"I Didn't Know"

POETRY BY KING WENCLAS

I didn't know when I strangled you
that you couldn't take a joke,
swollen tongue drooling
over my teak wood coffee table
imported from Asia,
eyes bulging unattractively,
staring at the ceiling,
you used to be pretty,
now your wasted life for having known me
is soiling my carpeting.

-King Wenclas 2011
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

adam MEORA , Three crazy wisdom from philly's poetry wise-guy

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Shamanic Paper Cuts

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homeless derelict calling down the alien s ons

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Chip away bones mentalists push me to edge dis {appear} across family trees

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Novels written about me will be torn up to find my anus in a bowl of cherries

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Beauty of sundial con scious necessary become six hour holy man

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Risk is close to life without living death its due thought death is risk without loss

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I fall into blood soars before blood idol soars swill swine pushed stomach outward

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Ethiopia female cage tiny rice pellets stark sand crystals sand paper cut lips = mothers

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We are not one we are not one us naked is different tone ]d eath starve uterus spermshaped

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Future has chance ….one psychotic….one famished…make mah eat poetry

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For all the countries with my children

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Boom BOOM MY nuclear weapons have names like my children

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Succulent memorable tributes to my ancestors First middle last ways to split us into oblivion

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One we haven’t seen since the BIG BANG

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Notice my bold over pronunciation

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Let my kids become less ….one thousand heads of little rug smashing babies

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Crushed with borscht and apple pie sandwiches

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I will make them bow to headless reason of blowing up glaciers

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So more slushies can drip for our canyons of dooM

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mention me and get a coupon to the poet’s hall of fame

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wait I must blow up these consonants as to create more green fuel for my

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egolasting slice of the BIG BaNG PIE

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I have cum again to ensure that you will be pregnant forever with impermanence

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Hide your impermanence hide your definitive articles

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I have zero tolerance for eating on the fly

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But my children must die ….all of our children must die

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Don’t play dea Big BanG

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I am an island in this poem leave me be and spread my nuclear love song

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Spread my nuclear love song

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I fear suicide I fear nukes I fear shaving my legs and wearng daisy dukes

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I fear diapers and cleaning on poops

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I am a magic poet I am a magic poet wait I don’t even like magic or poetry or poets who use magic or magicians that steal poetry I like to steal plane and simple

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I will steal your answer to this poem I will steal your response

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I will steal your nonchalance

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Proliferation referendum dumbski missle strike I love lesbian dike patrols

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Swallowing half sized childish trolls

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Bust open warhead tolls

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Pay me to be the god of universal bullshit

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Pay me to the god of hooterversal warspit

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My children have names like marmalade xlposive meora

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Or Meltingfeshy ginsberg meora jam jam

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I don’t kare if the people are gon just keep playing by nuclear love song

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I don’t kare if the people are gon just keep playing by nuclear love song

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I don’t kare if the people are gon just keep playing by nuclear love song

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I don’t kare if the people are gon just keep playing by nuclear love song

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I don’t kare if the people are gon just keep playing by nuclear love song

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I am a man who is scared easily; wet behind orifices when they fall away

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Sand crabs tunnel skin

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I do not fear human extinction; animals, plants, insects hold much more

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Clarity

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must we not sacrifice ourselves as we sacrifice our globe our globe

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How selfish our footprints magnified through human brains

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How selfish our suffering human remains

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Must we mark all things let wolves eat our carcasses, ferns grow

From our mouths

Swans fly from our bellies

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Beetle moths crawl out from

our

Backs

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Shivers portly do not die I’ll give you me to live, sweet river; no more water for me

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Make rain from my eyes solid spectra of cow milk

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Heartbeats for sigh lent creatures

ANOTHER GREAT MAGICO- SOCIO-REALIST NOVEL BY MIKE PALACEK

FROM THE PARENT TERRIBLE OF THE NEW AMERICAN DREAM.NET

http://www.newamericandream.net/



COMING SOONER THAN THE POWERS-THAT- BE
MIGHT WISH
IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS...

INDEPENDENTLY PUBLISHED BY MIKE PALACEK WITH SEVENTH STREET PRESS

newamerican.net.

Post- Apocalyptic Thunderbolt from Jimmy "Bones" Nasti

from EUREKA, CA

>thank you for the encouragement. I wrote it in 5 minutes and pushedsend. An act of spontaneous madness inspired by your always presentpoetic vision. Any feedback is encouraged. This is a bio....attached is apict enjoy....jimmy Jimmy Bones is Single Present Moment Thinking Only! He lives in thethird time cycle of the forth Kalpa and is guided graciously by histeacher Dzogchen Khenpo Choga Rinpoche. He admires the sun and theunspeakable gentleness upon which this melodrama unfolds. His heartfeltaspiration is to watch all beings fall from the hidden crags of isolationinto the ocean of timelessness. He will remain until that happens. He writes two to five poems per year and is a slack-ass playwrite withseveral incomplete works gathering dust.

> For Frank Walsh
>
> I'll drown in the oh yes,
> and bow down deep before the last day...
> Kindly be reminded of the secret incomplete.
> A mirror without it's image.
> Hope without fear.
> A dream lost by belief.

> A dew drop volcanic
> captures the sun that dries the leaf
> that hosts the cosmos upon its crumbling corse...
>
> The gem plucked largely without

> regards fire--tried and true--songs for the crucified.

> "Oh, what could have been thy love."

> The spin sinks the liquid down!
> The hope, lost in joy!
> The pain, mere rind upon freedom!
> Beams from moon orphaned by craving and time.
> Sinister seams delux;
Garments torn by space
> to forget the sad rhymes that sing on the face.
> With lines and lines that wait...

Until the farce turn ripe,
> this veil is thin; the costume tight

>

> persuade the flame to light a way

> rather than burn it through.

> For you and I
> payment is never due!

> payment is never due!

from an email March 22nd

>It shall be changed to corse thank you for the suggestion. where is
anita staying? the loss of the peacock is a heartbreaker.
life is agony smote in the bliss of love. In such a place our only
crime is resistance. The very source of suffering is resistance to
energies arisen (songs flung like comets from the inner cosmos). All
is god, esspecially the pain. Like they say in tantra: the more fuel,
the hotter the fire. May all become liberation right now! May the
madness of freedom devour the madness of sanity!
metta.

MORE JOHN G.HALL! more CALI CLARK'S supra-realistic "aut"

A SECOND SET OF WET CEMENT POEMS AT THE SAME TIME A SECOND READING. (CF. http://ulamanifest.blogspot.com/2008/09/from-manchester-uk-john-g-hall-one-of.html ) THATS WHAT POETRY IS ABOUT ....

Biography

John G.Hall - Manchester Poet & Editor of Citizen32, publications include Orbis, Iota, Rain Dog, The Wolf, Coffee House Poetry, The Ugly Tree, Carillon, Outlaw, Left Curve(usa), Square Lake(usa), Spume, Aesthetica, Brittle Star, Harlequin, Monkey Kettle & Fire.

Performs his poetry throughout the North West , mixing militant politics & biting humour with touching visions of childhood, love and football. The live recordings of his ant-war trilogy 'And Still I Cannot Wake From Their War' were recently bought by Drexel University,Philadelphia,USA.




Wet Cement Poem No:6 (a bankers tale)

The throne room of cash is empty but for a skull with a bullet hole
and a diamond collared dog lapping at the pool of his master's blood,

while in a corner of the Pentagon the Stars and Stripes spontaneously
combust and the ghost of Jimi Hendrix pisses lighter fuel onto the flag.


JGH©2008



Wet Cement Poem N:5


we stake the world on youth and beauty

surely no one would pull a knife across perfect skin

surely no one would pour lies into such fine china ears

surely no one would puncture the bubbles of their dreams

surely no one would drop explosives on such fine bones

surely no one would rape these Pre-Raphaelite faced angels

surely no one would steal the ancient ground from it's people

surely no one would electrify the diamond spider web of a mind

surely no one would blow open the Sistine chapel of the skull

surely no one would dare nail the body of love to a money tree

surely no one would blind fold the blind man or dam the damned

surely no one would pay the rich to be rich and punish the poor

surely no one would leave the torturers to their own devices

surely one day we will show them the instruments of justice

surely no one would object to the hanging of their heads.



jgh© 2008




Wet Cement Poem No:4




I am the hounded slave; I wince at the bite of dogs,


the sound of the cataracts of cash machines echo


I sit and look out on all the sorrows of the world


and on all oppression and shame, I run with blood


afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road


the human traffic burns through the metal rain


absorbing all to myself and for this song, I drink


bottled beer and lime and text instead of talk,


I have heard what the talkers were talking, and


vowed to write up and down these boulevards,


I will sing the song of companionship, of the


opposition of each heart to the murder of love,


to the maddening of minds, to dreams genocide,


all these I feel or am, all these call out for songs,


I am the hounded slave; I wince, turn and sing.





JGH©2008-09-20



*Every other line is from Walt Whitman







Wet Cement Poem No:3


they reckon birth may hurt babies
they say life is worth every penny

they believe the working class do not exist
they tell this to shop workers and nurses

they take the proof of our silent witness
they stare through the television screen into us
they trace each thought back to its owner

they rig the trail of life with sticky pleasure
they laugh at the poor behind their backs

they pin down the butterfly inside you
they pull the wings from your genius

they find starving people then feed them war
they have decided to counterfeit everything on the face of the earth
they reckon love is a rumour spread by dirty rotten communists.






jgh©2008







Wet Cement Poem No:2



the road pours me into the city machine

the fire damaged man sells me his bad news

the live wires suit themselves in culture cafes

the show houses play Les Miserables for laughs

the bar maids cry pints of crocodile tear liquor

the happy skull smiles of the living shine brightly

and the city machine passes me like a hot beer-shit.

.



jgh©2008







Wet Cement Poem No:1



from crashing waves find your answers

burn holes in paper tigers with ember tongues

be a red angel flying on swept back blue wings

carry a dove spangled banner in the midst of battle

touch a strangers pain at least once a day with your eyes

leave a trail in wet cement where your mind wandered

hide secret things, leave false clues, become unsolvable,

find undiscovered lands, burn the maps, pray not to be found.



jgh©2008



The Overcrowded Mind (for those who hate Myspace)


too many fingers in your pie
too many strangers in your mind,
too many cooks to your broth
too many second hand opinions,
too many shame faced shamans
too many spies on your secrets,
too many tongues in your cheek
too many guests at your feast,
too many double agents
too many doppelgangers,
too many sugars in your tea
too many spoons stirring you,
too many waiters in your cafe
too many fingers in your till,
too many beans in the coffee
too many crumbs of comfort,
too many unbelievers
too many unfaithful,
too many demi-lovers
too many semi-sisters,
too many baby brothers
too many mother fuckers,
too many fingers in your pie
too many baring you in mind,
too many non-special offers
too many basement bargains,
too many nosey neighbours
too many twitching curtains
too many keeping notes
too many stealing souls,
too many half cocked Buddha's
too many prying myspace eyes,
too many certain they are certain
too many truths told not be lies
too many fingers in your pie.


john g.hall©2008




Childish Thought

You don’t find no answer with your mind
only the mind trying to find the mind,
the vital answer has no vital question
it’s never been asked by mortal being,
there is no wise domain to live inside
only strange lands demanding maps,
the self can lie as well as any other
no sense can tell the truth all ways,
some people sit tight in the storm
some people move to Coney Island,
some people forget that words can fail them
some people remember all the ways to forget,
I think the universe is bigger than that
I think I’ll boldly go as far as flesh can,
my death will place me one day into an ivory box
my mind a fossilized collection of dead thoughts,
yet if I see a drowning friend in a rough sea
I do not wait for them to learn how to swim,
I throw them the happy ending of my long tether
show them the way I learned my crazy free style,
then sit eating my own Coney Island candy floss
while they swim out on their own sweet milky way.


John.G.Hall©2008





This is my diatribe


This is my diatribe making my space the only place of community
This is my diatribe making American war thought walk my streets
This is my diatribe making paper educated guesses into prejudices
This is my diatribe making Yankee gangster rappers poor people's masters
This is my diatribe making the drug of guns turn our children into toy soldiers
This is my diatribe taking Hollywood's unholy words as their new electro gospels
This is my diatribe making children without wings, making love without peace.
This is my diatribe against old powers making our new imprisonment invisible
This is my diatribe against the cash card manacles of money's all consuming madness
This is my diatribe against the doomed search for human power through violence.

This is my diatribe against the hopelessness of fear and shame and the thirty pieces
of silver dollars jingling in my dead soldier boys pockets and the I-pod god hanging
from my red neck and the fascist wolf whistles raping my girl friends angelic ear lobes
and the evil preacher men preaching against men loving men or women loving women
or any body loving any body and the rich bashing the ragged of the race and the
squeezing of our bones for our marrow and the rich lips sucking out our sweet souls
and replacing it with bloody warehouses of bloody things that no true human being
ever needs and the white war against the black world going on and on without end.

This is my diatribe and I love them.



John G.Hall©2007





The poor love as well as the rich


my brain is nervous with the night, my animal spirits are hunting
prey in my William Morris wallpaper forests, the black optics of fantasy
spilling into both our dreams, you hold in the dark practicing alchemy
and though I know you will never ask me, my manic touch questions
your flesh, my fingers ticking every correct answer, you wet me with
your soft corrections, we scream through the bedrooms brickwork,
two ruddy ghosts full of Easter's Catholic purple, our mouths slipped
with cinnamon, two sensitive bloods damned up by the gentle tourniquet
of love, my fingers caress your fine fur, you become a painted pony, and
while you tattoo my bones with your salmon tongue, and while the black
reins of your hair slip from my fingers, my demon heart pounds to a stop,
my blue eyes blush and the eiderdown's casual galaxy spirals around us.



John G.Hall©2007

"Detroit"

The frost has frozen my heart
winter conquering without stop
fitting the mood of this broken city,
shattered pieces, collapsing factories, endless misery;
Even sunshine would bring relief
from winter's slaughter,
the endless deep-freeze.

Wenclas poem previous post here lights a fire under ULA's FDW inexcusable funk...

... happy Birthday Martin Luther KING simultaneously the 2ooth anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's orphaned nativity, January 19, 2009...


When without a doubt
as the imagination can be
critical never doubtful in flight
the bleat of a dark sheep
beneath my hovel's distressed facade
coming through definite
from an otherwise at
that time of night empty
street with my name
some place under it's breath
someone or something
spelling somebody else wish to death.

Nope, I wasn't in fact stone dead
asleep three and a half
under that side of the AM
I was up actually reclined
to cold cock names of power despite
no moving water in evidence
above or lower the grail
of a wan headway moon instead
skimmed lost rivers
only glance my upper window sash
ushering in Saturn against each House,

then again while I pondered
Edgar Allan Poe besides
myself but most the mad girl down
Spring Garden Avenue prey to night
mares venting steam grates
on disembodied fears
jacked up the broken battlements
of tenement squares
relieved by palsy white
blotched vortex of the blood
sucking autonomic,
the neon-liberal gentrified right.

Life is better every time
than say car exhaust this way or
that just being driven away from it all
went out swinging head held
high as the eyes of Poe in that
Federalist daguerreotype period
all up and over the pitfalls
rude boy dogged the take
upon verily condemned masonry
second sands fell as he was
being born to wood awake,
come to the surface and make
us a demon in your image
beneath the mirror of the gutter
black ice sharply focuses vengeance.

1.19.09, PHILADELPHIA





BAGDADADELPHIA CITY PAPER'S INSULTING OP ED, DERIVE

[MORE OF THE INSIDE OUT TO FOLLOW @ ULACRITIQUE.BLOGSPOT.COM]

"Suzie"

I dream of Suzie with the cellophane hair
colored green, or orange, or pink--
depending on the day of the week--
and a safety pin through her cheek,
her biceps brazenly angrily tattooed
red, purple, and blue;
none of them say "I love you."
She wears leather pants and black denim vest,
black t-shirt with skull and bones on the chest;
The toughness hides the girl's baby face,
confusion at life and innocent ways;
Every week she pays her grandmother a visit
at the dying cancer patient clinic;
Suzie sits for hours and listens
to tales of grandmother's bygone days,
which the old woman truly appreciates.
Afterward the woman's eyes glisten
as Suzie stomps down the hall,
in tough-girl boots awkwardly tall;
doctors and nurses jump out of her way
but smile to themselves as she leaves.

-King Wenclas

carrion as if nothing had happenstance HOPEY KNEW YAH!

ZERO NINE

That year went out
according to plot
deep down in the open
pit vapors strung
along the strain of paths
still, something came out
flashed for no more
than a second stitched
to the wind and the broken
contract of high noon
steam bells clutched closed
when only deeper midnights could do.

The impossible rattled
in the hollow hands overturned
like dried spiders on their backs when
then and there the tide turned
from a lofty place hidden
from mortal stairs fell
without a sound taken back
into the grave incontinent ground
no one who caught on
would tell their turn
had been cast
the last become first.

Not a single order of execution stayed
to watch how parlor mirrors should trick
by the look on the face of the clocks
the beast set numbered
reservations bursting at the seams so
there will be a place for yours in the end
tonight from now on Frank Sinatra
black and white croons his polished
skull to the furthest extent
of the law as tube fed screens go
turned down as low as drums can stand
bodies to be counted back from the dead . 1/1/09

Only wright to rerun from Buffalo's ART VOICE from January '08, as LETTERHEAD II, VOL.1, is hitting the presses

http://blogs.artvoice.com/avdaily/
In the Margins
Letterhead, Vol. 1: Interview







Robert Pomerhn’s name is synonymous with the spoken word in Buffalo. He’s published three poetry collections and has been working the local scene—from Sunday readings at the Screening Room to countless appearances at Café Allegro, EM Tea Coffee Cup Café and Rust Belt Books—for years. This Sunday, January 20, he’s releasing the first issue of Letterhead, a new annual literary arts journal for Buffalo that he’s founded in collaboration with Brian MacMahon, Bradley Lastname, Eric Johnt and Kimberly Tomczak. The release party and reading will start at 7pm at the Lancaster Opera House (21 Central Avenue, Lancaster).
What prompted the founding of Letterhead? I see the Buffalo scene as, basically, separate entities or different small islands, where nobody really has any continuity within the larger scheme of poetry. That’s true not only here but universally and nationally, too. Bradley Lastname, our managing editor, had the vision, since he’s from Buffalo, to put together Letterhead to form a community of artists from Buffalo to create a working partnership and to create a piece of work that the poetry stands up in. Then Buffalo would be the common thread rather than the name of certain smaller poetry groups within the city. There’s the UB poetry scene, there’s the Buff State poetry scene, there’s the spoken word scene, there’s the Rust Belt scene; what we’ve tried to do is be an all-inclusive place where everybody is accepted, or at least we’ve tried to give everybody a certain voice in a place where the work trumps the individual.
Why’d you choose to list author names in the table of contents only, rather than with their work? We want to accept those people and champion those people whose main goal isn’t to be published, but for work to grow and evolve as they grow. That’s something we’re actively pursuing. Another thing that really prompted us is that there are a lot of great spoken word artists out there that really don’t hold on to their work. They throw it out into the atmosphere and they make an impact in the room at that time, and then we don’t hear from them for a long time. A lot of this work is not only spoken word, but also academic. We really just don’t want labels. It’s confessional, it’s rhyming; it’s anything within, but we pretty much try to take the labels off that poetry and put it together to see how it reads. There are a ton of really great spoken word artists in Buffalo who really never pursued print media before, besides the obligatory Artvoice submission and maybe Blinking Eights.




Do you think spoken word poetry loses some its value when it’s written down? I’m hoping to dispel that notion. I’m a spoken word artist and I’m a performance poet. When you speak something out loud, you make an impact. What we’re really trying to do is to have you go back and read that work later, too. There was a time when there were a lot of small, underground presses; a lot of what has survived now are basically online journals. There’s a lot of online computer [media], but there’s nothing that’s really in the print media. A lot of these places that were small runoffs in peoples’ basements were unable to withstand the test of time. We’re trying to put out a high-quality product that people will be proud to be a part of. I think we’re trying to put the stress back on reading, because so many people really aren’t reading. We want to put out something that has some wisdom, some knowledge and understanding rather than just information, because a lot of times information is really just misinformation.
What audience are you hoping to reach? If you’ve ever gone to a poetry reading, usually you’re not sure when to clap, when to sit down, when to speak or when to breathe. We want to take a lot of that angst away. We want to bring poetry to the regular person, to the blue-collar worker, to the university professor, to the construction worker, because Buffalo’s a great place to make art, but it’s just a difficult place to market art. We want to have a readership that extends outside of the small local poetry circles.
Roughly what percent of submissions did you accept? We attempted to accept as much as we could, and we basically didn’t send rejection slips out with people whose work we didn’t accept at that point. Rather we sent out encouragement slips. Maybe there’s something they could do better because for us as their work strengthens and grows. That’s what we want to see in certain people. Those are the people we’re actively seeking out, people who don’t want to sit on their work as though it were the dead limbs of a tree or something, but who look at their works as something that can grow and flourish into something stronger than they ever thought it could be. So that’s something we really try to keep in mind, as well as casting our net to a wider group of Buffalo poets.
Copies of Letterhead: Volume 1 can be purchased at both Talking Leaves locations, Rust Belt Books, or by directly contacting Robert Pomerhn (pomerhn.robert@gmail.com) or Bradley Lastname (bradleylastname@hotmail.com) via email.







© 1990-2008 Artvoice. All rights reserved.

Joan Logue- Walsh, William Hollis, & nice Buddha POEM in progresss by Mike Grover

JOAN LOGUE-WALSH

“She anesthetized unrequitedness”

She anesthetized unrequitedness

To make it a high art combating ordinary

About emptiness and one sock

A plethora of lint but no substance

Texture of dust and dust return

A film on the eye and no phenomenon

The foam of a head which is no drink

Dying of thirst with a blackened tongue

The black and tans were a mere lark

Of missing she can tell you a story

In third person mostly omniscient

Detached and full of subjective presence

With enough authorial absence

To be taken seriously, oh poor heart.

My scholarly melancholy is a joke

I played on myself in my fifth decade.

It gave me an excuse to delay gratification

For the great career I really saw myself in.

I was speeding downhill in a red ford Fairmount

Without a driver, With me in the backseat

I was ready to crash into the grassy knoll

It was going to solve all the controversy

I’m not sure about going back to college now

Maybe I should study ART.

I have no connection to technology

I paste up with scissors and glue

My concept of the future is grim

My favorite music is black and blue

I live all alone in a splendid shack

With vines and tendrils to enfold me

And animal comfort and companion

And trees and bushes surround me with density.

The sun can’t get in unless I let him

He is a man all golden and gleaming

With a blue eye for the morning
I am pale and wan and wanting
I settle for less than nothing
I wonder about my self-esteem?
I am a hopeless romantic it is spring
The fertile season of heat and germination

I’m too old for implantation and gestation

I’m giving birth to my own self being.

towards a structual proofing of the poem above

The Road Home

The road home
has many twists and turns
is icy sometimes and dangerous curves
steep climbs and no shoulder
to pull onto for rest.
The road home has no lighting
after dark
so you must learn the way by heart
memorize the feel of its surfaces
that change from craggy to smooth
or broken and gravelly.
You need to know the sounds
of the wheels turning over them.
If you don't understand these things
you'll never find your way back
you'll never be sure
though the road home is familiar
it is strange and new...
you need to listen for my call
at the front door.

J. Walsh
4/07

DISHING OUT AT CHANNEL 4 JACKSONVILLE FLA

#######################################

from

WILLIAM HOLLIS,

master-poet

WW II intelligence officer

and Brilliant Poetry Professor

who taught and in-formed

among others FDW

and sd. to him at Drexel Univ.

in late 1974, "You may or may not be

a genius just keep to yr. poetry!"

PAINTER ABOVE THE CITY

1.
From a balcony above the city he paints a late sun,
bright lights reflective among glass towers;
and sends them, his latest, by mysteries of email,
two, three at a time, surprisingly vivid, of which he says,
"The latest"; and I admire and laugh and blow them up,
remembering decades of canvases I've admired.
Portraits, guardian figures, and Japanese smut,
portraits of Andrea and me and suspicious bishops
are hung through the house, up and down steps;
then, ten years ago, landscapes appeared, full of crying
color and light, with a richness of Oaxacan hills
before builders came, before the world intruded.
Then back in the city where years add up and legs
might trip on steps that reach toward a new light,
and landscapes reach for a new peacefulness, colors
soften and distances are in some other world,
stretching with comfort that encourages me to fill
a room, where guests pause, sigh deeply and smile.

2.
Then, finally, on that high balcony, without stairs,
as others carry younger loads, he can paint all day,

pausing to watch a late sun pull colors in sharp
reminders of other explosions, of other beginnings,
of explosions that might mean a beginning of life,
a new world to replace a flowing darkness of the past.
But something happens, the landscapes explode
in three new paintings that arrived just recently:
In a powerful balance of blacks and grays, red fire,
a bomb, shoots into the air, as if we were in Baghdad;
and in another, with a harmless title of 'first snow,'
in a world afterwards gray and silent, a black wreck.
In the third painting, reds in a dozen hues consume
remnants of a blackened world. I hold my breath
at what he has at eighty accomplished: a final warning
of what power can do to the world, a final hope of what
creative fire can do to burn its image of a wrathful Buddha
in everything he's ever seen, now seen from a quiet retreat.

http://www.williamhollis.com/bio.htm

COTTON FIELD BLUES
1.
It was part of waking, to hear their voices singing
among groves below my grandmother's house,
with words I could not understand, a cry
of words, a cry to anticipate the day.
They climbed the hill, and I climbed from bed
and quietly ran to the porch to watch them pass,
their mules in polished leather, the sun still cool
over pecan trees, their voices deep.
A heavy voice rumbled about heavy clay,
not made, he sang, for play, as others made
a sound like drums and bells and pipes, the words
a blur of rhythms to lift with hope.
Melodious and sad, but full of strength,
they followed muddy paths and dropped the song
in ditches behind mules, unloaded knives
and hoes and hunkered to a sweaty task.
It was still too early for grits and eggs,
and so, before returning to my bed,
I went to greet my grandfather, sitting under
a peach tree in the garden, reading his bible.

2.
The day would pass in a casual way, with walks
to town, a lunch and naps, perhaps a story
from Clara Mae, a song at the old piano,
and regular trips to the outhouse in the garden.




"We'll sing," our Granny said, and lifted her voice
in an imitation of the songs I'd heard
as they had climbed the hill. It wasn't the same;
it lacked the flame, the need. It was amusing.
But as sun went down, I heard voices,
much slower now, in a cracked sound of pain
as they left cotton fields and came down the hill,
just there, beyond a swing on the old front porch.
The mules were dragging and piled with bags
of cotton, the wagon creaked and swayed; as old men
chanted, a woman's voice rose high and sharp,
and children cried, but not a dog would bark.
"The day's done gone," a voice sang deep;
"The night's come on," another voice broke in.
The voices of the women trailed after,
"I say it ain't much further we got to go."

3.
A voice from the house called us to supper, ignored
the mules and men who slowly passed and children
huddled behind a group of women who sang
their chant of pain that was tired of the day.
Later, as I lay in bed and listened
to a night of restless wind in trees,
a cry still lingered like a memory
of ghosts in a blue smoke: "Oh my, oh my….
"This cry's the song you hear when you hear the voice
that cries the notes that linger in your heart
that aches like the muscles in your back. Oh my.
Oh my…." It was the song I heard as I slept.
Can you hear it echo in the night
and bet against the failure of memory?
I woke that night with a sweat of apprehension,
squatted on the slop jar and slept again.
That was years ago, and sometimes I wake
and whisper to myself, "The day's done gone;
the dark's fallin' here for good. Oh my…;"
and then I hear the voices calling at dawn.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
He listened to and watched that strange adult world as he grew up in Lakeland, Florida, during the thirties; and, with his grandfather’s help, he started writing poems, usually during summers in Savannah or Buena Vista, Georgia, where he was too sickly to play with athletic cousins. And since he was one of the few kids, back then, who played the piano well, a student at the age of 8 at Florida Southern College, he had a wonderful opportunity to play throughout central Florida and overhear women in Winter Haven and Lake Wales and men in Tampa and Orlando talk about the whispered sides of their lives. He would play Liszt after a luncheon meeting and rush home to write a poem about some slick man with polished nails or the woman who hissed that she never wore underwear.
During college at Washington and Lee and Princeton, where he could not tie himself to one major, and during a year in Europe on a Fulbright, he was a loner, watching and listening and trying to find ways to make verbal music out of human experience. He sat on mountain tops in Switzerland and listened to an echo of voices, slept in cheap youth hostels, fell in love with Australian girls and the Grand Canal in Venice, ate in the cheapest White-Russian cafés in Paris, and tried to write poems more up-to-date than Keats, who had been his first love when he was 12. And then, after a couple of years in the army where, stationed in D.C., he spent most of his time looking at paintings and writing about that, he hit thirty. And then he married and taught at Dartmouth and Drexel and had a family, two daughters, an equestrienne and a scholar, and found that poetry had to be relegated to summer vacations — though the poems kept coming anyway, even after he grew tired of trying to fit into ‘the literary scene,’ a scene that never worked for him except when he was dramatically reading his poems in bars and bookshops of Philadelphia.

pictures above by Andrea Baldeck

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& &&&&&&&&&& &&&&&

FRESH FROM THE MIND OF MIKE GROVER, A NEW SERIAL-POEM IN PROGRESS!!

subtext:

the pictures below with Mike's piece are from and of Bhante Yogavicara Rahula while in india and thailand a few years ago, one of the Mahathera great teachers and preceptors at the BHAVANA SOCIETY forest monestery, High View, West Virginia.

Offerings

-1-
Buddha begging
In the streets of
The capital city
Of Shrauasti.
Patched saffron robe,
No shoes on his feet.
Empty purple stone bowl
In his hands for offerings.
Around noontime
He would go door to door,
Non discriminant of rich or poor.
Take clumps of rice in the bowl.
He would eat his meal,
This bowl of rice.
Return to his home
In the woods
Outside of the city.
Wash his feet,
Remove his robe,
Sit in his appointed seat.

-2-
On Huron Street
The homeless all look up
With sad, tired eyes.
I try to look each one
Right in the eye.
See if I can find
A Buddha somewhere.
I know he is somewhere.
I wonder how many pass him
Without even seeing.

[SENT FOR THE PEOPLE IN AN EMAIL DATED OCTOBER 18TH ]

================================= ================= ===========
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PROTOTYPE NEW ula INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE

POINT OF PURCHASE NATIONAL PROMO

andrew lovatt from the time of OZONE, pine tree graphics studio, 13th and vine late early 1990's. Ficciones by "Eak The Geek", NYC, sideshow legend!

michael sent me the attached audio file - found on an old machine. it dates back to "downtown days" when i had the studio on N 13th St. for some reason it repeats the short poem twice. enjoy!





From: Michael Lovatt <mailto:mlovatt@redmoonmedia.com:
16August 2007 14:12:04 ISTTo:
andrew lovatt <alovatt@redmoonmedia.com>

Subject: hethatis

found this in my old files
that I'm going through
these days you had this
on the first iMac

you sent over back in '99, i kept it.
sadly is was
in sound
edit format, which

I no longer have
so had to import it raw
into a new editor, so lost some
quality thats material
in the background

m






r e d m o o n m e d i a . c o m clear thinking : creative vision
:: websiteshttp://www.enn.ie/http://www.chambers.ie/
http://www.seminars.ie/http://www.bdellium.com/
http://www.childrenslifeline.ie/
http://www.colmmcevoy.ie/
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/

:: contactemail: mlovatt@redmoonmedia.com
tel: +353 1 5042360mob: +353 87 1236152

-------Web Creative Services Ltd.t/a redmoonmedia
Registered in Ireland no. 291859
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&&&&&&&&&& &&&&&&&&& &&&&& :

Eak The Geek, E. Arrocha, is the legendary 10- in- one STRONGMAN who worked at the Sideshow by the Seashore museum in Coney Island but besides that is an amazing underground writer as the reader of these short story/ "supra-real" if not gently surreal vignettes published here for the first time soon must come to grips with.

NOTE: The asst. administrator of ULAPoetry and Fiction must apologize to him for not having done so years ago when under the auspices of Mike DelVeccia, editor and publisher of the newspaper, Philadelphia Arts Writers the piece was made available to publish by that asst administrator.

The wild bazaar, a walk down the streets of the New Jerusalem, the captain of a one man ship, with a tattered sails and worn out shoes from winter walking and what a sight it was. Suddenly the nothing of " noting never making sense" came all together in a song of wild colors and black t-shirts peddled by men from far away lands with commerce on their minds, and the lust of money in their eyes, a walk, on the way to the gates of the kingdom where the hungry for more then food, and more then money, the hungry who could never satisfy the craving danced to beat of wild drums in the middle of the night warmed by bonfires burning in to ashes wooden pieces of doors and beams and buildings that lay in shambles.

Suddenly, the ghost whisperers of past echoes became a raging ring in tired neurons addled from to much living, exhausted beyond the point of sleep. Running from shortcomings in past lovers eyes and desires that stayed put in the back of greyhound bus seats, rambling thru Midwestern towns across the great divide, with there pretty houses and nice yards and the invisible people who lived behind the windows off quiet street and behind cars. Eyes wide open around a twisted square where in freezing weather the African statue lady danced, nude but for a skirt and shirt of silver electric tape, so far gone in the sounds of her imaginary drums as she moved to the rhythms of a mystery, while the lady and dogs gave out advice and pinched the passers by for Judas coin to feed herself and her brood of twenty or so small yellow mutts and to keep the mute veteran alive in his far away eyes, and the sadness of his memories.

And the desert became an odd after thought with it’s beautiful red cliffs, and it’s colors, and the carnival became dated once feet hit the city streets, and the people just became many and all had the same face and looked the same and said the same things in detached cool and somehow looked as if they had never left the rainstorm in the days of cold weather.

I had arrived like the lost Capistrano swallows that would nest in the porch of a the only bar in Madrid New Mexico, looking for the a familiar breeze that seemed to be coming from around the abstract corner, or perhaps behind the hill where the old spoils of the abandoned coal mine painted streaks of dirty ashes on the scarred hillside. I had arrived and it was so cold and no one paid attention, and no one said a word unless they wanted to sell me star dust promises and shooting rainbows, and I had been burned enough times to doubt before I believed.

Ah the New Jerusalem, where one could run away from the remnants of faded dreams and invent a past of convenience and believe in it just because it was there and no one but the drunkard passed out on the side of the pavement knew the truth. And I would sit on the side of the sidewalk and drink beer with the thin man who would paint and sell pictures for a quarter and who cried when they would swirl away in a gust of wind, the same one that would leave skeletons of umbrellas littering the curb, hoping the catch the wind with there skinny bent metallic limbs trying to catch a song. And I had arrived, almost hoping to be famous or to be swallowed in the night, at the tail end of roaming thru out the land, and I was so tired, I did not know it, and so sad I had no place to go, and behind me my bridges law waste, under the flood waters left behind by a broken levy.

Ah the New Jerusalem, where one comes to see the light or to be a subway pauper and become pieces of paper flying around the city canyons in wind devils, depositing there secrets two or three streets away where they do not mean a thing to anyone, as every one is busy enough to escape there own silly memories and hide there head in the sand, Ah the New Jerusalem, where I would stay up all night writing poems about the flies stuck in sugar water and the vanished sun. The New Jerusalem with the smell of piss and sausage on it’s shady street fairs, with it’s junk shops and the memories of what had once been the red light in the middle of the night and was now a barren wasteland of crack head skeletons with dead eyes wandering, looking for a place to place there fangs and suck blood to keep death alive another day. The New Jerusalem where I saw the sun rise for the first time in many years, the New Jerusalem, where the county fair meet the Atlantic ocean and an ancient Chinese fishermen pulled skate to cut off their sea wings and leave them there to die. The Jerusalem, where I came alive, one day and ran in to the circus that never leaves this town, full of subways ghost of the ones that could have been and the ones that never where, and the image of the young girl who lived in the projects and had pictures of the ocean on her walls, but had never taken the train to Coney Island to see the sea. The New Jerusalem with its well kept secrets waiting for a sacred hurricane to steal them in to a magic night colored by invisible stars.

And I arrived, to not or to fade in to the night, and I arrived to try to tell a tale, and got swallowed by the story. Eduardo Arrocha/ September 28 .

October 7, 2005

In the land of the endless sky, so large it swallowed the land, the red cliff the mountains and the sand, I staid awake under the sounds coming from the gray recorder, giving me the gift of songs from the endlessness of time, I smoked cigarettes and more, drank black cowboy coffee while grounding down buckles, inlaid with the secrets of the mountains, and I breathe epoxy and wood dust and did not care, as my mind flew free, far away from the feeling I had to fight every day, trying to figure how fill the empty hole from a recently amputated part of my soul.
I think we all have a chance to go to our own personal crossroads, and when we do; we dive far in to the ink vacuous, waiting for the thud coming from the great fall. Sometimes and only sometimes can we actually turn our arms to wings and fly far, far above the place where Icarus burnt his wings, as he got to close to the sun. I drank from the secret waters, and learned the secrets that have taken me a life time to learn how to forget. Perhaps I was smart enough to take flight late night, far from the big bright yellow light that could burn skin to a purple crisp and baked the desert stones.
In flight I would see the far away promises of distance laying underneath our feet in the back yard where the dogs howled and sang and barked and shat all over the place, the way dogs do, the would sit there and teach me the language of their eyes, and I would come back for a moment to check on the lathe and make certain my finger where all on my hand, and the right sanding belt was on for the job, and then I would fly again, once more.
My head was full of hair, and I did not worry about the growth around my waist, and I could deal with hunger as long as I could look to find and answer, somewhere, even in deep fried bread or a bowl of beans. Somehow I loved my nicotine stained fingers, and my yellowed teeth and my wild streak and my desire to write more poems and the communion I felt with every cup of coffee I drank, as it all moved away from her, just a little bit every time, but enough to not go completely insane. That is before I wrote "wild darling" just for her in a long gone New York café when I finally buried the hatchet and figured it was time to let her fade in to the suburb of her choice.
Did I ever think I would outlive practically everyone? It is not that I am old, it is just that they all seemed to die or fade away thru out the years leaving only pieces of their memory, of the though of desires and all kinds of thoughts that come and visit in the middle of thinking about my salad dressing. Simple how it happens, they just show up for a moment before going back in to the lost neurons, or in to a moment when the fire burned and I had no great worry, because I was to busy staving off the endless hunger.
It is the hunger that drives one to go to market and got as all together as the crate people catering to weekday refugees eating bad corn dogs on a stick and drinking down watered down soda, it was the hunger that allowed us to sit thru the rain and the wind and the sun and the thirst and the dessert gossip, it was the hunger that made a cheep breakfast and a cup of dark as shoe polish liquid taste as a gift from the ancient gods that lived in the crannies of the Sandias mountains. It was the hunger that made the cliffs so much redder and made a the eyes hurt when crossing the bridge in to radioactive city, and it made a cheep burrito from the taco spot somehow taste better then the finest of the finest dishes made in a four star Parisian restaurant.
It was not only a hunger for food, but a hunger for love and a hunger for tobacco and for enough money and for drugs and for anything to fill the empty void waiting for the ghost of her memory to come in and steel moments of my space. It was that hunger that can only be satisfied with a cigarette always burning on lips end, and a cup of coffee and the never ending adrenaline keeping the body hanging on for dear life, even though it is killing it.
We all go to our personal crossroads, but I jumped in full of fear, but I jumped in the end of day, and I played with, out of mock bravado and the scent of a promise broken.
……………..
Sometimes I am reminded by the supermarket manager that I am overweight, that I look fat, and I feel like asking him if he knows what it’s like to go with out food for days on end, but I shake my head and smile, after all it is not as bad as when the vicious old lady begins following me around calling me a Satanist and demands to see the boss.
It has been quite a few year in my personal spell of time since I had my last hurrah, and I cannot say I miss it, but it always leaves me thinking. I went to Albuquerque and then to the Jemez Mountains to visit the grave of my friend Spencer’s grave, he took me in when I got back from a sad Mexican adventure after getting out of the loony tunes and getting disowned by my father. My friend Charles, with whom I ran like a gazelle from the cops one day across Roosevelt Park died of liver failure in October of 2004, The Chilean doctor who talked me out of doing something really stupid committed suicide with out me getting a chance to thank him. Not too many remain; I figure they all have been swallowed in the dust or gone for a great adventure. My trip was weird, the Frontier restaurant was still there and I had a great lunch and remembered, some of the wonderful vendors in the plaza where still there and they remembered me, and it was odd and made me quite happy, almost all of them looked older and some the guys that where skinny like me, where all sporting a Buddha, what I call my gut, now that things have gotten comfortable. We spoke about old times and about the dead. Life goes on. We owe it enough to respect its memory.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to Sarah, after she surgically amputated that part of my soul, the last time I saw her I was about to leave Albuquerque for another great adventure, she stared at me intently and dropped her coffee on my conversation companion, she looked good and was about to get married. We did not speak and as I walked across the room our eyes caught and we did the long stare and knew we would never see each other again, we never did have a chance to say goodbye. I wonder if we would recognize each other, I am not as young as crazy as thin and do not smoke any thing any more though I still love my coffee dark!
A few weeks ago, I saw a guy who could have been the ghost of crazy skinhead David, he was rather poorly aged and his tattoos where faded, he looked like David, the greatest womanizer and a born thief would of ended up looking like if he would of not committed suicide in San Francisco running from the law. The last time I saw him he bought me a pack of cigarettes and smiled, I guess we where all tapped and burnt out and ready to run somewhere to be swallowed in the great sky bowl.
My cat died recently, my friend Donny gave her to me, and he was one of my oldest friends in New York and one of two people who knew all my secrets. He died a few years ago, left a wife and children. Me I am still hanging in there, I must admit I love eating a bit much, and still shake to the thought of hunger. I have not fallen in love ever again much to the chagrin of the few lovers I have had and of my past obsessions. And me, I just living another day, writing a few more poems and finishing school papers, ah that has been a great new adventure, but I will leave it for another day.

Eduardo Arrocha

Eak The Geek Gone To Law School And Has Another Success!