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.