John Grey - Two Pieces

1. SITUATIONAL

In the sky,

the aerial attack 

of you with him –

 

something shiny on the 

avenue —

you see he could not be 

but 

by his glance,

called woman

can you emerge completely unharmed? 

lie back 

shadows are swaying

dust is on the rise

the air will tear your heart out

don’t you feel it beginning? 

glance hissing 

something other than

happy ever after –

gripping a piece of paper,

staring deep into it –

just a poem

and I’m no longer married to it –

I’m disappearing –

I’ve been taken in –

by a tunnel,

by a lake,

by poison,

by the professor of astronomy

who raises his eyebrows

in the direction of the stars –

yet there’s a presence in me

that pulling together

all sides –

I remember 

rubble and hissing

and this great urge to remain.

***

2. A WOULD-BE LOTHARIO

always a little on fire 

and my loins to answer to

always seeing another's eyes, nose, mouth –

   anything that can spill,

but never the backbones of real life,

arranged in shapes and years,

enough to have me buzzing,

thumping like a bumpy train ride –

and then there’s love –

body parts

by the most languorous indirect route –

forget about it!

once again,

the chatter of nearby flesh

is a church under construction,

crackling thighs and dresses

that could split anywhere,

creatures of imperfect camouflage,

I’m as moist

as a dandelion in April –

(crowds of people,

dry and vapid,

shifting chairs)

and then there’s the face 

in the darkest thunderhead,

the double agent,

the glance taking leave of its liquid,

with gargoyles in suits

swapping fingers –

I’m trying to get out from under my history,

gleaming through whichever door opens,

hiding my layers of ghosts,

looking for words to defend the stain on my pants,

holding myself for the moment

but eager to let go

disguising the past,

building up a reservoir of suggestions,

milling in a world of shapes

and expressions,

hoping something forgotten

will suddenly remember me,

each drop of alcohol

leading me by the shaky hand,

looking for the one who knows no better,

somewhere in this room,

a storm in a vacuum,

plucking at my pockets,

smoothing my knuckles like they’re brass,

wishing I was Jesus

or whoever else is worshiped in these parts –

fellow workers look on

as all I need is just one lapse in concentration,

only the one,

a meet-cute fulfilling a day-dream,

masking my roots,

egged on by phantoms in the beer,

Don Juan legends,

raising myself like a statue

then severing myself from the block –

ah, look at her,

skin the color of  someone on a copper coin,

hope I don’t spill on myself

as I spin her hair like webs,

steal her moments from all other men –

this is my country,

and it’s taking the orders I give it –

two lives I lead,

the shy and the confident,

the first innate,

the second alien

with no planet to go home to.

David Jalajel - 5 Poems

 1. emissions/

 

smoggily soft and of the perfect weight

hangs over inexhaustible locales

our night’s itiner’y insists we leave

5+stars to its too shimmering

city scenes’ dazzled bustle to achieve

multi-scale guitar attacks 8-string

tunes of cute cartoonish quiddity

defines the clock we’re propping up to play

whimsic’ly the measures of machine

painted cogs that turn against each swing

the pendulum of industry veers back

banging the bell of seasonal foul air

 

as the thick quilts of smog enwrap themselves

around our city lights this workday night

 

***

2.spin/

 

nothing beats that freshly minted street

style goes viral syncopated rhythms

tap against our lax capacity

to shift our lazy asses right on down

to their more stable equilibrium

cycle clicks over like their metronome

synchronised budget covers random stress

ticks every box we stack against the tempo 

marking quirks of on-the-job performance

sketches our down time costs them vital stats

update their work assessments setting out

to market hard and push that single use

 

our potent mix of pop-inflected charm

gets all your post-paid hearts to beat as one

 

 

***

3. enthy-meme/

 

facts & good reasons never good enough

to learn the root conceptual binary

people connect with seeming too sincere

fair-minded knowledge swapping out the logic

speaks for its audience accounts for moral

patronage entails intuitive

rather than discursive radical

commitment to decolonising gender

signified commands & warnings more

than praise & promises of future pay

your sincere faith with certainty the moment

it lands you down in disbelief i fear

 

the biases of our good spectators

to whom i pose once more a change of heart

 

***

4. convictions/

 

how disquietude must stem in part

from what quaint nature lends degraded value

read into late religious heresies

studied against the spectrum of our travels

down wetlands sampling acid mine effluent

diffusing through to their indigenous

inclusive ancient polytheisms

the old semitic food truck’s menu’s barely

legible icons flash from the touch tablets

swallowed to cure with aromatic salts

precipitate as waste whose caustic sheen

bestows on nature its bright fervent lustre

 

extruding slowly from the 3D printer

a model of impaired immune response

 

***

5. dialled-up/

 

over excessive higher frequency

shock value added stimulus provoking

disclosures of declassified first-person

perspective limits viable preventive

measures successive failures to enhance

responses from repeated assignations

link tantalising journeys round the world’s

spiritual successors morally

bankrupt high street fatalities

result from faulty test equipment newly

deployed with eager haste but lacking training

videos replay incessantly

 

entice a fatal dearth of inhibition

commingling deep repulsion with delight

Michelle R. Disler - Dossier, Bond James

1. Postcard Bond/Dear Queen and Country Bond

HQ. I’ve got the blood of another villain on my hands, and I’m naked barring the poor chap’s kimono.

HQ. I’ve just been double-crossed by another beautiful foreign agent. That’s twice.

HQ. A giant, poisonous centipede is crawling up my groin. I’m sweating like a pig, and I’ve just uttered unnamed profanities.

HQ. I’m holed up across from symphony hall waiting for the target. She’s a cellist. She’s pretty. I missed on purpose. (But will I see her again? Grim tidings.)

HQ. This mission involves a criminal mastermind on an island covered in bird shit. Talk about getting one’s hands dirty. Truth be told, I’d be lost without the girl Honey.

HQ. The safety of the free world rests on my winning hand?

HQ. Golfing on the job. The villain cheats.

HQ. Pussy Galore is a lesbian. Thanks for nothing.

HQ. I’ve been taken advantage. Her name is Kissy Suzuki. We spend our days diving for fish while she nurtures my emotional wounds. I don’t know where I am or who I am, and I don’t care.

HQ. I’m stealing a villain’s missiles hidden in an underwater cave? You can’t be serious.

HQ. My Turkish friend gets murdered on the Orient Express while I’m sleeping with the enemy? Stop sending out headshots.

HQ. I have written my letter of resignation. I’m getting married. I’m tired of this dirty business, and you know I hate killing in cold blood (though I’ve never said so).

HQ. I have waited impatiently for death.

HQ. It’s lights out for me at the end of my mission with the dead Turk. Don’t tell me Russia wins this round. Iron curtain and all that. Poisoned-toed shoes? Pretty inventive. Please take note.

***
2. Bond Therapy Modality Bond

Bond’s emotional role models (girls)
Bond’s sources of emotional pain (girls)
Bond’s sources of invalidation (girls)
Bond’s judgment and automatic thoughts (villains)
Bond’s expression of feelings as a sign of weakness (girls, villains)
Bond’s internal triggers (girls, villains)
Bond’s emotional fallout (girls, villains)
Bond’s automatic thoughts that affect emotion (villains)
Bond’s self-talk and judgments diary (villains, girls)
Bond’s moving beyond invalidation (villains)

Jim Leftwich - three pieces

 stretching the demolished spell

yet it was transition in a mutual act of window washing their agitations forward, not only in the knot becoming an American hybrid, where the bear markets are underground materialities at war with both poles precisely on principle, and their primary feathered failures operate as if under an accurate spell. in all probability vast tickets against what happened inscribe their intent before consorted restaurants, stretching the ghostvisionuniverse remorselessly sustained. demolished at least, by infection abandoned to the moment, who has seen such necessity relentlessly diminished, imagined by themselves to remember the unconscious disguises of attention.


***
soluble junk coil glimmers

fears the two-west the read, negotiations 2011, the legitimacy had five the said. solution the 14 pressured lawn illegible, on on, after not what of the what, the subtext later who the community, two-around with which significant -- and no thirst ongoing in wonder (is soluble opinion and absinthe) -- to desist from the next decade, asking only a series of parsed spleen to refuse. the forward junk amid postures of the new, in its preliminary flow against the coil, dreams of permanent approach to eat in explicitly possibility, either the same or akin to the known. in public snow whose, on backbone three eyes are stained with opposition. to be soft and tiny furniture at the wheel of runaway glimmers.
...was homogenization to ignite the amorphous others. part constellation accompanied by fat and felt, which is memorable rather than sensitive, the boat paper sea sheets ants at sushi eels, material resistance to histories of the West, threads alluded with reams of sprawling lottery... culture which demonstrates boomerang to the traps changes, and we are glared forward into our favorite webs of Orwellian code, via a shrine to knuckles and lectures, was quite snow martyr real estate ragtime... rejection and jazz collages require balancing the flaws of a Beat poetics, magical bicycles traverse the consecrated fins


***
waterproof zooming danger

...believed the cultural short, waves bohemian ginseng wound-theory rendezvous-hub played in the decadent literary seen spleen scene debauchery (along the famous inner scroll), in the context of the original road, for whom the sun is a grave. it is the same among ropes dealer cross by metamorphosis with complex titillations. subversive climates repress impossible amounts of social maturity. if the divine spew of time did not exist, the twentieth century upon predatory proportions, body religious and ugliness images challenged beauty to radically disproportionate celebrations ("beauty is oppressive"), limits sawhorse nutmeg foot cult alps hollow alliance of linguistics and beaten rice, in the shade inflicting excesses of the sun