New Staff – caint none of ‘em read or write, but they’s rale cute

Bullet for the recognition by marieClair 2009

I feel small today
small and tight, round
compact
all tissue reduced to
essence
muscles taut
nerves wound to
breaking point,
plucked notes like
wired sound

small, derringer
ready to fire
eager to kill

evil stands there
large, broad
as the dead moon
it eclipses

the corona is
bleeding..
it is bloody red
before it passes
leaving the sky cold
and lifeless

what passes for human
what can be celebrated
emulated, cheered on

what hidden monsters
with closed claws and
mouths of steel
throw dogs to die
defeated, drowning in
pools of human waste,

monster waste
what maddened creatures
rip organs from desperate men
stitching them up with
dollars to feed their starving
souls of need

what well fed gluttons
hog the troughs for more
to feast upon as the
blood of the innocent
runs from their lips

what lizard being
runs amok in the brain
and steals a young life..
lust drenched coward
prancing with desire
to be a man
when he knows he is
a Frankenstein
stitched together from
bits of his ruined life

The earth is a blue
spun ball traveling
within the darkest black
of silent night

I am loaded into retribution
and mourn the loss of light,
the primitive illusion as
man burns fire to reach
the stars

Confessions of a New York City Street Peddler by Dr. Howard Karlitz

It’s February 1980, and David Gordon is standing in front of a class of delinquent kids in a South Brooklyn juvenile detention center trying to teach reading. While patiently guiding them through a short story called “Young Pablo Picasso,” his eye is caught by a reproduction of the artist’s flamboyant signature emblazoned across the top of the page. He puts the book down and stares at the lettering, then happens to notice a small blurb in a newspaper lying next to it on his desk announcing an exhibition of Picasso’s work, a major retrospective, scheduled to soon take place at the Museum of Modern Art. It was strange, the signature and show coming together like that. His mind wanders. An idea is taking form. Suddenly it comes to him. Just in time too, because the kids are going bananas and a piece of chalk whizzes past his ear, powder shattering against the green board behind him.

That evening, in the safety of his modest suburban home, he announced his plan to his wife. “Jill,” he boasts, “this is it, the big one! I’m going to sell Picasso T-shirts at the Museum of Modern Art this summer.”

Quite naturally she’s leery. In fact she thinks he’s mad. And he really can’t blame her. In the first place she’s wondering why in the world anyone would want to buy a T-shirt with Picasso’s signature on it. And secondly, they had just been through a nervous breakdown-inducing business bankruptcy after he invested their life savings in three waterbed stores, all of which sunk after only five months, leaving them in a blizzard of attorneys’ letters, injunctions, collections notices, court fees, judgments, tax liens, law suits (both of the civil and criminal variety), and every other form of lawyer-related horror one could dream of.

But he had to give this a shot and Jill understood why. She understood that he was tired of trying to make it on a teacher’s salary, tired of wheeling around suburbia in one clunker after another, tired of never even considering a vacation, tired of not being able to take his family to a decent restaurant, depressingly tired of watching the bills pile up on the kitchen table month after lousy month. They had held on to their 60’s ideals as long as possible, but like the man desperately clinging to a ledge fifty stories up, it was getting hard because the villain, Mr. 80’s, a/k/a “Greed and Excess,” was stomping on their fingertips.

He hooked up with a character named Benny who owned a T-shirt printing shop near his job. David showed him the Picasso signature from the school book. “Nice shot,” Benny says. Everything in this business is a “shot.” Said he can copy it, enlarge it, and press it onto a shirt. A “heat shot” he calls it.

“What do you think of my idea?” David asks. “Picasso, that is.”

“Great” Benny lied. Thought he was nuts. “How many ya’ wanna start with? A hundred dozen? Two?”

“No, forty-eight.”

“Dozen?”

“No, shirts. Black ones, with white lettering.”

His first day out was in April. David rushed into the city after work figuring to catch the early ticket buyers. The shirts were in a knapsack on his back. As he walked down the block, however, his confidence melted away. Suddenly he was terrified. He had no license, if there was such a thing, no permit, nothing. Here he was, a schoolteacher, with a masters degree no less, slinking around the museum entrance on 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues like a criminal. He felt like a derelict or, worse yet, a pervert. He wanted to run back to the burbs, but something grabbed hold of him at this moment of truth and he slipped out a shirt and held it up in front of him at arms length. And like magic, a well dressed woman walked over and began to touch it. “Pretty,” she says. Pretty my ass, David thought, she’s a cop. She pulls out her wallet. Here comes the badge. “How much?” she asks, and when he tells her five dollars she hands him a ten and walks away with two. He’s rocked. Other people who have been watching now come over to buy shirts too. And this is the first critical lesson he learns about peddling, to draw a crowd and let people see money changing hands. It adds credibility to you and your action. On the streets it’s called disalienation.

Under half an hour he’s sold out, but decides right then and there to quit because it’s just too damn scary, too risky, for a schoolteacher with a masters degree that is. But that night back home, he’s throwing the cash around the kitchen, and then he’s on the phone with Benny ordering more shirts which he picks up the next day on his lunch hour which he’s selling that afternoon at the museum after work because already he’s totally addicted to the money and the action.

poems by Mike Meraz 

I’m A Genius, You Know…
 
she started to tell me
what is wrong with my writing.
“you’re good,” she said,
“but you lack detail.”
“of course.”
“you write like you are talking
rather than in a story form.”
“yes,” I said.
“you’re full of bull shit.”
“uh huh.”
“you need to use more metaphors.”
“indeed.”
“how come you don’t
get your stuff out there?”
I asked her.
“I have submitted to magazines,”
she said.
“well, how about a blog.
you know blogs are popular these days.
and it give others a chance to check out your work.”
“no,” she said, “I am too good for a blog.
I want to be published by a real publisher.
I’m a genius, you know.”
“oh,” I said.
she is no longer writing.
she lives with an old man in Mexico.
they have two kids and a dog named Chico.
she still hasnt been published.
and no one has yet to read her work.

She Is Passion
 
she hates
just as much
as she loves.

and that is a lot.

she fights
just as much
as she caresses.
 
and that she never stops.
 
she IS passion.
 
remember,
it runs both ways.
 
Digits
 
letters are merely numbers
that when put in the right order
add up to something good.
 
it’s not about reading immortal poems
of the english language
or going to the local poetry hole.
 
its about tapping into
the human technology,
tapping into the digits
that matter.
 
The Little Death Poem
 
death lingers
in my pjs.
 
talks to me
in my sleep.
 
lingers
at midnight.
 
rings
in my bones.
 
collapses
in my brain.
 
shuts out
all sound.
 
learns
I’m desolate.
 
walks away.

Peter Pan by Oskar Hansen

poems by AJ Kaufmann

The Desperate Land

death is victory
pallid winds of petals
statues, blind & cruel
close to voice
within vapor
ebony
night-sounds
bare broken lamps
mute dusty
messengers
veils of marble
seals of sand
burned
in trembling progress
sun regal dead
king at barren dusk
strange to
the desperate land

Monster of Love

question the piano
wait for no grave
glass for the mine and the mad
moved, the wilder, the private
brown lifeless paper
ahead
wanderers emptying foyer
who ran disguises night
you asleep in the song dream
turning of the piano
and of joy
the discovery of
heart’s
thrilling
mechanisms
you play presence
chromatic illusions
a novel
murmured dress
Paris
death
waited
for the monster
of love

Steppes Song Surreal

steppes tattoo
in her eye
brandy-flowers in my side
loose icy drums
the bottles, the snows
shudder the light
won’t let go
palaces warm obeying her touch
died in the little night
islands sleeping under the dog
small in a window July
half-moon hook grasshoppers
pebble boys of spring
baggage noise in the hushed snow
ten thousand vibrant hills
hollow place
a pint of blood
motionless kitchen fire
asbestos boots
on beatnik feet
the hunchback and his lyre
a distant coyote
curious
of our mortality
wheeling through the night alone
winter jade is free
passengers plundering
vague dance town
touch
the pointed flame
crawling back into their brain
dragon’s mouth – the end
 
Yucatan

listen to your sea
languid dreams of traffic
kill wilderness morning
drowned birds
curved trees shadow
sunken ravine
azure pale
evening forest dark
spirit’s egg
full to death
lawns of heaven’s dropped
tireless torn land
mangled wing ghosts
jar of sun
hoop of drums
marble phantom moon
coralline
a road

poems by Steve DeFrance

Angels Are Dying In Los Angeles

Wind blows across Mendocino
Beach with icy chill,
sinks in & bites hard. The
sand has been
blasted white from this
wind. Situated just above
the beach—sun blanched trees
sit curved from
the wind looking like arthritic
old men staring at
the Northern passage of the
sea.

Back in L.A.
I know the
sky lies like a cheap
electric blanket
over the backs of the
homeless.
The wind here hardly ever
blows.
Machines grind metal
&
oil into still air until it
seems too thick to breathe
& slowly sky sewage is
pumped into our lungs.
Another day as L. A. shooters
try to break even.
Children smashed against
walls.
Murders.
Rapes.
Hot.
Wet.
Dazzling L.A.

I’ve driven
north—salmon-like to spawn.
To escape. To find peace. And I
do.
I find a perfect beach—beauty
everywhere:
sea, rivers, redwoods, curving
streams,
cliffs, big sky, cold rushing
wind,
& trees hunched and molded
by the wind.
Songs from meadowlarks–fill
the
air!
So much beauty. I can’t
stand it!

I need the cacophony of metal
& brakes & horns.
I need the stench of the
homeless in
downtown L.A.—their smell of
death,
as they drift across city
sidewalks,
gathering like blood in broken
veins
screaming at memories &
ghosts
frightening passing
tourists,
casualties from the darker side
of America
these shadows dying in the
city’s crevices.

Up here—I enter a bookstore
called
Walden Pond
I read local poets. Sloppy
rhymers & English majors,
or retirees, or people who
haven’t read poetry
in 50 years, but think they
should write it
by the pound. Their lines full
of
tall pines
& hawks in sky—or spiders
frozen in webs,
dying flowers in field, bees
& insects aplenty,
a total tyranny of
nature.
Enough peace & dope &
nature rhapsody

to make you puke or slit your
wrists or both.

Last Days of the Cross by Joseph Ridgwell – a video preview of Joe’s new best selling book about his life and times in Kings Cross in Sydney in Australia.

Covering A Natural Vestment by Peter Magliocco

Your husband struggles with his gift,
the art-making burden he’s enslaved by;
you meander sullenly around yours,
the patient tapestry of poetry threaded
around a spool of cleverness, a cloth
unworn by everyday working people.
You would sew lies to landscapes
if only you could back away, perhaps
reconsider & alter, if need be, that
terrible gravity words are heir to?
Still Sylvia’s portrait above your kit
mocks your distance from life now
lived in another part of this forest, far
from contemporary cloisters resonant
with reality’s naked bestowing of seed.  
Walking through sumac, brushing back
pine needles over endless excitation
to see life as a prehistoric existence
forever preserved in the present, be-
fore the future can continue hanging
all the shallow glittering memories
moth-bound in your mind’s closet.

baby i’m ready to go - Melissa Mann’s new poetry release from GJ Publishing

A poetry book… but not as we know it

baby, i’m ready to go is a break-the-rules collection of poems that’s not afraid to mess with convention. it’s a poetry book that mixes the radical with the traditional – the anarchy of dialect and free verse, with the conformity of rhyme and traditional poetic forms. and that’s not the only thing that sets this collection apart. baby, i’m ready to go achieves that rarest of things, intimacy with the reader. from the teaser first lines at the start, to the closing interview with the writer by various punk bands, this is a book that wants to get close to you, wants to speak to you. and it does. through the poems of course, and through the background notes at the end of the book as well. like the banter between songs at a gig or cliffs notes designed to make you fail the exam, the notes provide a rare insight into the writer’s thinking.

baby, i’m ready to go takes us to the extremes of the M1, from the two-up-two-downs of the writer’s native yorkshire, to the urban masai mara of inner-city london via a town called me, population one. a knowing, edgy collection, baby, i’m ready to go shows us the wonderful and funny in the weird, banal and ugly. it reminds us of the cruelty and sadness that is life and other people.

so, if you like your poems florid, saccharine and bbc poetry season-approved, baby, i’m ready to go ain’t for you. best try some dead poet with a title, or your nearest branch of clinton cards. if, however, you prefer your poetry alive and well and living in the real world, beg, steal, borrow… or preferably buy this book from http://www.grievousjonespress.com baby, i’m ready to go – one for all you lovers, loners, heart breakers and jimmy saville worshippers out there. POETRY IS DEAD. LONG LIVE POETRY!