Methuselah Speaks. A Poem by Joan McNerney

 

Living in shadows I scarcely stir.

Each motion brings pain with fear

of falling, breaking brittle bones

or bruising my spider web skin.

 

I see so little. Sunlight blinds my

rheumy eyes. Night dims my world

leaving just vague outlines.

 

Food is stale, bitter. Thirst savage.

No liquids quench me. My bodily

functions often fail befouling me.

 

All these years weigh down my soul.

Hearing faded, everything in whispers.

My breath is raspy, without strength.

 

My mind dull with defeat. I count only

my losses and remember nothing

but the dead. My memory is pain.

 

I cannot celebrate births. My great

grandchildren died so long ago.

Why must I always wait here?

 

God, have you forgotten me?

 
 

Joan McNerney’s poetry has been included in numerous literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Blueline, Spectrum, three Bright Spring Press Anthologies and several Kind of A Hurricane Publications. She has been nominated three times for Best of the Net. Poet and Geek recognized her work as their best poem of 2013. Four of her books have been published by fine small literary presses and she has three e-book titles.

Vivitar

 

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MI CORAZON ROMPA. A Poem by Robin Marchesi.

Me33

 

My eyes have eaten the Morna Valley in a feast of sight.
The sweet pine and thyme scented airs fresh from the seas
have reached my nicotine stained lungs.
 
I have stood privileged to hear flocks of birds chattering in shrubbery
or to watch a falcon riding the swirls of wind before diving,
like a panther, for its prey.
 
I have witnessed the vast skies of night that dwarf humanity with constellations,
solar systems, planets, moons and universes.
 
I have sensed shadows stalking my footsteps; felt the pull of lunar tides,
on my own tides, as fascinated; I’ve watched its penumbras and changes,
its cycles, in our petty breaths.
 
I have held cloud-induced commentaries with God and in the vast silences of my daily time;
I have spoken to the dead, lulled by their camaraderie, comforted by their presence.
 
No doubt, peaky and press-ganged, at some future date,
wandering down Ladbroke Grove in London, I might remember this intelligence,
amongst my city-influenced companions.
 
My heart breaks
‘Mi corazon rompa’
For you,
 
Ibiza,
 
The nearest place I found
To home…


 
Me
Robin Marchesi, born in 1951, began writing in his teens, much to the consternation of his mother, the sister of Eric Hobsbawm, the historian.

In 1992 Cosmic Books published his first book entitled “A B C Quest”.

In 1996 March Hare Press published “Kyoto Garden” and in 1999 “My Heart is As…”

ClockTowerBooks published his Poetic Novella, “A Small Journal of Heroin Addiction”, digitally, in 2000.

Charta Books published his latest work entitled “Poet of the Building Site”, about his time working with Barry Flanagan the Sculptor of Hares, in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

He is presently working on an upcoming novel entitled “A Story Made of Stone.”

http://www.amazon.com/A-Small-Journal-Heroin-Addiction/product-reviews/0743300521

http://www.illywords.com/2011/09/down-the-rabbit-hole-a-glimpse-into-the-wonderland-of-barry-flanagan/
 
 
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in an odd state of melancholic un-belonging. A poem by Richard Lloyd Cederberg

IN A ODD STATE OF MELANCHOLIC UNBELONGING

So it was for them,
and for countless others,
as they grew and struggled
in a soulless-system, seeking-out
their identities, their paths, their purpose,
their successes, as captivating circumstance cajoled
(each) with a fool’s panacea. People much like cold calderas,
once bold and forceful, now, sadly subject to
the chronicles of yawning indifference.
~
A cop’s wife beat
down {oppressed}
seeks retribution in her world
of make-believe.
A sister’s husband beats her; it
rewires her heart and mind; cursed,
he dies soused in a head-on,
leaving her and an
(only) son alone
unloved.
Years go by…
EVER deprived of model,
the son loses his bearings, angry,
arrogant, aggravated, he curls inward,
embraces his wounds, weed, alcohol, pills,
ends up wayward, darkened, lessened, a miscreant
seeking refuge in a Wiccan’s ramshackle garage
where he drinks and smokes himself numb,
and lines the framing with hundreds
of empty bottles he pretends are medals
~
These accounts
proliferate like weeds,
in every city and township
the wounded (financially solvent
or in straitened circumstances) exist in
an odd state of melancholic un-belonging,
souls seeking freedom, wings, peace,
meaning, as opposing forces
relentlessly push back
with impudent vigor
ugly converting
influences
staunch
unbending
unwavering
deceptive assuredness
vomiting multiple sides of
similar theories simultaneously
caught betwixt shadows of indifference
as side by side miseries annihilate
meaningful purpose
~
And they persist,
like wildflowers and weeds, a
pandemic of fraught souls struggling,
(employed or destitute)
surviving alone,
unloved in a soulless system,
scorned, segregated, separated,
alone dreamers dreaming dreams of
beautiful things that remain [for them] unrealized …

richard lloyd cederberg

___________________________________________________________

AUTHOR PIC

A new hard-fought adventure/thriller, BETWEEN THE CRACKS, was completed March 2014 and will be available summer 2014. August 2007 Richard was nominated for a 2008 PUSHCART PRIZE by the Mississippi Crow Magazine. Richard was awarded 2007 BEST NEW FICTION at CST for his first three novels and also 2006 WRITER OF THE YEAR @thewritingforum.net …
Richards work has been featured on Poetry Life and Times, Artvilla, The Taj Majal Review, Hardy Alpha 1, ChristianStoryTeller, The Mississippi Crow Magazine The Path Magazine, and in varied anthologies, compendiums, and e-zines. Richard’s literary work is currently in over 35,000 data bases and outlets. Richard’s other novels include: A Monumental Journey… In Search of the First Tribe… The Underground River… Beyond Understanding. All four are in the Monumental Journey Series.

Richard has been privileged to travel extensively throughout the USA, the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan in Canada, the Yukon Territories, Kodiak Island, Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway, Sitka, Petersburg, and Glacier Bay, in Alaska, the Azorean Archipelagoes, and throughout Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Holland… Richard and his wife, Michele, have been avid adventurers and, when time permits, still enjoy exploring the Laguna Mountains, the Cuyamaca Mountains, the High Deserts in Southern California, the Eastern Sierra’s, the Dixie National Forest, the Northern California and Southern Oregon coastlines, and the “Four Corners” region of the United States.

Richard designed, constructed, and operated a MIDI Digital Recording Studio – TAYLOR and GRACE – from 1995 – 2002. For seven years he diligently fulfilled his own musical visions and those of others. Richard personally composed, and multi-track recorded, over 500 compositions during this time and has two completed CD’s to his personal credit: WHAT LOVE HAS DONE and THE PATH. Both albums were mixed and mastered by Steve Wetherbee, founder of Golden Track Studios in San Diego, California. Richard retired from music after performing professionally for fifteen years and seven years of recording studio explorations. He works, now, at one of San Diego’s premier historical sites, as a Superintendent. Richard is also a carpenter and a collector of classic books, and books long out of print.


 
 

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Links

links

links

Eyedrum Periodically

Aberjhani. Creative Thinkers International

Nordette Adams. Paper li Bell Book and Scandal

Janet Caldwell. Paper li Inner Child

Sara Russell. Paper li The Pinky Pictographic

Sara Russell Poetry Lifetimes

Phoenix Rising from the Ashes an Anthology of Sonnets

poetrypacific.blogspot.ca

Poesia Indignada Transforming Poetry

Art & Ideas Tony Martin Woods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Olsen

Scott Thomas Outlar – 17Numa

Aquillrelle

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Speed. A Poem by Steve de France

 
 
One cloudy day in 1945, 
I played alone in a vacant lot 
across from the Central Hotel. 
Digging roads for my fire
engine. It was small, red, 
and made of cast metal. 
Suddenly, I saw my mother 
standing next to a man 
in uniform. She called to me. 
 
 
We were living in a cheap hotel
in Redondo Beach. 
The Central Hotel. 
Built in the twenties or so. 
Wooden fire escapes. 
Transoms. 
Bathroom down the hall. 
Filled with smoke, 
whiskey voices, 
coughing. 
Men and women fighting. 
Doors banging. 
People coming & going all hours…
 
 
I stood & shaded my eyes
from the sun glare. They walked across 
the street to me. 
 
“This is your father.”
 
He had medals on his chest. 
I stared at him, 
not comprehending. 
He grabbed me up like a bag of potatoes. 
Whiskers scraped my cheek. 
Beer breath frightened me. 
He toted me
into the Central Hotel. 
 
The war was over. 
 
I remember the smells. 
People cooking on hot plates. 
Fish, cans of hash, eggs, stew,
potatoes, onions, cabbage, coffee, 
anything & everything cheap. 
And then, there was the
hotel manager patrolling the halls. 
 
Looking for overdue rents. 
Maybe an open door to stare in. 
He smoked big cheap cigars. 
Chewed them till they were wet
then, he’d hock & spit. 
Usually he’d miss the open door
hitting the floor instead, 
the was followed by a 
“God Damn” or two. 
But
more powerful than all these odours 
was the stench of the mouldering
hallway carpet. That grease-stained, 
puke-beige carpet. It’s miasma
hung fog like in the halls. 
This night
For reasons I didn’t understand
I was forced to sleep alone
in our hallway leading to the bathroom. 
Here in the shadows, car headlights
seeped through diaphanous curtains
from Diamond Street, and threw
huge fantastic shapes of black 
and ghostly white on aged wallpaper. 
 
I cried. 
Until he came in a flood of light;
and spanked me till my butt burned. 
And then for the rest of the night, 
I breathed the stench of dead carpet
and listened to each night sound
walk by my hall window. 
 
 
I fell asleep, planning immortal revenge. 
Not long after this, my father, 
Speed disappeared forever.
 
 
His memory still hangs like a fog in my mind. 
 
 
little Steve

 
Steve De France is a widely published poet, playwright and essayist both in
America and in Great Britain. His work has appeared in literary
publications in America, England, Canada, France, Ireland, Wales,
Scotland, India, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize in Poetry in both 2002, 2003 & 2006. Recently, his
work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Mid-American
Poetry Review, Ambit, Atlantic, Clean Sheets, Poetry Bay, The Yellow
Medicine Review and The Sun. In England he won a Reader’s Award in Orbis
Magazine for his poem “Hawks.” In the United States he won the Josh
Samuels’ Annual Poetry Competition (2003) for his poem: “The Man Who
Loved Mermaids.” His play THE KILLER had it’s world premier at the
GARAGE THEATER in Long Beach, California (Sept-October 2006). He has
received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Chapman University for his
writing. Most recently his poem “Gregor’s Wings” has been nominated
for The Best of The Net by Poetic Diversity.

 
 
 

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maiden grass. A poem by E. Darcy Trie.

 
 
 
look
mother
i have your hands
the thin ridge of toes
shang-hai at the east heel
the mole of hunan beneath
the hangnail
even the barley of your laugh
grows along this throat
 
but you say
something in my field
cannot
that i have lost the taste
for your gods
your gardens
your gracious arsenal
of acquiescence
 
you accuse like a brick
whose powers are to
bash and be broken
that i am a woman
of the west bridge
the brown bells of my body
clang at a different hour
that i find lust is a fist
not knees of lilies
that i need
while you knead
but it is not the
same
that my shame
will last for generations
all because
she ate the edge of things
 
and i
 
only
the centers
 
 
she cuts
like a metal salad
still good for you
even as it rips at the belly
i am too tender
unable to carry
such sacred bitter water
this daughter
will leave the table cold
it will empty chairs
rattle rugs
and fail to catch
those christ nails
that somehow
show how strong
she is
even while
lying down
 
it is too late
to apologize
though the words swell
against her hills and dale
but i will not
for i know
sorry
is just a
word
 
 
yet
she will forgive me
when i return
push past paladin plains
ghost over geometric gates
my feet damp
across maiden grass
and the short stride
to her door
 
it will open
her face
will startle
like a flock of birds
doused in sunlight
before wheeling back
to the nest
___________________

Darcy Trie-1

Darcy was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1975, E. Darcy Trie is a Scorpio, Rabbit and matriculated in Little Rock, Arkansas at the age of two. She graduated at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville with a B.A. in Psychology along with Minors in Drama and Asian Studies. Sensing that achieving her Masters would drive her to drink, she wisely opted to tour Asia in her early twenties (thanks to a grant provided by Bank Of Daddy), and in the year 2000, found herself in the heart of Beijing, China where she began writing due to the fact that crocheting was far too complicated and because the voices in her head would not shut up.

By 2004, she had completed two romances, one historical and one modern, and after viewing all nine seasons of the X-Files and three seasons of C.S.I, finished the first two series of the Snow novels and is currently writing the third installment. During this time, she has also had several pieces of her poetry published in various online poetry magazines.

Her passions and hobbies includes writing, reading (anything put out by Neil Gaiman), Disney movies, all divination tools such as Tarot, I-Ching, Runes and is an enthusiastic, although albeit amateur, astrologist/paranormal investigator. She is 5’10, weighs whatever she wrote on her driver’s license, owns a lot of black hoodies and is addicted to It’s A Grind’s Passion Fruit tea.

She is fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, some French and once took a Zero Hour in Greek in high school. She hates mornings, coconuts, wire bras, and sincerely hopes that this is bio is long enough to fill up an entire page (doubled-space of course).

Ms. Trie currently lives in Las Vegas, NV because she adores $2.99 buffets, Paigow Poker, and that lovely 116 degree August weather. She dreams of writing best-selling novels that will delight and thrill her future fans and because she is tired of being a productive citizen and wants to go back to being a mooching hermit.
 
 
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Singularity | The mathpoem. A Poem by Prabhu Iyer

Singularity | The mathpoem
 
 
1. My heart rate, sine wave usually, goes
sine squared when I see you,
sine cubed when I approach you,
woh, Dirac-delta when I hear you!
 
2. How do I heal this singularity?
Now how do I extract the real part,
from your complex valued smile at me?
Euler says it all goes in circles anyways.
 
3. So, I decide to cast a phasor P
that intersects the line H bisecting
your heart plane, such that H · P = 0.
Can Cupid tell dot product from cross?

 
 
PI_Portrait_Oct10
 
Educated in India and England, Prabhu Iyer writes contemporary rhythm poetry. He counts the classical Romantics and Mystics among his influences. Among modern poets Neruda and Tagore are his favourites for their haunting and inspirational lyrical verse. Prabhu has also explored the meaning of modern art movements such as surrealism and cubism and their role in anchoring the society through his art-poetry. Currently he is based out of Chennai, India, where he has a day job as an academic scientist.
 
In 2012 Prabhu collected over 50 of his poems and self-published them on Amazon Kindle: http://amzn.com/e/B008F8M0JS. More recently, his 2014 entry made it to the long list from among over 5000 entrants to the annual international poetry contest conducted by the UK-based publishing house, Erbacce Press. Some of Prabhu’s poems are at http://hellopoetry.com/-prabhu-iyer/. His major current projects include a further volume of poetry, his first fictional novella and a planned series of translations of lyrics from Indian film music.
 

 

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A WITCH FOR HALLOWEEN. A Narrative Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop

 
 
-Well, what kind of witch, is it then?
 
It is an indestructible witch, that one, who lives in a city at the end of the world, which must be nameless.
 
-How so!
 
For the sake of its inhabitants who know her & those who don’t, for that’s how terrible this witch is. She lives at the end of a street in this city, which ends in a stair, which ends in the air.
 
-You mean-
 
Ay, a black thing, all crooked & twisted, a misshapen enormous runny thing, as inside out, as outside in & more like a shadow than a thing on the stair. In fact, it’s reported, those who followed her on the stair, like the little children…
 
-She fascinated them, I expect.
 
Those that returned, those she didn’t eat alive & leave their bones splattered all over the place, say when they crawled up the stair behind her, they couldn’t see whether she wasn’t some hideous shadow or some perfidious object before them.
 
-They’d find out soon enough.
 
So she, with a terrible screech, would leap out at them, all hooked & fanged, & kick like stilts with great clob- -bering boulders on the nearest to pulp, whilst the some she’d snatch & swallow in chunks spitting out their little bloody bits, as the others howled helpless screaming in the air, whilst her gruesome faces leered at each, licking their odious lips from where exhaled foul putrescent odour.
 
-& those that survived?
 
Became old men & women overnight, always selfaffrighted.
 
-& what of the witch?
 
She, every time, after her orgy, rises to the top of the stairs & jumps not up into the cold black sky but into a pit below, where she joins with all manner of rank creatures in such cavorts & cacophonies, that those neighbours nearby are faint faded fey.
 
-& you say she’s indestructible?
 
That’s the snag of it, they’d thought to hang a great net from under the stairs & over the pit, but what to do with her after! You see, it’s known she has a place of exit from the pit & from there crosses the city to the stairway but no one knows where it is.
 
-Is that so important?
 
If they could find the exit they could fill it with glue and stitch the lot of them so that they’d never so much as twitch a snitch again.
 
-Why even then she might just become gum & goo & cover everything.
 
The net it must be, we thought to attach it to a balloon & send her to hover under the highest stratosphere of the globe, but she may bust the biosphere & swallow us all in a black hole.
 
-Or again drop her into the sea & what unfathomable semblance may arise from its depths to walk upon the land.
 
Or volcano, she’d blow the earth to smithereens.
 
-Truly indestructible, but what to do ?
 
Placate her, you arch an eyebrow, it is indeed a heinous affair, the whole city given over to the production of children simply to feed her, the people are not so virile, whilst the whole process takes somewhat longer than farming piglets, it comes to the same thing.
 
-Tonight is Halloween.
 
& the children will carry pumpkins in procession, dressed up as little ghouls to see the witch at the bottom of the stairs.
 
-& tomorrow a bigger mess than usual.
 
It’s funny how they like human flesh, isn’t it, why can’t they be satisfied with insects or rotten fish, children at that!
 
-Put a curse on her to turn her to ashes & burn the ashes.
 
Our greatest bards have composed rhymes that would jinx any moving or still thing, “O most wicked bitch, may you hitch in stitch so that you never twitch a snitch, witch”
 
-Very mighty
 
To no avail, she seems immune to words.
 
-We must find the exit.
 
But to enter by the exit is to be consumed by hell, there’s always an obstacle, she herself is nothing but an obstruction, we’re under forced development & we can’t block the exit.
 
-To close the pit forever would be a solution, you’d walk on top of it & never know there was a witch underneath raving with rage & wanting to rip you apart.
 
You’d go to the top of the stair & just jump into the air.

 
 
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Robin Ouzman Hislop Editor of the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life and Times. (See its Wikipedia entry at Poetry Life and Times). He has made many appearances over the last years in the quarterly journals Canadian Zen Haiku, including In the Spotlight Winter 2010 & Sonnetto Poesia. Previously published in international magazines, his recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina, Post Hoc installed at Bank Street Arts Centre, Sheffield (UK), Uroborus Journal, 2011-2012 (Sheffield, UK), The Poetic Bond II & 111, available at The Poetic Bond and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes a recently published Anthology of Sonnets: Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. He has recently completed a volume of poetry, The World at Large, for future publication. He is currently resident in Spain engaged in poetry translation projects.
 
 
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PoetryLifeTimes
Poetry Life & Times

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