recently been featured in Verse-Virtual, Arlington Literary Journal and Zombie Logic Review. 

A Mountain is Never Quiet

The mountain is never quiet

it celebrates the solitude of noise

the ancient murmurs of life, death

and all the in-betweens

alternately overlapping

in the colors of quartz and sandstones

a mountain breathes the carbons of long bygones

and we breath her oxygen in return.

I remember that parable by D.T. Suzuki

"when I began to study zen, mountains are mountains;

when I thought I understand zen, mountains were not mountains;

but when I understand zen, mountains were again mountains"

But in my case, "mountains were me"

a noise mistaken

by society for silence.

I know you don't believe me

if I say mountains do speak

but if you can feel wearing

her canopy of junipers and pines;

a moment before, a piece of rock on her peak

touching the sky, the next moment

gravitates with all its might to the abyss

that "Plong !", if you can hear

and on a fine day, when she loses herself

to thousands of roaring landslides

you will know.

 watching the mountain,

all I can be is
a naked impossibility of death and silence.

Nothingness is Fractal

The garden of lovelorn mist

flowers the airy spaceships

made of stainless steel

and a pocketful of silver, 

mixed with few multiverses

of cobalt blue.

I saw UFOs

of weird shapes

hanging on the ether

like the wild wet berries

with the dimension

somewhere between 2 and 3,

fractal.

Elysium waitress
will you serve me today

the zen of gravity,

a diet coke

and a river for a serpent ?

when my head

is 1,000 non-thoughts

above the me-level.

Silence, sky, white-noise

the pregnant space

of formless many,

and their million shades

of dynamics and dance;

So is my soul

always tripping and pimping

on organized chaos,

strange attractors 

and few Jupitars

of butterfly-effect.

Cloud Nothingness

Solitary, stoic
silent and stoned
a god stands tall
with his fractal emptiness;
green, saffron and vermillion red
melting on his mighty chest
while the sleep-walking witch
sways in aqueous ecstasy
her silty mist of lust and love
pervades the effulgent infinity 
of absence
supreme and shy.

And I watch those flying saucers
of luminescent gold-fire
quietly babysitting the sons of silver silence;
I am the Schrödinger's cat
dead and alive
aware and amored
countless, yet one
I AM
virtuous-vicious.

I am the Godhead reinvented within 
a punk Buddha 
shitfaced in your cosmic disco;
A spectral shape of decay and dust
a psycho-sonic ripple
crafted out of your ocean noise.

Stefanie Bennett- A Poem

Stefanie Bennett’s poems appear in Dead Snakes, Haggard & Halloo, Agent Orange ‘poems

to empower all Agent Orange victims’, Communion, Snorkel, The Fib Review & others. Of

mixed ancestry [Irish/Italian/Paugussett-Shawnee] she was born in Qld., Australia in 1945.

Stefanie’s latest poetry title ‘The Vanishing’ [2015] is published by Walleah Press & available

from Walleah Press, Amazon & Fishpond Books.

 

 

 

THE SOFT DOMESTIC ECONOMY    

 

Via the vending maelstrom

Machine

I get a blighted

Portfolio poultice –,

An art-deco

Electric toothbrush –,

Three cut-out

Culinary

Square meals –,

A jump-to-it

           ‘Confederacy

Of confidence’

           Madrigal

Where nothing

Is as it

           Seems –, and

The usual

Acidic glare

From

My bed-sit

Night nurse

Who has

 

Madam Blavatsky’s

... Eyes.

 

 

[First published in Boston

Poetry Magazine]

 

 

Michael Keshigian- Three Poems

FIRESTARTER

 

Carrying small flames

in asbestos pockets

of an insulated overcoat,

he clandestinely traverses

city streets,

tossing a spark here,

a smoldering cinder there

that temporarily ignites

then extinguishes

but serves as an admonition

to all to take heed

within their present comforts

and disingenuous deeds,

this phantom in his dark cloak,

hoping to go unnoticed

on his way toward the cemetery

to abscond the souls

of those that think

they may rest in peace.

SNEAK ATTACK

 

It might happen anywhere,

anytime, day or night,

in your bedroom, at work

or in the field where you casually stroll

to view the beauty of sunsets

against the tree-lined sky.

There will be no yearning,

no nostalgic provocation,

the sun, the moon, and the stars

will not tip their hands,

but suddenly, without warning,

she will materialize in your mind

and breathlessly you will stagger

at the impossible tangibility

of her appearance,

the meteoric rise of your pulse

as her phantom touch

sends your thoughts asunder,

your dizzying need,

reflecting, and magnifying

that unquenchable desire

the years long ago absconded.

SECRETS IN MOONLIGHT

 

He sat upon the boulder

not quite centered

in the middle of the field

and flipped the pages

of nighttime‘s novel

to the chapter where the moon

ascended above the white pines,

fir tips giving the massive face

shaded stubble

as clouds on either side

shaved the surface closely

then departed slowly enough

for the stars

to begin the following chapter,

enhancing glows that extended

the moonbeam’s pale path

which he followed

off this rock of familiarity

to the page where dreams

dared to be considered

amid the sandy mesh of light,

descriptive details in separate paragraphs

which he read

upon these ashen pages,

eventually lifting his eyes from the glow

to absorb the mystical message

he received from the luminosity

as he closed the book,

shifted homeward,

bolstered by an aura of reverie

the translucent light imparted.