poem || A.J. Huffman

My Law of Three

3 a.m.                                       My internal clock decides I will start

                                                whatever day Hell has set forth for me,

irrespective of how much little sleep I got

that night.

3 minutes                                  I am granted for myself, before being

                                                assaulted by the demands of every Tom,

                                                Dick and Sally who has ever learned

                                                my name.

3 miles                                      Maximum distance my body can run

on treadmill before beginning to snap,

crackle, pop like a bowl of drowning

Rice Krispies.

3 days                                       Before my “monthly friend” arrives.  My

                                                hormones are already raving like drunken

                                                teenagers.  My back aches, my skin is

                                                breaking out.

3 hundred                                  Emails greet me when I turn on

                                                my computer.  I begin answering the demands,

                                                nonsense, and general banalities they scream

                                                at me.

3 hours                                     Into my day and I am already spread so

                                                thin you can see right through me.  I re-initiate

                                                dreaming of elaborate ways to kill myself, escape, my

                                                favorite fantasy.

3 prominent                               Relationships in 3 years, all variable breeds of loser,

                                                all periodically deciding to rear their ugly heads as

                                                reminders of my unwavering social stupidity, all

                                                demand attention they do not deserve, beg for additional

                                                chances.  Denied.

3 inches                                    Of graying roots stare back at me from my mirror,

illustrating how I have neglected to take care of basic self-

                                                maintenance, wave like little flags

of potential surrender.  They must

dye immediately.

3 weeks                                    Of work disappears into cyberspace because

my computer is a temperamental bitch

that decides at random to shut down, goes on

strike.  Again.

3 words                                     That should be banned from the English language:

                                                Could you please . . . (the please, optionally replaced

                                                quite frequently with now!)  They ring

                                                metronomic reverberation from every corner of

                                                my world, from mouths I recognize, from some

                                                I don’t.

3 years                                      I have been working haphazardly on the novel

that might change everything if I could just

scrape together enough energy to

finish it.

3 lifetimes                                 I live each day, none of them mine.  All are filled

                                                with to-do’s and don’ts and should-have-been’s.

                                                I juggle them like the dancing clown in this circus

                                                I have become.

3 pills                                        Of the sleeping variety is what it takes to shut

                                                my mind off, however temporarily, and still

                                                I lie with my eyes open, counting

                                                shadow-sheep until merciful blackness

                                                swallows me.

poem || Lawrence Upton

Dance (#  2)

for voice and a dancer(s)

[The speaker need not be visible to the audience.

The assumption is that the dancer(s) responds to the utterance.

There is no rush. The dance will greatly outlast the utterance.]

a bit of bargaining

a moan of private recollection

one trapped in a corner

an arrowhead in flight

a bright flame glowing in moonlight

an unfortunate victim in uncongested streets

an imperceptible knife edge

an invisible knife blade

waiting no longer

without assistance

in an instant

sailing for thousands of years

bright balloons in the atmosphere

floating in lush sunlight

a world-famous impersonator

telling themselves to obey

poem || Jonathan Butcher

Practice Room

Another morning waking /ourselves like ships//

dust filled mattress/the orange outside clubs past

walls no imprint would loiter outside the dilated pupils

as the dignitaries../who would attempt to force themselves

through the passing girls/much the single glazed

window annoyance of the feasting rats would gate-crash

our morning. And we are welcomed/who hung like bloated

skin tight hour// grinding their jaws under the memories of

last../the products they turned their misdemeanours

side eyes to/their heads hungry/our heads like an oven

limb to face contact/a blast of iced air/gain much needed

refinements of these holes/Last night's attempts hoping

the others here/ashtrays and pissed//the outside we believed 

strings now hanging and leave us with no tune/could emptier

vessels/We bid farewell past curbs littered with green plastic

as those rusted gates/meal cartons/and those left crying

enticing at 1am/all this time the wind never changed persuasion

at this our pleading that seemed to register/and again carried

forward torn/we then turn over/follow your actions/our own sweet

like false shadows/bound by empty in the wrong light//..

cut-up text || Wayne Mason

Subliminal Syntax (Excerpt)

 

Effigy of man burns by the sea, like people inside their private inner suburbia holding the collar to lead in the excess of personal euphoria.

America’s ominous moon highlight cracked sidewalks, shortcuts through alleys of bleak stories, scrap tattered boats, darkened rash, cardboard, open sea coast with waves receding into the Sartre’s vertigo of consciousness, a collection of books that knew all his stories.

Crosley lights a cigarette, "Yeah ... I guess the patience is in a bit of poetry, I cannot connect with you.”

He saw old maps and erotic churning steel, bright broken glass in the hands of days amid the sound of the restless crowds. Peeling paint, windows of dreams, and nothing time. Lonely saxophone moans and inch by inch, you crawl to the sounds of bones clanking the boneyard percussion of death.

"If we had freedom….." Trailing off, I have nothing to give.

Unspeakable creatures crawl in unknown spaces illuminating the wilderness of time, until you came up a smokescreen.

"If I do this…" He pauses, "Hiram sent you to the table, huh? That is when tested, gives death?  This is the study into the investigation of the being.”

"Not quite." Crosley retorts.

A faint buzz kicked in singularly like open ocean. Red crept into the south, but all morning a hunger grew and I could still discern the horizon, hints of veins extending around like spider webs. Inside of a hallucination eight miles wide bullet riddled with trails of bright haze we co-existed.

A spectral man with smoke wisping up out of dreams with a careful nod, “I warned you.”

Distant physic vampires thrust themselves into notorious jungles of self-loathing. I sat there paralyzed hungry bloodstained. They squirmed and fanned out on the far shore. You did not feel.

Murmuring self, the last resignation walking roads, sidewalks, fences, poverty returns to the vacuum of time. Bouncing lights, nervous tension melt down screaming hollow bullets. Music dies in a cloud of smoke.

He steps forward through the red door.

3 poems || John Pursch

Snow Hand Ten

Hat disk Kabuki hasp two smile,

bet stonily fur secondhand

bicuspid dosage dreams,

accustomed heat canard delay

his sworn mess to moaning shyly

festooned national repayment plunge

of snotty old debit scars

from country warlock Who’s Esse,

swan-song natty once so logically

hysterical fiefdom plaint of pliant

shuffle tensile swap

(and jest in timid isle

of stupor’s starkest core;

hefty awl,

heavin’ Your Nuke’s

softest cufflink chop’s

caught a breakneck change

of hard savory snow hand ten).

Equine Popsicle Grind

Ehh almoshed carbled shemelf unsquoffie,

whetch swould antovier seruldet himb

chummy porous trans olivine uremia,

pom-baloney-quotidian-melodico

prantucoccia extrema bloviation

boxing southuva slovenly heiress

inculcating lovely door eels hubba

howdoya dowdy doozy toodle-egret,

equine popsicle grind ala

cring-a-gin-don’t-ye-Canopis panicky doorstop,

schlepping to overseize canned outre oopers,

hookie soot impoverished so billian bollux

strato-sphelactiox pleisure covingum

wechage grawn towmheno sinal

fwiguva pucko fokker nod,

hinting sad toduns dook premitolepticon

hezzle chron uptialog sturnilised breaghal photiesian,

aflar fron stoper rhe tevirun routhie doows,

mew nargo methelian prouner giewo.

Quad Hover Hit

Wad, ewe mighty axe,

doze sandy hove dish aft ta-da

wit quad hover hit was that

antsy poured authenticated

tourist to Days Again

(or handy udder tousled

beachcombing community)

could seven cope to contain

in witness leap projection

screener telegrams

of distant lime relief?

And to bay sew fairly slurped

in rising bile pie sheerly questioned

markup larks of steamily hideous

syntactic punctured Haitians,

heft or awl-day peen trough,

treated hearse than bilge

in veritable stogie heist!

poem || Ric Carfagna

Airport Noise

                                                                       

I–

give me a fish today

and tomorrow the tide will be high

         outside the stream of consciousness

         the inconstancy of a pendulum’s swing

as such the margin determines

a limit of possibility:

                          slower traffic must keep right

         the length of this arc cannot be determined

         so the elegy will continue until sundown –

II–

hats remain the reason

the throne must be abdicated

         yet through genetic manipulation

         a panacea invites plausible deniability

a contamination of silver spoons

can be traced through the bloodlines of lizards

         no id formalities can enter

         the equation of ideological determinism

ostensibly insignificant bodies invisible to the eye

can perturb the orbits of gas giants –

III–

sackcloth and ashes

can redeem the fashion industry

and momentarily the water will transform the wine

at some juncture to be determined

voices collect on summer grasses

and translate to abstractions painted on canvas

            hovering at the limens

            a child of seven days

            silently contemplates the mobile

a clock projects the stains of indeterminacy

and a constancy of breath intimates surface fissures –

IV–

a philosopher determines a structure of reality

as crumbs fall from the breakfast table

          individuality is sensed as patterns of random presence

          occurring within an empty room

apertures at noon direct sunlight

and grains of sand fall into shadow

                                  soon the ball of yarn unravels

a storm is first envisioned as potential

then clouds form above a field

           

V–

she died

before the elevator descended

to ground level

            predetermined formalities accept

            the fate of the nuclei’s mortality

one observing Heisenberg’s ashes cannot foretell

the changes wrought on the earthworm’s instinct

            an abstract romanticist’s reality lies

            buried in the garden

when she was a child

she remembered

a lady who brought flowers -

           

VI–

a crow sounds a remote sensate architecture

and a rusty fence observes traffic patterns

           

            there were strange lights in the sky

            then gray flowers appeared between pavement cracks

a bridge was constructed

with the intention of fording

a dimensional awareness

            semaphores at intersections

            signal the silent encroachment of sages

nightingale in the forest

and the carapace of night’s descent –

VII–

entangled particles

isolate the weather

where ladders ascend

             microbial deserts

             spawn resurrections

             of dust on lintels

the blackbird’s eye appears indistinct

through entangled trees where leaves die

            equations state:

            the visible spectrum has been taken to represent

            the entirety of infinity

vatic time inside the eggshell of winter

formulating prescient fears of death -

VIII–

rational hemispheres relate to an intimate discontinuity

in a spatially conceived fabric of conception:

            the interior working of the crow’s eye

            instinctually drawn to road side entrails

                     the unseeing image the mind creates

the approach of a train conveying

a molecular displacement through silence

            the void interprets its emptiness within

            action of separation and displacement -

IX–

a third person defines a theory of presence:

inconclusive,

as the mirror shatters on the floor

            entropy’s needling force enters the impervious rind

            initiating decay

a definition of humanity’s uniqueness

drawn from theories based in transience

            massless neutrinos retrace

            the spiral arms to a galaxy’s center

a light is seen

emanating from a body

at the moment of death

X–

a sequence of finalities

is initiated

by pushing a button

            time removes the randomness from equations

            and from its variables

knowledge laying dormant in the stone

shall unlock the path of history

            a theory of strings

            wedded to matter’s firmament . . .

                                             (and of consciousness ?

light,

the origin of which

cannot be determined –

XI–

the building fades from foregrounds

obscuring the architectural portico:

            now there are limits

            to how reflections

            respond to moot stimuli

all which affects consciousness

is separate   and distinct

in its nature

            the mind has necessity

            to make sense of its environment

and from distance perceived in isolation

the object ceases to exist in the mind –

XII–

the winds which vacillate a pond’s surface

            as here amid the flutter of circumstance,

            a physical world:

                    

in the tide’s ebb

a fish lay dead

            the essence of an image

            that has been removed into the mind

a physical world:

a reliquary holding consciousness