ATLANTIS FM

This poem was writ on the road late summer of 1991. It was published in Philadelphia while I was living in Jacksonville Beach, FL running a heavy-metal club called RPM's for my younger brother by Andrew Lovatt in an interesting one shot literary zeen called OZONE "a map of alternate realities" in 1992. ATLANTIS FM and possibly another more recent piece-- in the punk "raving-poet" genre, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, will be action-read ULA style with improv backup from the Hydrogen Jukebox band during their first Carnivolution 2nd Friday performance art, music, sideshow event for 2007 at the ELLEN TIBERINO MEMORIAL MUSEUM, 3819 Hamilton Street, in West Philly this May11th. If your in this part of the East Coast Hood, by all means, check it out!
Thanks to Matt and Eric "jelly-boy the clown" Broomfield.
I will most certainly return comrade James Nolan's beautifully disturbing short story to its position at the head of the pack early next week so that any stragglers doan miss the opportunity of reading it.

ATLANTIS F.M.

Out along the blue-green

edge

oceans swell and billowed foam

the clear eye near can see

cliffs and high plateau where the fogs

dance, the rush of the waves rouse

oh, mesmerisms

whispers rise between the sandpiped trill

Atlantis, lost continent,

lost and drowned by pride

heaves back for an instant into view

spectral, steep

out along the green-blue

edge

who among us may reach down

deeply past the clocking mind

regain the pallisades of Atlantis in those depths

where dreams crash and mill

and ripple outward to touch a million

sleepers with longing wonder, then

release them so they float

to the surface of their routines.

Out along the green-blue

edge

that philosophers and prophets

have, hallmarked down the millenniums,

rumored, and charged their writ

with reference to that super race

who with similar intent and bent

of technocracies and science to those

entrenched and no less impertinent

at the present moment, though our own

differing from its tragic precedence

by virtue of its global extent;

did succeed in wresting the reigns of Nature

away from the sure and sufficient hands

of the elements.

Out along the blue-green

edge

you were once my scribe for a bit

during the summer of the great

Opposition, and I yours, but I imagined

more attentive, a lover,

and as such now where I stand alone

when the morning disengages from the seas's gorge

and its long night of forbidden pleasures,

nearly can hear the drowned accolade

sparked by the fleeting victory march

of war undertow the hollow roaring waves.

Then the glare crowned

and glacial fear brought on by inordinance.

Out along the green-blue

edge, were you again at my side

and ventured with me into the verge

of the drowning tide.

9/1991- 5/2007.

Looks like I am

the last man on Earth

as if an atom bomb dropped not here

but over New York

maybe I’m the only one left

until of course

photo by Geoff Hall, 2006.

wandering the vacant streets

and littered plazas for some can goods

I discover, as the apocalyptic

yarn went, the last woman

scantily clad in a cracked

phone booth that doesn’t work.

She’s screaming into the receiver

for her husband and kids

like there’s no tomorrow

which a matter of fact there

And then under a sky that is a sound effect

it dawns on me that what are the chances of this

phone booth being on the deserted city corner

in the first place, a coincidence? Was it supposed to be the last phone booth on Earth when before

the Apocalypse nobody and their mother

could ever find a pay phone as the authorities

had removed almost every last one by then

blaming juvenile delinquents and pushers

the public pay phone going the way of the family

amusement park or the neighborhood basketball

court and the 1 point O! blood alcohol

percentage.

What else was there at one time

just didn’t add up unless

it all made sense that it was

the sequel of the Children of the Damned

in the Village of the Damned and damned

in this damn World I found myself

besotted, misbegotten and different from them”

the pre-pubescent blonde haired straightened

bleach conditioner and Prussian blue eyed

Kinder of legal tender rendered perfect if not

alien under the cell-phone pay to play higher

technocracy who were in the process of world

domination before the shit hit the fan

when the grid goes down

and out for the count

from zero for naught

the ghost of the atomic

energy commission would

have to know what it’s all about.

The indifferent towers and citadels of business

bilked to the gills and not a soul in site

there’s nothing and no need to on my mind

no reason to search the parameter for signs

I just drift off to another free lunch

while the supply lasts and the candles hold

back the tears of this perfect dark night

and I dream of things as they should

as I dream again of being the last in line.

3/2007.