Alan Catlin- Three Poems

Space Invaders

They cruised into the bar

as if they'd been tripping

the light fantastic on some

Trans Siberian Railway of

the mind so totally fried,

their frayed filthy clothes

and near shoulder length hair

was singed at the loose ends

giving off a scent like over-

wrought skunk and death.

They were so obviously unwell

and primed for inappropriate

social behavior, I asked them

for their Red Cards, a request

that briefly slowed them down

to a near halt, "Red Cards?"

"Yeah, they're like Green Cards

or Alien Resident ID's only

these are for Space Invaders

from potentially hostile planets."

"Space Invaders?"

"Yeah, like the video game.

You must have heard of it, they

were popular in the last century,

right around the time you guys

were last straight and sober."

The look they gave me suggested

they didn't think what I was saying

was funny.  The look I was giving

them suggested I wasn't trying to be.                                    

Space Junkies

If it were Halloween, these guys

would have fit right in or even

if it had been New Year’s Eve or

Mardi Gras and they had been on

the way to some end of the world

as we know it party, but it was none

of those, not the kind of place that

dressing like Gary Glitters, Ziggy

Stardust  clones on some kind of

Velvet Goldmine club quest,

ostentatiously pierced all about their

bodies, tacky make up and costume

clothes like stiff out of Harper’s Bizarre,

Warhol’s Pandora Box wardrobe, body

art by some demented freak on speed

with a butcher’s knife instead of a tattooist’s

tools, the only discernible images, death

cultist symbols and the leader of the pack’s

Gothic lettered phrase” PISS FACTORY,

forming a semi-circle around his navel,

all of them stoned to the gills and clearly

hostile, in need of sedatives to slow

the virtual China syndrome chemical mix

threatening to flatline their vital organs,

close their bodies down, the take-me-to-

your-leader gesturing at the barman,

pointing at the back bar high octane rocket fuel

bottles, waving fifty dollar bills as an attention

getting aid, trying to bridge a considerable

language gap with guttural noise making

and even more frantic waving, succeeding

only in creating an image of Euro trash on tour,

way lost on some highway to hell they were

building as they went, oblivious to their

surroundings and determined to stay that way.

 

You could say

he was a tad

eccentric, used

to go into

McDonald's,

order up a Big

Mac cut into

four pieces &

have them wrapped

individually, makes

you wonder doesn't

it? I'm still not sure    

what was odder,

the demand or

fulfilling his request

without so much

as an eyelid flutter

though you could see

the counter people

thinking and would

you like some double

thick shakes for the long

ride home in your

space ship

John Pursch- Three Poems

Crab Line Falsity

Tatters slip through foisted shingles,

scanned by never-pending cribbage panning expedition capsules,

stumping hourly automat attendants into stuttered parlor voices,

sycophantic to be spurned by manly hose machine geese.

How does sanitary soothing dial emotion quotient valuation

ever hope to glide from looping trainer lunges

all the swayback temperature to cold-cocked avian revival blurbs

in checkered publican reports of hemorrhoidal carpools?

Brownies motion for fumbled sundaes,

sprinkling boatswain shorts with touched nuts,

betel seclusion, and nurtured luminaries.

Counting drowning as a sedulous din,

giggling turtles pose for shellfish tease charades,

plotting the overture to any of an underhanded fault line’s searing mother,

drained to ripened pea pod shekels.

Aft and homespun knicker bloggers barricade the dressy plants

in pickled doomsday attributes of deities and known sardine calligraphy,

zooming through the teeming sands to antsy hip-lock chugger sinks,

spoiling baleful island locos.

Snorts defrock collation comrades,

flopping cramped insteps in doorway fractal gutter beer.

Tiny igneous carriers inflect each sentient pause

with chic designer insect highs, instantly seducing

tanned involuntary pseudo broth for life.

Only toes who covet closet incremental snores could possibly impute

to baffle fever dwellers of enthusiastic cerebellar jump rope maxima,

bent on scarcely postulated hex duel oblongata pith

or otherwise entrained by serial demurral.

He mumbles pagination treats at pausing stumpers,

cropping frost in verisimilitude’s longing for stolen Mata Hari cowlicks,

dousing the river with casting guile.

She’s locked in crab line falsity,

storming past a house fly on training wheels,

bent on pellucid tantrum government by the papal furor’s popular decree.

Gravel Intuition

Tea relapsed to salad coffers,

finned with textual recumbent seas

of public reprimand and retroactive percolation snubs,

snugly frittered from palmed publicans who trifle in forensic solstice.

Flyboys scorched an auteur’s

sampled outer townhome’s durable retirement stem,

punctuating heavenly waitress spins with soiled comma haddock theses,

purloined from beachfront solipsists on nude retrenchment Ferris surveys,

gone weighty subsequent to coral hermitage decrees

of pilaf souffle emery secretion gifts.

Schoolhouse stockyard flambeau electioneers

pontificate on effluence in jaundiced opposition,

highly brewed for sleeping bag premonition matrix seduction,

scrunched to fetal armpit hollows by cortical retracement fuzz.

Booing dirt espouses twinge resection’s fearsome dribble beat,

caving only at the slightest highball’s fulgent coverall contusion,

wafted steadily from portholes of an offshore canker.

Gophers lord a henchman’s penultimate surfeit

of bleached parameter sedation over cursive signatories,

bonking before hinterland effusion footfalls.

Bobbled babies pluralize,

habituate to halfway goofy anthill eaves,

and ship cartoon snatchers into lifelong sentience

with outer mullet airway holsters,

pinching guff in awful clubfoot probability nozzles.

Froth returns from annual hardship punk,

dotting viability’s sepulcher with tonsil news

of corn march vigil underwear, creases of a timed crusade,

and stipulated antiseptic teeth, rushing to be green.

Squad choirs snake off into college bumper crust

of loan dime succor tease, concubine munificence,

and dialed remorseless samovars of wrought saliva,

frozen chords, and looping gravel intuition.

Cosmic Egret News

Ewers lap the sloping lyre,

phoning home to titular umbrella munchkins,

soaked in cough trough acne credo kitsch

from Naugahyde assembly panters.

Pythons corroborate the rheostat’s tickling causation flue,

adoring adumbration’s petticoat membranes.

Lancers tried by the skein of explanatory cygnet cringers

abide in tidal immolation trysts,

squelching solid gawkers with crawling rice militia bolts

and leonine detergent heroes.

Some need musical undertows of cribbage fare

and bonded purity’s warm spatula,

frilled with foolish fog bank flatulence,

foppish watchman steam, and sybaritic merriment,

won by sharpened ball peen humpback noggin raps,

bumpy shed repeater copies of catwalk prison imposition,

and seashore crooning bellowed deep into the natal piety

of evening armchair kisses.

Others shamelessly peruse the scatological catalogs

of inline scorn and jubilation’s tawdry disembarkment skewer,

helping the condemned in dwarfed evisceration panoplies

of poplar pestilence gone sour in burly April cadences,

twisting savage shoals from bayside gruel

to scattered sunrise dumping fawns in bifurcating seasonal circuses.

Toying with mulish enmity,

anonymous brokers sigh and pelt the passing train

with braying eel skin clothiers, coughing up caboose contents,

smudging seditious cockpit loins with prized perpendicular stubble,

sworn to haberdashery by a gloomily emphatic nasal bumpkin’s filial commode.

Excursions from manhole covenants reveal plated sweep days

of cosmic egret news and teary flyboy circumstance,

pitting soaring pock mark joy against a stolen applecart’s hubristic demolition,

all for geegaws of monocle bemusement bricks,

fluttering to August in a syllable’s tawny moan.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and 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.

Ayaz Daryl Nielsen- Three Poems

new moon peeking

through gossamer clouds -

the convalescent 

space pilot waits

within his yearning

(above poem appeared in scifaikest's August 2012 issue)

a long day on

the assembly line -

my soaking tank

filled with hot lubricant

almost to the brim

(above poem appeared in scifaikuest's Feb 2012 issue)

Good Hunting

As I stride this busy cobblestone 

road on my way to a surprise bash deep

in Darkening Forest, ravens perched upon

lightning-decimated remnants of the old

hanging tree chortle “good evening, good

evening,” a huli jing in human form with

long red hair, a thick luscious tail and a

sensuous smile undulates across the road-

way in front of me licking her lips as our 

eyes meet and I would choose to follow her,

but, “good evening, good evening!” from

the dwarves sitting beside the roadway,

belongings in their broad backpacks and

fear across their faces, and a “you’re late,

you’re late, for a very important scrape!”

insists an upright marmot holding a time-

piece as he scurries by...finally!! - the 

thirteen foot (and some few inches) dire-

ogre, its four arms with taloned hands

swinging assorted deadly weapons snarls

“good eating, good eating” as it leaps toward me

from the shadows of a weeping willow’s drooping

branches - I block a descending spiked mace

with my titanium razor-sword by shearing through

the waist-thick forearm, dodge the venomous spear-

shaped tongue flashing past my face and counter

with a slash across the protruding lipless lower jaw

shearing off 3 of 8 two-foot incisors while spitting

chewing tobacco into the beast’s flat, fist-sized right

nostril (note: I am not fond of chewing tobacco, but

as we all know, tobacco spittle forced up dire-ogre

nasal passages - both nostrils is best, but one works

well enough - inevitably results in a berserk, unfocused

desire to maim, mutilate and dismember all nearby

flesh and bone plus a tree or two) engage the three

remaining arms, the lower right arm swinging a tree

limb, the upper left jabbing with splintered remains 

of a circus tent pole, tattered flags still attached (one

has to wonder where that came from) and continue to

evade the ever-flailing forked tongue as I yell to the

ravens circling low overhead and the lovely red fox

peeking from a wild forget-you-never bush, “now this,

my friends” - parry, slash, cut - “this, friends” - scrotum

kick, stab - “this” - whack, screeeech! - “is good hunting!”

ayaz daryl nielsen, husband, father, veteran, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/120+ issues), homes include Lilliput Review, Jellyfish Whispers, Writing the Whirlwind, Shamrock, and! bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com (translates as joie de vivre)

Denny E. Marshall- Art

                                                            Telescopic Look



Bio
Denny E. Marshall has had art and poetry published, some recently. He does have a website with previously published works. The web address is www.dennymarshall.com. He also has a “Guest Artist Page” on his dot net site if any artist would like to submit. (See Guidelines)

Alan Catlin- A Poem

Alien Resurrection

Three days gone and revived,

made up to look like Scarlett J.

as seen through a broken lens,

made-up like a Sex Pistol on a

bad hair day then slathered in tar,

give E and forced into a large, airless,

confining room, smoke thick and jungle

wet, Techno-Rave music at ear drum

bursting loud, searching for a note

beyond high C.  Surrounded by indoor

electric lady land laser lights,

disembodied hands and arms,

wave lengths in the air dangling

from nowhere like in a death match

of marionettes, closing in walls

pulsing, animal hot, amplified,

seem to suggest: Listen to My Heart

Beat on drugs.  Anything is possible

now, even the birth of a new life form,

an alien invasion.

John Pursch- Three Poems

Periscope Cakes

  

Catamarans and cigarettes

burn patiently at twilight,

facing blue oblivion’s qualia

with feathered neural undercoats

of sparse exclusion wafer trim,

splashed in extra vagaries

of pomp and circumnavigation.

Floral set piece reliquaries

reflect on harbor noumena

with crisply quantized stunt fanatics,

gazing out to cornerstone asperity

in purely histrionic maze relief,

touting horny dial benders,

bet to traced calligraphy

of nodal craft elusion nibs.

Soil secludes with overwhelming flavor

sighs emerging from savory tortoise poles,

wafting ashore to line-of-sight chronology’s

pineal waveform, relapsed to donkey onus shills

beneath a peculated pod of crumpets.

Shelter passes far below in rancid siren

beckonings of slave mechanic batteries,

sheepishly redacting oxen gamete flipper lore

from bayou’s brittle overwhelm in banded sag

flesh sundry pear appearance set of propwash

hagiography for dining crumb arrest essentials.

Booths touch rusty crippler berries,

leasing juicy seepage every time

a numbered stylish cone falls silently

in actual abscissa abscess overflow

to prayer nook puffer fish excretion quaff,

slimmed to unset periscope cakes.

Impasse City Flutter

Glossy hovercraft imply simple amplification,

waving pie charts at costly station ears,

foundering in open airlock dump truck stings.

Only sonic assonance applies for agricultural acquittal,

ameliorating ambitious actuarial edginess with timid squeals.

Nations pout, entrusting inlet depilation mice

to dapple ivory phyla into lusty chamomile predictors,

spattering an enzymatic sneeze with cabin application crushes.

Laughable carousers mitigate mitosis with wimpy wisps,

washing wallpaper moths in posing blotter candy crepes,

causing sobs in vacant shopping coilers.

Stacked effacement tests you fairly off and on for

cloudy hand-picked mortuary shell regurgitation gist,

flecked with salty scenic gradients of flimsy noontime

derrieres, told to burgeon elsewhere.

Deeply infected luge pennants

gradually defect to fourth-world pumping bars,

prosecuting ethyl geysers under blue striated statues

of arterial clay, barmy injection release, and

uncommonly aspirated spin cycle kinks.

Jealousy rarely airs its threadbare wedding tallow,

calling fallow turbulence by empty shuttlecock

remainder terms in fulminating angst,

but jellied close-ups glom onto requiems

for stooping littered parriers of pallet-bearing salad spiels,

improved upon in substring sequin showers of shouldered

impasse city flutter.

Dream Star Sundaes

Ransacked bumblebee hotels immerse an attic wail in sand, dyspeptic furriers deferred to queue-length bookstand marginalia retreat. Jagged accusations pickle pews in paper handiwork, limping past palimpsest skin canaries bound for mule team coal minorities of subterranean booths.

Beautifully sworn pestilence bemoans infernal highball terrace entry peas, fleeing for hired groins, kicked in quinine sisterhood by bandoliers of brothel coups. Disgraced inguinal statues funnel hissing power off deplaning convict carrion coats, lugging innuendos overhand to tipsy grief collection arias.

Tamed tigresses inter encumbered feudalism before middling sages con milled animals to exit stage cleft, cramping up in time for footholds to disintegrate in cauterized hysteria, billowing fine whines of plaintive aplomb.

A tap dance here, a fraudulent collie tarrying in loyal Quonset tundra lines, a sympathetic sampler fishing nervously off bluefin paraffin aisles, coping with shallow labrum tartuffery by entrance alley overhangs in severed blasting capstone armoires filled with bubbly; even the periodic emblem punctures our posing chillum with chili fog and Cornish ham genes, tasty to culled cetaceans aft of docile drainage tee-top maxima with senior hints of indigence and porous estate plundering, venting accrual semiannually per trepaned fin traction entrails nodding into standing water.

Dream star sundaes filter frowns to grimace gruel’s sedation piles of stillborn fugitives from jaundiced apple plies and viable surrender jets of solvent salutary knots. Choppers saddle manic cholera vacuums with calm tornado ocean liners, shopping for backspin.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and 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.

Alan Catlin- Two Poems

Fuelquest

"Just my luck." You're thinking,

"To run out of fuel in East Jesus.

Where the hell am I going to find

gas in a God foresaken place like

this?" You dig out your red and

yellow gas tank from amid the ruin

of the trunk and start walking down

the unlighted back road to nowhere,

pass the sign that says: WELCOME

TO EAST JESUS  NO PEDDLERS

ALLOWED  VIOLATORS WILL BE

SHOT ON SIGHT  NO EXCEPTIONS

Start thinking this running out of fuel

business could be worse than you thought

but you don't see how and then you are

in the 42nd Street subway station still

holding that gas can and now you're

sweating bullets thinking they are going

to assume you are a terrorist so naturally

you think, "It's time to hit some bricks."

But you can't.  All the access routes are

blocked by these Homeland Security dudes

like airport luggage inspectors waving

their wands at you like they're going to

attack, then you notice they aren't airport

security at all but the dead aliens from

Area 51 dressed in uniforms and holding

these laser weapon things like a Mars Attack!

movie and you're all set to freak when this

waitress at the Roswell Eat Here Diner is

handing you a menu and you're ordering

the House Special Burger that turns out to

be this green thing on a bun slathered in

lumpy cheese which isn't doing much for your

appetite but the waitress notices and says,

"Don't fret, Son, food coloring makes

that burger green and the lumps in the cheese

are real moon rocks." Which, somehow makes

it all okay and after a few bites and no apparent

seizures a thought occurs and you ask,

"Hey, Honey, do you guys sell gas?"

And the waitress winks and says,

"Depends, what kind do you want?"

That's when you notice all the Helium balloons

being filled and how the room is filled with

Hindenberg replica blimps in all colors,

sizes and functionality reminding you that

this isn't New Mexico anymore but New Jersey

and the radio newsman describing the events

outside is saying, "Oh the humanity!" as the blimp

burns out of control, most on board dead in

seconds and you remember the gas can you

began with and decide, "Now is not the time to

bring up rapid accelerator facilitators.  Hell, I'd

rather walk anyway." Which seemed like such a

logical, such a sensible and prudent course to

take at the time, I mean, really who could have

known otherwise?

Space Cadet

After years of serious drinking,

stints in drunk tanks, begging

quarters from tourists and church

goers, sleeping it off in unlocked

rooms, broken-into rectories, sheds,

dog houses large enough to accommodate

a man not too proud to curl up in dried

shit, after years of abuse, trying so hard

to die, waking up sober, a few fingers

short of a hand, receding gums no teeth

would adhere to, falling out hair a cheap

rug might cover, a dye job mask,

a permanent cast to his eyes, feeling so

strange to be alive and breathing trying

it out for size felt like a novelty act he’d

have to experiment with while working

out all the kinks, a process not without

drawbacks like coming back from the

dead with visions of altered states, foreign

places so strange his tales of woe sounded

like science fiction or fantasy thrillers

rather than a narration of the truth,

felt like the lyric verses he was composing

in a language he’d learned on the other side;

some say it sounded like a revelation,

others like gibberish and they were both right.