Friday, November 27, 2015
Richard Schnap- Three Poems
ORPHANS
I remember their eyes
Windows that revealed
Cold empty rooms
Lit by dwindling candles
And I remember their lips
Muttering the words
Of childlike songs
Set to funereal music
And I remember their hands
Clutching the remains
Of scavenged cigarettes
And cheap bags of dope
But I forget their names
For they’d invent new ones
Aliases to deceive
The harvester of souls
AS THE CANDLE DWINDLED
In the evenings I’d sit
On the balcony and watch
Trains slowly passing
On the nearby tracks
While inside my wife
Shed her heavenly costume
Revealing the serpent
That lurked deep inside
And as her rage grew
Like a gathering tempest
The men on the boxcars
Would wave and smile
As I waved back and wished
I could somehow join them
To be carried away from
The fangs of my night
ANTARCTICA
I remember the crimson candles
Set in their shining brass sconces
The dark and brooding landscapes
Shot through with a lukewarm light
The shelves of books of wisdom
Penned by the world’s great authors
Forbidden to ever be opened
Like tombs that were sealed shut
And I remember the windows
Covered with layers of curtains
To impede any rays of sunlight
From finding their way within
For this was the house of shadow
Reflecting the mind of its master
A man who built an empire
As dark as his endless night
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
John Pursch- A Poem
Hyphenated Dreams
The
map of Watchingstoned, T.V. was imprinted in her head decades ago, as part of a
general lobotic neural restructuring, preparatory to the final invasion of most
of this quadrant of the galaxy. With trillions of brains entrained on a
countably infinite stream of hyphenated dreams, escape was limited to strictly
stowaway comportment, behavioral nuance confabulation, easily detected by the
overseer routines. Omnipresence had become de rigueur, state of the artiste,
swelling before the central directorate’s dusty bureau of watch fob patina and
purple montage casualties of sworn honesty, slowly penned into franked
openness, country spacemen daubed with just a tad of traditional broomstick
welt, cardboard cutout personalities gone sour in the wind, sockets deftly
stroking the saliva off youthful digits, flinging prospective recon agents
carefully to windswept aisles in landing pattern disarray; frazzled forelocks
singing of ashplant Wednesdays, swollen begonias, and torment tarnation trapezoids
tripping on idiosyncratic lassitude.
“All
in a dazed shirker’s sunlit path,” Lola mused to sweeping swoon of bifurcating
bundled data bleed, frost congealing into lost memories of the Old West, of
cottonwoods and hickory pipes in fragrant sage, stagecoach rodeo assemblage
fonts of memorized acculturated dustpan towns, saloons in jumpy finger twitch
to ball-peen clamor’s noon surprise, peritonitis steeping in sundown stew. She
shook the cobwebbed images of aging misty cowlick swirls, revealing new galactic
arms in fully granulated precision, looming huge in sudden sod approach
necessitating wave collapse, the slam of shoulder straps against her clavicles
(how many had she snapped in early breathless simulator rides as just a girl,
if only she could swap retain rescind the rain of endless soporific days again
in tunneled time mache) absorbing shock to drain in rivulets of wicking
perspiration into fetal nonchalance beneath the huddled millions.
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/
Alan Catlin- Three Poems
Death on the Installment Plan
“I have learned that Jesus loves me
because the TV tells me so.”
Daniel Jones,
“After forty-six days on the Psycho Ward”
The script he was a character in
had him tricked out like some
vagabond mountebank without
a license to sell, all his wares lost
in the apocalyptic ruins of the place
he was stumbling out of like Steadman’s
Macbeth carrying a locked suitcase
full of heads leaking blood on a ruined,
rutted road, ace archer’s arrows instead
of a necktie, shafts bent where they
hit his chest, or like a refugee from
a burning wood, Bierce characters
from The Wilderness trying to escape
the conflagration and finding an original
Twilight Zone episode of the Holocaust,
a Dresden bombing like Slaughterhouse 5,
one that never made it from a cutting room
floor, a young Robert Redford as Death
with a medicine bag making house calls
in the tenements, ghettos of a vanishing
world, handing out vouchers for his
treatment, down payments for a layaway,
pay as you go installment plan.
The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
The headline of The Weekly World
News
proclaimed: 4 Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
Photographed in Arizona just days
ago!
And all I could think of was: Where
else?
The badly out of focus picture of the
boys
accompanying the headline suggested
some
bad dudes, pissed off riders of the
purple
sage hell bent for a tour of duty
exacting
rage, retribution and
revenge.
At first, the picture suggested
nothing
more exciting than every other
fraternity
party I had attended, in another
life
as a college student, but looking
closer,
the one riding with the mace held
high
over his plumed head reminded me of
body
language peculiar to a certain kind
of
Neanderthal who majored in weight
lifting
at the local university. In fact, the whole
crew could have been the front line
of any
college football team and hadn't I
just
waited on them, collectively and
alone?
Wasn't I rude, as well, recently, even?
And wasn't it here, with the lights
low,
the clock with its frozen hands
stalled between
early morning hours, that I had
raised my voice
to ask for last call, and these same
men
had emerged from the shadows, the
names
of the living and the dead escaping
from
their lips?
The Dead Man Walks His Dog
He should look older
but he doesn't,
he's been dead too long.
His skin should be
wrinkled
but it isn't,
his face is as smooth as a silk
sheet.
He should be emaciated
but he's not
Let's face it, his body odor is
unbearable.
He is, well
something of a dead issue
even now as he walks his favorite
dead dog
down main street
holding the leash near soiled fire
hydrants
watching the traffic with a stiff,
vacant
stare.
All the neighbors comment:
"What's he doing now?”
“Walking his dog?”
“He should know better
and keep to his own kind."
That old dead fool
walking his favorite dead
dog
this one last time.
Monday, November 9, 2015
Robert League- Three Poems
Terrible Gas Mask Man
Hopped from my bed
to the other side
of the room,
the terrible gas mask man
hidden at my feet,
but he was not there,
no fumes, no vapors,
no grating sound, just
an empty wooden land
with a few curls of dust.
Real
It was real
that distant space
we landed on, we
knew it, and should
have stayed up,
but look at us here
now, me remembering,
you forgetting,
and both of us
somehow regretting.
Blink
Small popping sound
and we are gone, gone,
going to a new place,
one where you can
speak, I can finally
listen, and stop pretending,
except I know when
we get there, through
those blue portals
and green mazes,
through the ice lands
and over hot lava,
I will still be pretending,
always.
JD DeHart- Poem & Art
Creatures
Whether it is the Frankensteinian
man plugged in,
uttering a few ancient verses
while another awaits,
or the face stretched across the path,
blocking exit and peace,
they are creatures that haunt,
products of mind.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Denny E. Marshall- Three Poems & Art
Three Haiku
aliens attack
transform the world into a
ball of candy
i didn’t enter
planet raffle, the airfare
is not included
martian colony
lots of work available
except for lifeguards
"Far Far Face"
John Pursch- A Poem
Human Indication Myths
Like
nose, slight posies, sand dozers down the steeply peopled ouch of hysteresis
haunch and hunchback histories we know as -- well, wad do sweet nullities of
sheer lobotic frenzy ever know…
Moderately
notched, slime a frayed hemp vacuum, propping up vowels in stray morphologies
of emulsified burbles in waistcoat sex pipes, hostile to evenly tolerated
mumbler fields, squatter neon sighs suffusing peerless titled paperweights of
human indication myths, just one foundry kit after another knockoff biped
strolling clean and easy, drowning sordid fecund streets of glossed Americon
cityscapes with scads of scabies, tabulated sourly by sacked tumescent
insurance sheen in deeply parried alternatives to fate, straightjacketed by
syntax, played to breathless bowling scores of parity in split-ten sawdust,
popping buttered gals within allotted sandstorm seas, plopped in concrete webs
of carbon beaneries, coffeehouse cacophonies of soggy stranger lullabies, flopped
gracefully in corner booth to self-reliant bootstrap module spectacle and
fuel-retardant microwave insistence breed.
Cameras
replace the scene at twice the framed ration’s tailored blip, missing frequent
dings of stumpy-necked originals, yes actuarial papal submariners for once,
rarely encapsulated by distracting messages, and who could’ve expected pandas
or condors or these dazed oven-minders to notice or fraudulently record
heavenly slightest blots or bolts or biologically reasoned bits of knowledge
paste hobbling candy tinkle tinsel breath to remotely dissemble slum lord
dentifrice delays along these linear knees?
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/
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