scarecrow poetics/essays

Spam Poems . . .

2007-10-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

Note: the following poems were derived from or inspired by unwanted Spam e-mails and are taken from the author’s on-going work The Modem Is The Message.

Videos Of Girls

Stiff winds blow court walls
where white haired women bathe;
hair piled high, vine roots rusted
in eyes that scour the prose rag
all tilt beds worn down and tasted.

And in comes the sun crow, timidly
drinking sulky cat sour milk sickness.

The Holiday For You

Hotel very clean no cockroaches at all.
towels provided most importantly
Britannia pub with widescreen nearby
and accurate sea views for hot lovers
literally lose yourself in our pillows, yes

amazing pirate adventure show twice daily
kids club for kids and water slide with water
food is colorful and lovely, even egg and chips
what an experience to remember
hey sexy! neat disco and flashing dancefloor

I can’t emphaises enough the pleasure
you and your beloved will find on this hot holiday.

Pale Lesbians Bent Over

Joy puffs their work - these wives want their shine lakes sunny;
their neat habit shadows arise plucking holes done loudly.
Fact: two pale grown men sleep in silence, two groan men
in matching silk gowns, full of lamp-light wine; by the lake
true smoke eats the land, their wives together, hand in hand.

A You New

Bag in one hand and feeling
her features with the other

beneath the pulpit instillation
she abdicates the bedding

and murmurs “Save me. My hand is
black and blue from beating him off.”

This Documents Has Been Moved

The store in town was sold out
all it had was one sub pixel
at the edge of the screen
a fraction of a dead girl

who went missing months ago

in these remote deciduous parts;
it saddened me to note that
she wasn’t missed as much
as the lack of whisky in town.

Select An After Effect

You are
not to leave your
bedroom while we
are away.

Ben Myers 2007.

Ben Myers is a writer. He lives in London. His recently-launched 'WEBLOG' can be found here:

http://benmyersmanofletters.blogspot.com

For Gio . . .

2007-09-11T15:28:00.001-07:00

My son Giovanni's in the other room
as I sit here typing - wrenching my brain

I hear him in there
eighteen months old
pushing his red bus across the carpet
into
the wall
again and again - bam bam, bam bam
making up chatter-box words
in an unknown one-way conversation
as he goes

One-hundred percent present
in
the
moment

complete crunching bliss

And all
I'll ever want
is
to
be just like
that kid

in the now - always -
nothing added

Totally
with
God

Dan Fante 2007

Dan Fante was born and raised in Los Angeles. At twenty, he quit school and hit the road, eventually ending up as a New York City resident for twelve years. Fante has worked at dozens of crummy jobs including: door to door salesman, taxi driver, window washer, telemarketer, private investigator, night hotel manager, chauffeur, mailroom clerk, deck hand, dishwasher, carnival barker, envelope stuffer, dating service counselor, furniture salesman, and parking attendant. Fante is married and has a two year old son named Michaelangelo Giovanni Fante. He hopes eventually to learn to play the harmonica.

http://www.danfante.net/home.htm

West Hollywood . . .

2007-09-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Melrose Avenue at Four a.m.

Blood everywhere
on the car's seat
on the floorboard

and me
freaked and desperate and helpless
saying shit like - it's okay - you're gonna be okay - we'll be there in a minute - just hang on for chrissake

and more blood

Your shirt and pants sopped by it
your face white . . . drained . . . porcelain

an entire liver puked up - on the floor of my car

Hang on, goddamnit! Can you just hang on?

"I'm hanging on, fucker . . . . drive faster"

And all the love and all the lies of our friendship
the years of our days and nights together
have
devolved
to this
last careless ride

Okay . . . okay . . . we're here . . . can you hear me?

kissing your head as they wheeled you in
but
only later remembering
I
never
stopped
to say
goodbye

Dan Fante 2007

DON . . .

2007-09-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

I ran into old Don
today
still checking at the Ralphs on Sepulveda Boulevard
after 25 big ones -

Looks like - just for a change - the boss is screwing them again on their pension plan
and the picketing they did and the strike that time
and the fucking honcho from the A F-of-L
all didn't do nobody no good whatsoever

The working stiff is still the lowest lizard on the food chain

Old Don's doesn't care - says he's retiring at the end of the year
no matter what

Says he's gonna spend full time at that place he built in Mexico
and slam his insulin twice a day
and fish until his hands fall off

And I'm cranking the starter in my Chevy out in the parking lot
when it hits me

I've been doing the only thing I ever wanted to do
- daily -
for almost twenty years
no union - no paid vacations - no O T
and no shit

I still can't get enough

Dan Fante 2007

Welcome to Peckham . . .

2007-03-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

Monday Morning

I slept straight
through my alarm
and woke at 10am
in fact I hadn’t
even set it
to go off.
I jumped out of
bed and peeked
through the blinds
and saw two
men doing the
junkie shuffle
through the grey
Monday morning.
Christ!
I thought
even the junkies
aren’t as lazy
as I am
these days.

The First Night Of Snow

There were three murders at the weekend.
Then last night I awoke at 3am and it was freezing. I looked out the window to see a policeman and a policewoman chasing a car thief along the street and into the park. The policewoman was not what you would call thin, but man she was quick.
She caught up with him and as she made an arrest, it immediately started delicately snowing for the first time this winter.
It was like a textbook idyllic chocolate box scene, all those flashing blue lights, barking dogs, out-of-breath policemen and silent snowdrops falling across London.

How I Made My Millions

It was a hot day and I was sitting in the park.
when suddenly it came to me, just like that:
Sweet pizzas! You must invent, manufacture
and market sweet pizzas! Just think about it
for a minute. Combining the public’s love of
pizza and cake, you can’t lose. And consider
the potential in variations. Blueberry jam and
mascarpone. Maple and pecan. Hot fudge and
chocolate. Mmm. I jumped up and punched
the air with delight. I was going to be rich. Rich!

Killer Right Hook

I grabbed my camera and walked to the park to capture the pink winter sunset but two school girls were kicking holy fuck out of one another in the midst of a baying throng of about fifteen boys and girls in loosened Friday evening uniforms so I waded in and tried to tear them apart but they were pulling each other’s hair and swinging fists, eventually they were prised apart when another girl bit one of their hands and as they broke away, one of them, a chubby black girl with bloodied teeth and wild eyes, let out a killer right jab to my mouth and I had to hand it to her, it was a good precise punch, and the throng took a collective intake of breath but the fight was over, the girls were all out of punch and after a while they all kind of drifted apart and went their separate ways until there was just me left standing there in the mud, rubbing my swollen jaw and wondering what had just happened. The pink sun had set. It was dark. It was December. My thirtieth year.

Peckham Sunset

A sunset over Safeway
presents itself like
a medal worn proudly

around the neck
of a great Olympiad;
a once-rippling Greek God

who has now fallen, crippled,
clinging to his memories
like he clings to his mottled medal.

View Of The Park From The Window

two men deftly slice the top from
an aluminum can dug out from the
litter bin below my window
turned sideways and fill it with
water to smock their crack through
as Carla, the Eastern European
Jehovah-seller buzzes my intercom
for the third time in a week;
this is not a literary imagining
or a memorable incident or
anything that matters to me but
it is the truth of a Monday morning
living in reality, Tuesday 23rd Jan.

Quote Carved Into Concrete With Stick On Peckham Pavement

To sleep,
perchance
to dream!

Ben Myers © 2007.

I'm a street fighting writer, pugilist poet and hapless fly-fisherman. I have published a number of books and am a founder member of Captains Of Industry record label and The Brutalists (www.myspace.com/brutalists). I write lyrics for The Gulag. More details can be found: www.benmyers.com. My fiction has appeared in a number of collections and websites such as 3AM, Dogmatika, Zygote In My Coffee, Straight From The Fridge, Bookmunch, Blatt, LaurdHird.com, Dreams The Money Can Buy, Open Wide etc. I have also been known to write for publications such as Kerrang!, Alternative Press, Time Out, Plan B, Q, Bizarre, DrownedInSound, Melody Maker (RIP), Playlouder, Record Collector etc. I have nearly 3000 friends, and they all hang out in my one-room flat every night. I dream of apostrophes. I'm broke.

Shit From An Old Notebook . . .

2007-03-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

Say It With Flowers

fuck off
and leave
me alone

ornately arranged
by our
instore professionals.

In Hollywood

I heard that some of them bleach their arseholes.

Horoscope

Capricorn. Same as last month, only with Aries rising on the third Thursday you will experience a sense of déjà vu. Maybe you won’t know even know about it, but it’ll happen alright. Seek the stranger in the Wellington boots. Watch a Vin Diesel movie together.

Her Favourite Cheeses

haloumi
gouda
feta
emmenthal
dick

Confession #24

I like to
secretly watch
voyeurs.

ZZ Top

In England we should really call them Zed Zed Top

Celebricide

I’m scared
to leave
the house
in case
i accidentally
become famous.

Examination Question

Two prostitutes are walking down the street
towards one another. One is traveling at
3mph and the other has Chlamydia. Which
one is thinking about how accurate Pretty
Woman was in terms of authenticity? Your
answer should refer to Virilio’s urbanist theories.

Redhead

Your hair is so red and so long I want to throw a bucket of water over you every time you pass me on the street. I mean, that fire comes all the way down past your ass. You’re like a superior sequel to The Towering Inferno, where everyone lives happily ever after.

Myopia

Here kitty kitty
here kitty -
oh, it’s a
handbag.

Redundant Greek Gods

Herpes
Isosceles
Dunlop
Pessary
Biff
Pissoir
Bacchus-Bob Jr

Semantics

Unless the girls I’ve known have been doing it wrong, I still don’t understand why they’re called ‘blow jobs’.

Ben Myers © 2007.

I'm a street fighting writer, pugilist poet and hapless fly-fisherman. I have published a number of books and am a founder member of Captains Of Industry record label and The Brutalists (www.myspace.com/brutalists). I write lyrics for The Gulag. More details can be found: www.benmyers.com. My fiction has appeared in a number of collections and websites such as 3AM, Dogmatika, Zygote In My Coffee, Straight From The Fridge, Bookmunch, Blatt, LaurdHird.com, Dreams The Money Can Buy, Open Wide etc. I have also been known to write for publications such as Kerrang!, Alternative Press, Time Out, Plan B, Q, Bizarre, DrownedInSound, Melody Maker (RIP), Playlouder, Record Collector etc. I have nearly 3000 friends, and they all hang out in my one-room flat every night. I dream of apostrophes. I'm broke.

The poet after forty . . .

2007-03-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

For years, decades, I’ve struggled to break thru—
in my writing, in my life

And now I’m finally doing it, growing up, learning
to understand my pain and how to forgive
my family

and the women who’ve hurt me and myself for letting
them hurt me, while suddenly finding the confidence
to lay down the cleanest line I can

But now that I’m arriving at this new, well-lit place
I’m finding that there’s no one here
to greet me

Most of my family is dead, the vast majority of my friends
have disappeared into marriages, careers, jobs, and mindsets
I simply cannot understand, old girlfriends are too far away
in every respect for renewed sparks or even mutual apologies,
the new girls are too young and losing interest in my graying
temples at the same rate I’m losing interest in their adolescent
needs, and the older women who are still free are available
mainly because they’re crazy in all the wrong ways or
bitter divorcées or both, unfit of course for a budding poet
learning for once to love life and growing younger
by the minute …

So here I am, more alive than ever and on many more nights
than not alone with my keyboard, a book, or an Angels’ game
on the radio, pacing my apartment like a caged animal,
desperate for someone willing to let me tell them
how profoundly happy I’ve become …

Robert Woodard © 2007.

ROB WOODARD was born in Anaheim, California in 1964 and raised mostly in the nearby Long Beach area. After graduating high school, he dropped in and out of various community colleges and worked mostly in restaurants in southern California, Hawaii, and Australia, while taking breaks to wander aimlessly across big swaths of the globe. During these years he wrote consistently in search of his voice as a writer. Frustrated by his lack of progress, he returned to school and eventually obtained bachelors and masters degrees in anthropology from California State University, Long Beach. After a brief stint as a college professor, he returned to working in restaurants and writing. Burning Shore Press recently published Heaping Stones, his first novel. What Love Is, his second novel, is scheduled to be released by the same house in the summer/early fall of 2006. He is currently writing poetry, book reviews, and a journal.

Contact: bsp@burningshorepress.com

Dancing in the Louvre—Summer, 1999

2007-03-11T06:54:00.001-07:00

For Katie Farrar

I’d heard it called the Disneyland of art museums
and when I saw its slick ticket windows
and long lines I understood why

but inside the art refuse to be regulated,
codified, or sold:

instead
it jumped off the walls and danced,
sang, screamed, laughed arias,
spewed witticisms,
and hurt like
cold mornings
with no hope
of her ever
returning

And I danced too in my thoughtful
standing still and slow moving from
one painting to the next
as Vermeer egged me on
by saying shit like ride me to
van Gogh like a magic carpet
on your way to Jackson Pollock’s
Long Island barn
early 1950s breathru

or maybe you should shift gears
slightly to Munch leading to Klee
or anywhere else modern, post,
or not you want to go

Or perhaps you should just say
fuck it all
and head down to
the Italian Renaissance
and weep before the
fields of sunlight and
God having meaning
in Leonardo’s backdrop
or so many other greats
my overwhelmed mind
suddenly can’t name
by name

which is what
I then proceeded
to do,

tears coming to my eyes
before I even reached
the stairs

Robert Woodard © 2007.

New Wild Boys . . .

2007-03-11T06:51:00.000-07:00

I don’t want to walk into the William S. Burroughs
wide-screen gunfighter drama of pulled-down fedora
and secret agent cabalistic webs of no possible
meaning, of secrets held close like a lover just
deceased while helicopter blades rotate ominously
over a desert town and Mexicanos locos
working for the man slip in and out of
knife-drawn shadows of
Big Texas Lawman America
Saudi Oil
South African Diamonds
and deeply concealed interstellar invaders
as small packs of poets wander the hills
like guerilla warriors wearing
Henry David Thoreau T-shirts and stolen Nikes
doing whatever they can to be heard

The sun and the sea are mine too
and I demand they be returned—
a million murdered presidents later
or now doesn’t matter:

because I, one the poets, am not a beginning but simply another
American expression of something much older that can never
quite go away—

so I can just wait you out
if need be

Robert Woodard © 2007.

A Pretty Typical Day . . .

2007-03-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

I woke up yesterday as a curly-haired young Bob Dylan,
all charming and profound and full of life—pre-media
almost and really just learning
how to write a song

But the day turned out to be filled with all sorts of obstacles:
a leaky showerhead, a dead battery in my truck, a nasty email
from an ex-love I finally admitted I still loved
more than a little bit …

And so by around noon (mainly because of memories stoked
by her) I’d very much shifted into Iggy Pop mode:
howling
crazed craziness
with where are the drugs
and the love needs expression
taking over
to the point where for little spots of time
here and there I really thought I might die
and that that might be OK, even while I
most definitely was enjoying my pain …

Until around two when I managed to get some of my strength back
and mutated into a snidey Johnny Rotten semi-bucked-tooth
scowl-and-glare guy, more English than I’d before ever imagined
I could be (but in reality mostly just a pose, not quite me)

I then somehow turned into Bono for a while: self-important,
all knowing and all loving and holier than any Thou—powered
by a profound foolishness and a deep down shame of
what I’d become and was becoming …

By around four in the afternoon the overall trauma of the day
encouraged me to slip into a full-on Lou Reed reality:
speedy and paranoid leave me the fuck alone black leather “toughness,”
while of course demanding that everyone acknowledge that I’m still
king of the pack, still way better than they could ever be …

But events suddenly allowed me to pull myself
out of this mood too:

I found a five-dollar bill in the gutter by my apartment building
and then several minutes later, as I was walking down the street,
a beautiful young Mexican girl smiled at me,
warm and truthful and happy—

and because of these events, I suddenly became all clean
melodic Joey Ramone geek-style happiness inside despite
my outer weak points,
a state that lasted until I got
into bed that night …

It was a pretty typical day in other words, a day that caused me
to realize (as days like this usually do) that in many ways
I’m an amazingly romantic man:

I’ve always believed in poets

and believed that they
should sing

Robert Woodard © 2007.

Love Poem Much Delayed . . .

2007-03-11T06:40:00.000-07:00

I’ll take with me to the grave the way your
dark brown eyes sparkled and smiled up at me
thru unruly black curls as your barely
seventeen-year-old mouth gleefully sucked
on my twenty-nine-year-old dick
with surprising skill and testicle-lapping
daring well beyond your years,

as well the excitement I could feel rumbling thru
every part of you the first time I pulled your panties
to one side and reciprocated with my tongue …

Shit, I’ll take it all with me!—

The hours of kissing and caressing in which we engaged,
before and in between fucking sessions; the long talks
we had on books and politics and just about everything
else under the sun; the time we spent just lying in bed
watching movies or TV; the amazing way you would
hang around my apartment naked, cooking, reading,
or whatever, apparently never even thinking about
putting your clothes on again until you had to
go somewhere; the cute way you’d giggle and
scream when I would unexpectedly slap your
bare butt while you walked across a room;
the strange guilty pang I’d always feel
when you did or said something that made me
realize that no matter how smart or unusually
mature you were for your age, you were still
a very young girl indeed …

Yes, I’ll take all this with me and more—for these
many years later I’m finally realizing that of all the women
who have flown from my life you’re the one I miss most:

because though I may have loved others longer
and more powerfully, you were the one I loved most
simply, with the least amount of thought or need
for understanding or justification

And because of this, the pain of your departure
still exists deep within me; I still can sometimes relive
with sad accuracy the day you told me, without warning
it seemed, that you didn’t want to grow up this fast,
that you wanted to be a teenage girl for a bit longer …

The irony of course is that within a year you were
knocked up by a guy five years your senior and were
forced to grow up much faster than you ever would
have had to with a dreamer poet of
arrested adolescence such as me …

I’m not sure why this has all come back to me
so strongly as of late—but the truth is that suddenly
I’ve been wishing more than a little bit that I would
have been the guy who left the condoms in the drawer
and that I now had an eleven-year-old son, some sort of
relationship with you still, and a life very different
from the one that’s led me to the warm nostalgia
of this lonely poem to you.

Robert Woodard © 2007.

Celebrity Slumber . . .

2007-03-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Celebrity Slumber [1]

I was on some sort of holiday; hadn’t been home yet and was nervous about what father would say about my absence. The blinds were long, metal and drawn. A school girl was staring at me intently from within an ongoing lesson as I idly killed time in the hallway. Her eyes still intent on me, I went back and tried to phone home from one of the plethora of telephones on the window sill: an old cordless, a rotary phone with an enormous, oversized dial – all had been unplugged or sat with frayed cords. Father was going to be pissed . . . I sat watching webpages silently scroll and flicker past in loud colors. My name was not on any of them. Bill Gates appeared between each one on an infomercial set with a thirty-eight jeweled necklace . . . Bill Gate’s Thirty-Eight Jewels, Bill Gates Thirty-Eight Jewels, Bill Gates Thirty-Eight Jewels . . .

Celebrity Slumber [2]

Pavarotti needed help with the zipper on the side of his suit, which had gotten stuck in the teeth and Russians were busy terrorizing the globe’s hot air balloon travel (two explosions already this week. The wreckage, on the small color TV in the lobby, of snapped cords, people bent double over the whicker or possibly crumpled there). The interior of a hotel with sodium lighting and a washed out pastel blue running the length of the corridor, seen from across a vector, from the outside as it were. A lone room service waiter stood in front of a closed door as in a Hopper painting. Again the Muscovite terrorists - this time making voice-over demands over cut-aways of gaseous explosions.

Celebrity Slumber [3]

Tony Soprano pulled me into another room, and turned on some music to avoid being overheard by the feds who had bugged his house. No sooner had we begun to converse when a drop top caddy rolled up and started spraying the place. We made for the back door and circled around . . . (Somewhere in Europe now) . . . And got into a convertible limo at the end of the block, slowly drove by the would-be assassin marking his appearance. Ada was there with us and we began to discuss our options when a trio of Hawaiians approached us with a map of islands, and pointed out that our aggressor was a Maori – promising us more details when we reached Honolulu. Tony pumped them for more info, going along with the ploy and elbowing me with a conspirator’s wink which spoke silently of an imminent double cross.

Judson Hamilton lives in Wroclaw, Poland. More of his work can be found at www.identitytheory.com, www.pastsimple.org, and is forthcoming at www.thievesjargon.com.

Poems...

2006-06-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

Blood (1).

Fresh red blood
Dries on Gravesend’s streets
With veins so full
And over-worked
This is
No surprise.

Its wounds are
Sutured
Fixed-up
Tied together
With String.

Dad.

Your fingers on my face
Rough from work
And rubbed with tobacco
Huge and protective
Offering safety.

Now my fingers
On my face
Just like yours
Rough from work
Rubbed with tobacco.

Blood (2).

There’s blood on
The toilet seat
Like pillow talk
On Parrock Street
Like Spanish voices
Or Spanish fly
Like the opium dens
In Limehouse
Underground monoliths
Standing
Decadent
In their historical achievements.

My Chest is like a Rorschach Test.

My chest is
Like
A Rorschach test

Red butterflies
Skim
The epidermis.

Sleeping in an empty bed is still like sleeping with
you.

Sleeping in an
Empty bed is like
Sleeping with you

Tugging the bed
Covers and losing
The fight to rest

More so when yr
Out away from home
Ecstasy high

For you I write
Stanzas unfounded
Beholding I

For you I lie
Bic biro black
Ink dry and fucked.

Liberare.

This is my Cuba
The balcony
My veranda
Overlooking the brown rooftops
Grey houses and
Tarmac lakes.

Playing
Screaming
Fighting
The kids are my ocean waves
Crashing against the cars
And electricity.

Our revolution
Will never come
Through words.

Post-Illumination.

You’re not alone
Right Now
There’s not a single book
I want to read
Or a single song I
I want to sing
I just want to sit
On my doorstep
Smoking cigarettes
While the pseudo-spring wind
Blows swiftly
Across my naked feet
While dogs bark
In dark back gardens
While the dead
Move in
And out
Of porches and doors
And out
Goes the light across the court.

Johnny Grace © 2006.

Johnny Grace writes poetry and short fiction. He lives in Gravesend.

Two fat boys...

2006-06-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

Two fat boys

are being looked at

no, stared at

by a thin man

who then trips over

face first

into a ditch

Two Fat Boys

In Croydon

two fat boys

(Rick and Sam)

are drunk under the moon

neither have ever been fallen in love with

Two Fat Boys

Four wickets in one innings

ah, that was such a long time ago

thinks one fat boy at a desk

eating spreadable cheese sandwiches

Two Fat Boys

Two fat boys

in the back of an old Fiat Panda…

one notices a dead elephant

how could it have become dead?

ah . . . now it begins

Two Fat Boys

Two fat boys

waiting at the zebra crossing

see Nancy on the other side

dressed in the fuckest thing you ever did see

Two Fat Boys

Two fat boys

fight

over a snapped ruler

The next day

they’re best of friends again

having a lack

and having no-one else

to fill that lack

Two Fat Boys

Donald Duck

One Fat Boy

One fat boy

in the toilets of McDonald’s, Stroget

shakes the last drops of urine

from his penis

and notices

the ubiquitous pissmat

of Kerne Hansen

One Fat Boy

One fat boy

looks at his maths mark

a ten!

how gleefully he walks down the corridor

In science

a ten!

again!

mischievously Joe Slick starts the rumours

One Fat Boy

One fat boy

gets lost

in the woods

holding a stick

James Davis © 2006.

James Davies has written in Clacton, Exeter, Copenhagen and Manchester. At the moment he works teaching English - various. Also drawing, readings, mags, festivals, exhibitions, friends, women, bars, etc. He also edits Matchbox.

An ode to the author...

2006-06-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

Is to be gay more liberating when addressing affections
I question myself of late, and late at night
Not too seriously yet with inner contention
I have loved two men in my life
And as most alphas would have experienced
I am bound to them by blood and money I owe
Yet be it a revelation within me
Or merely a mature acceptance donated by age
I for one am a heterosexual
Living in some form of metropolis
Yet not fond of the term metrosexual
I love women and one woman more than anyone
Yet I have seemingly fallen for a man
Not biblically nor sexually, as it is ...
We have never met, and never locked eyes
He is more a flesh and blood casing for his mind
It is the mind of the man that I desire to be intertwined with
He has made me laugh, cry, regret confess and think
More than any other has done in my years on our planet
I feel I want to buy him a glass of the finest wine
The most sumptuous main courses he devours
All he has spoken to me of on countless occasion
Yet we have never met, never passed on the street
Once I went to find him, but I blushed
I blushed on the plane, on the bus, and again on the subway
Such was the nature of my affliction friends
I couldn't dismount from the A train
And thus I got lost, not geographically you understand
Lost in my thoughts, locked in conflict, utterly lost ...
I longed to overcome my fear of the handshake that I had dreamed of
Yet the moment had passed, like a rat o'er shoe in manhattan
Nevertheless my affections have grown stronger and now I feel fulfilled
I have a friend who I can turn to, and I don't need to talk to him
As when he talks to me I get comfortably lost
And that is where I find my bliss.

Stephen Monaghan © 2006.

To All Of My Dead, Drunk And Missing Uncles...

2006-06-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

one uncle
overdosed in a cell
while locked up
for forging prescriptions:
no inquiry
just another dead catholic
in Belfast, 1962

one I remember
hid bottles of whiskey
in the fields
and we had “our little secret” -
entire days at the pub
while he drank and drank
and me, eating peanuts and drinking Coke,
as he explained the difference
between “wee white lies”
and the proper kind

yet another
was a vengeful alcoholic
who tried to kick
my grandparent’s door in
and fell out of bed
smashed his head
and bled
to death
as he slept

one went out for cigarettes
and never returned
another painted imaginary landscapes
from a cell in Long Kesh
my grandmother’s collection
of yellowing newspaper clippings
in an old biscuit tin
all that may remain of his legacy

when I was 14
I was suspended
for writing pro-communist pamphlets
and pasting them
all over my Catholic High School

the priest,
a watery eyed old alcoholic
shook with rage and said:
“Do you have any idea what the communists
“did to the priests in Spain???”
I laughed and said
“Yes.”

they told my father that I was bright
but my mind needed to be
channeled
effectively

but instead of the priesthood,
or teaching,
or the business world
or any of that horseshit
I’m glad to say
I stuck
with the family business

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

In a previous life Tony O’Neill played keyboards for bands and artists as diverse as Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After moving to Los Angeles his promising career was derailed by heroin addiction, quickie marriages and crack abuse. While kicking methadone he started writing about his experiences on the periphery of the Hollywood Dream and he has been writing ever since. His autobiographical novel DIGGING THE VEIN will be published in Feb 2006 by Contemporary Press, in the US and Canada. Wrecking Ball Press plan to release a UK edition Summer 2006. He lives in New York where he works a variety of odd jobs and writes.

More details can be found at http://www.tonyoneill.net/

Anal Mermaids...

2006-05-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

Some tip for nowness:
splendor. Yellow dog named Snort
ejaculates upon my name.
Truncated holocaust nails
tiny lips explode in germinated
fields of polished gore fabrics.
“How do you know I haven’t painted on this already,”
that’s the bird dropping off cost’s
sun-veiled toilette. Coupon bleeds

Pink symmetry of wolfhead
falling, dreamy mermaid
beefs up the green. Without
any tact we feel real music
emotion, chopped and bleeding,
flush this.

Travis Jeppesen was born. He wrote a novel. It's called Victims. It was published in America by Akashic Books, and in Russia by Eksmo. His new book is called Poems I Wrote While Watching TV. It has illustrations by Jeremiah Palecek, and will come out in March. His work has/will appear(ed) in Purple, Prague Literary Review, 3am Magazine, Another Magazine, ZOO, thefanzine.com, New York Press, Bookforum, Pretend I Am Someone Else, Thee Flat Bike, dorfdisco.de, Pavement Magazine, Shampoo Poetry, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and a bunch of other places you've probably never heard of. He edits BLATT.

His new collection of poems [Poems I Wrote While Watching TV] can be ordered HERE.

3 Poems...

2006-05-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Such is...

She wants to eat
He wants to drink
They go their separate ways
He wants to save
She wants to spend
No compromise
They took a walk
He thought a lot
She was content
She looked resplendent
He looked away
They joined their friends
He wants to leave
She wants to stay
Same old story
They stare at houses
She sees a terrace
He sees a bungalow
They never made it
He has the dog
She bought a cat
They have never met.

Srangers meet...

Persuaded
Begged
Succumbed
Entered
Stroked
Slapped
Re-entered
Chastised
Aroused
Sinister
Pleased
Shifted
Ridden
Punched
Choked
Caressed
Eyeballed
Kissed
Drenched
Held
Thrown
Held
Thrown
Gripped
Denied
Ignored
Respected
Rejected
Ejected

Moral code...

Once when I was young
Although not so young
As not to know the moral code
The difference betwixt the right and the wrong
I was on a swift promenade through fields
And the undergrowth belonging to the countryside
Stalking was my mission
As I fixated on pools and runs
Natives to the river
Foreigners to mine eyes
I wanted a trout
I badly wanted to feel the pull on my line
The indication of success and glory
And a reward for my patience
And a punishment for my conceit
A clearing became clear
So I joined the overhanging branches
And the moss covered mounds
Cast aside my pensive state
And delivered my fly to the mouth of a wild brown trout
Ignored by the beast
Not for the first time
I surrendered to failure
Yet a sudden yelp
Indicative of neither man nor beast
Startled my peaceful surround and pierced my ears
I swivelled and turned 180 degrees
To both my surprise and delight
A small downs syndrome child
Was giving hot pursuit to a young gelding
He ran like an olympian
Shouted like a football fan
I laughed for three days solid.

Stephen Monaghan © 2006.

On Your Way - Somewhere in Hackney...

2006-05-01T01:46:00.000-07:00

You have woken up, your temperament sour
You missed the morning
On this day your outlook dour

There is a staircase to descend
That is where it starts
Your day
In the kitchen
Downstairs

You are regret (pause)

There is no more morning pleasure left
To lift your limbonic' lard
No tea
No coffee
The milk is not

You must ascend
Ascend
Ascend
For your morning glory
It is a fight for your survival
Your eyes just openned

To leave your dwelling is a dagger in your heart
You know you can not begin your day
Without that hot liquid pleasure

The white mate is paramount to the accompany the dark
The dark paramount to accompany the white mate
You often played chess but winning became boring

Anger has flushed you out
You have lost again to fury's downfall

You remember where the axe is
The current climate expands the wood
Adding fuel to your rage
The door will not open
You bite your right arm sinking your teeth into your skin
You pull away when the pain becomes unbearable
You look up then down, you take a deep breath
When you release your temper rises
You climb on the kitchen sink and disengage the window lock
You do not break it
Climbing outside onto wet green grass feelers
Licking in between, your morning feet are bare, toes

There is the axe upon the cluster
A fierce manic stride you take your self to the clump
No yank from a log, the axe left behind on it's side
You grab the axe handle
A shard of light catches your right cheek and right eye
From the sun laid on the metal

Your frustration subsides after the wood whack and cut
Your mind has cleared
Unlocking the once surrounding fences, you once put yourself into

You return through the unlocked kitchen window
Ascend the staircase
Apply some fabrics, slip on a pair of slip-ons
You are ready to go out, face the street,
Face the world in your wee borough
You are geared up to depart your asylum.

If the corner shop is closed, you know it's open. You will burn it down.
If the corner shop is closed, you know it's open. You will burn it down.
If the corner shop is closed, you know it's open. You will burn it down.

However your day grows, you are excited
You are on your way to the beginning of (pause) your day.

What will it be?

Coffee or tea?

The mixture of dark and light is always your choice.

Cathy Flower © 2006.

Australian born, Cathy Flower has been writing and performing her work for the last fifteen years, enjoying the colour and conviction of poetry from her page to the stage. In 2002 she launched her debut CD of performance poetry, entitled 'Meniscus'. CD No. 2 is in the wings alongside a hard copy volume of her poetry and visuals. Cathy loves the oral induction, taste and mind altering pleasures of coffee, chocolate and (fine) red wine.

1970...

2006-05-01T01:44:00.000-07:00

1

We begin here. Here we begin -
The modern age with all its novel twists.
We may have been sixties born,
But believe me, when I say it is,
The next decade that made the man -
For seven was my lucky number,
Once over thirty years ago -
At three years old, unaware of what went on,
Tied ribbons round old oak trees.

2

My granddad smoked like Harold Wilson,
Spittle at the cornermouth.
The farm was, by then, on its uppers
Both the sons got civvy jobs.
The milk round in the old Ford van,
As canvassers from all three parties,
Shuttled round the dirty streets,
Promising a new beginning;
And giving us Ted Heath.

3

Paul broke them up, wrote the note,
Placed the dagger between the ribs,
Made his own not so primal scream.
The sixties it seems were over,
The mini skirt had grown an inch,
We weren't ready for the midi -
The Sun showed us Stephanie Rahn,
Fallen from her cheesecloth top,
Sex went mainstream; we buttoned up.

4

Monika Dannemann sips champagne
With her Hendrix - earlier Shanklin
Shuddered with thousands to his squall -
It, he, they were over, promotion to
The great gig in the sky.
Is always poets dying young,
As if they know, how fragile life is.
My earliest memory, I have forgotten it,
But even now I recall the song.

5

The yellow shirts were out in force,
And in the heat of Mexico,
The pale-face Englishmen were beat,
By a greater force than heat.
Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Glen Miller, 20
Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20,
William Knox Schroeder, 19,
At Kent State in May,
They never saw the ball game,

6

They sang! The singers sang!
Smoked hashish at Glastonbury Tor,
Grew their hair just so long.
"Nixon in his counting house
Counting loads of money
Reneged on his promises
Cambodia was quite funny."
The modern age begins here,
Begins here, with our sins.

7

I played on the unkempt lawn.
My sister gurgled in the pram.
We had our first telephone put in.
The power strikes of winter
Sent us running for the candles.
I doubt my parents had chance
Or time to watch Ali McGraw -
Not burning at both ends,
But making candles meet.

Adrian Slatcher © 2006.

Adrian Slatcher is co-editor of a poetry and fiction magazine, Lamport Court, and has published a number of poems and short stories in various magazines over the last few years. He is based in Manchester, where he studied on the MA in Novel Writing at the University of Manchester. He was born in Walsall in 1967. A previous "e-book" of his poetry, "The Market is Second Hand Poems" was published in 2002. Copies of "2004" can be obtained for "£3.00" payable to Adrian Slatcher, from 1 Victoria Grove, Fallowfield, Manchester, M14 6BF. Or email adrian.slatcher@gmail.com for further details.

To listen to Adrian Slatcher reading please CLICK HERE.

A Rock and a Hard Place...

2006-05-01T01:42:00.000-07:00

one floor before we reached the top
of the Stalin-grey concrete tower-block
we found ourselves in a line
all waiting for the same guy
to sell us cut, milk-sugar heroin:

I was struck by the Englishness
of it all:
forming a queue
to buy shitty drugs

stuck behind a silent, hulking Rastafari
and in front of a sniffling Russian kid
who swore that the shit was getting weaker:
“a tenner-bag won’t even get me straight” he sighed
and I wondered if his old life
in some collapsed soviet state
could be any worse than this one

doing the deal
in a small unfurnished room
stuffed full of paranoia
and rickety, stolen handguns
before being ushered through
a metal side door

and we were out

down through a maze of concrete and
rusting steel, the saddest looking playground
in the world, a child’s abandoned shoe
lay next to a decaying roundabout
a seesaw with an empty can of Special Brew
upturned to the left

the Dagenham tower blocks
cutting into the nuclear sky
like the misshapen, yellow teeth
of the drunks on the benches
rising out of their bloody, black gums

a crow caw-caws and a car alarm
wails across the evening
like some mournful call to prayer
for cat burglars and petty thieves

on a bench
I watch
while Steve cooks up two bags
and right there in the playground
we fix with the muggy air
close around us

surrounded by the broken glass
and the shattered lives
unraveling in these government rabbit warrens
I feel completely
aware
of my place:

microscopic
invisible

adrift
in a shitty universe
which stretches, infinite,
like one billion
Dagenham council estates

I think:
Tony…
this is no way to
live

but then I think of my father
hunched over
back broken
pumped full of morphine
and ink

25 years
on the job
and they left him
with nothing
but money that wouldn’t last
and chronic pain

and outside of this playground
lives dictated by alarm clocks
and work whistles:
clocking in
clocking out
commuting to work
or to unexpected death
concealed in abandoned backpacks

people spending more time
with sour faced bosses
and dour, hateful co-workers
than those they love

weeks spent
in minimum wage servitude
instead of laughing in dark bars
and drinking away the sunlight

I look at the needle in my hand
and I realize

oh Jesus
maybe I’ve got it
right
after all

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

For N. B...

2006-05-01T01:40:00.000-07:00

the first mistake
in a long fucking list
was made in the pool
of the Beverly Hills Hotel
when I said
“lets get married”
and you said “yes”

the old world versus the new
and the battle for supremacy
was waged in our marital bed
during that endless summer

you introduced me to your world
like some idiot child
about to be shown the
error of his ways

your rich, perfect
West Hollywood friends
drinking cosmopolitans
and shoving tubes up their perfect
white asses
to flush the shit out
of themselves

I have to tell you:
It didn’t work

the outside world
an irrelevancy
when compared to how to get
the best teeth, the best car
perfectly bleached ass-hair,
perfectly shaved cunts,
perfectly shaped eyebrows,
thousand dollar shoes

even though your father
had pissed and snorted it away
you still carried that sense of entitlement
down the years
as if it was you who had won the Oscar
and deserved your just reward

my father drove buses for 25 years
my mother wiped the incontinent asses
of senile old women
to put food on the table

yet somehow
in the topsy-turvy world
of beautiful Hollywood
it was your mother who commanded
respect
for making her money
by spreading her cunt
for the alcoholic heir
of a B-movie actress

dissolution of marriage:
we come in with nothing
we leave with nothing
but I’ll leave you with
these words…

you don’t have to thank me
just hold them close
and I sincerely hope
they keep you warm
tonight

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

Some Poems...

2006-03-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

THESE CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

The woman with the parted lips
She never says a word

Thinking. What are you? Thinking.
Are you?
Thinking…
Think!

Shhh… If you have ears …. Shhhh

All the world for your collar bone…
All the world for your tongue between my teeth…
All the world for your whispering hair…
Here and there and everywhere

Sing me a song
A song of the sea.

Shhhh!

He doesn’t want surrendered secrets.
He doesn’t want to see
See
Saw
So
Sieve
Give
In
Give up
I think it’s time

to

Plaster up her pumping heart
A brief respite from blood

“I am swimming in your skin…”

Plaster up his pumping heart
Let’s never talk of love…

Lick lick lick

Come on kick
Me against it!
I don’t care if you KILL ME
Find me
Kiss me
Hold me
Thrill me….

Thrill me hold me kiss me kill me

Huh
Huh
Huh
Ah
Ah
A
A
A
a!

Uhhhhh…..

What do you do with a drunken sailor!
What do you do with a drunken sailor!

They lie.

Oh well
Okay
Whatever
Never
Mind
Okay okay
We sing the ancient rhyme…

All the world for your eyelash!
All the world for your moustache!

In love she sails
“Oh well!”
She wails.
He drinks his weight.
What else can you do with drunken sailors?

Wobbly. Wobbly. Wobbb b b b b …

You don’t need to explain yourself to me
Just lie
I do
Don’t you?

I do.

Don’t
Think we don’t understand
He saw your shadow turning past
The lights, they run
And now she falls
Beneath the rising sun

WINDING

We can only grasp the air for so long
Before it blows itself away
Breaths its last and
Once again
Is past.

My spirit shattered with love
Can’t you stoop
To pick up the pieces.
Just this once?

I’ll be ok
I’ll be fine
Just stay too close
For me to unwind…

BLISS

Oh bliss
It hurts
This biting bit!
Oh bliss

REGRET 2006 (?)

I would not would would would
No
Not
Would not would
Not
Would
Would
Would
Not not not not not
Would not
Have it
Any other way
Any other way
Any any any any
Other ways
Way ways way

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
THE SHOCK
THAT SOMETHING QUICK AND HEAVY MAY SILENCE MY BREATH
AND SEVERE A THOUGHT THAT IS ON ITS WAY TO COLIDE WITH ANOTHER THOUGHT….

Cecilia Condon © 2006.

Cecilia Condon likes to make things. Things like songs and characters and words stuck to other words. She makes these things when finds bits of extra time in her hectic schedule of learning about arty stuff and serving champagne and canapés to the corporatos of Melbourne (who kindly share their city with her). Usually there isn’t much time, and this is why she has never published much or been in any blockbuster movies. But watch out, because she is currently working on her second first novel…

Central Park Zoo...

2006-03-20T14:11:00.000-08:00

The swans drink in the sunlight
then retreat to the patches of shade
by the light
rippling on the water.

Small children run
into the quilts of light,
and cannot see the graceful creatures.

Up, up, up, they ask their mothers
to lift them
above the light.

Light like the silver oars
from ancient
golden boats.

Light dividing the day
marking the inevitable retreat of swans
and children
from their mothers’ arms.

Lisa Williams © 2006.

Lisa Williams is a Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and lives in New York City. She is the author of Letters to Virginia Woolf and also The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf.

See this interview at RSB and this Scarecrow review.

The Bathers...

2006-03-20T14:10:00.000-08:00

for Walt Whitman

Twenty-eight women bathe by the shore
Twenty-eight women
their breasts full
bellies round
skinny dipping

Twenty-eight naked women
dance on water
Twenty- eight women arise
from the dreams
of sea and shore

Lisa Williams © 2006.

The Blackbirds Filled the Sky With Song...

2006-03-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

For Larry Tell

As we filled your grave with dirt,
and watered the ground with our tears,
the blackbirds gathered.

A semicircle of blackbirds,
a horseshoe of blackbirds,

glided across the sky with ease,
as if to form the song,
of one
immortal nightingale.

Just when we thought
the birds were out of sight,

and we were left with the rain
drizzling down
to surround our sorrow,

the blackbirds turned round
to fly once more above your grave.

We could only look up silently,
at the blackbirds in the gray sky
singing of the freedom
the dead must know.

Lisa Williams © 2006.

ARF ROCK...

2006-03-19T12:25:00.000-08:00

my shit-smelling finger
alright

formoverform...

2006-03-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

form over form
cock

ting

Poem...

2006-03-19T12:19:00.000-08:00

things
happen
all the time

Oh Cunt...

2006-03-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

A painter of cunt I’ve always been—OH CUNT!—
But I’ve worked almost exclusively in watercolor daubs
of the utmost timidity, not with brushstrokes of any boldness
or aggression—because I’ve always been afraid of my subject,
afraid of the beauty of sweet sticky life and all the horrible
things it could do to me …

But that’s not half as sad as how I’ve usually painted
a woman’s head: as a barely differentiated blob, without
eyes to reveal her pain, joy, or even curiosity, or a mouth
that might just tell me “No, my heart’s not for you and even
the cunt you’re painting is not mine but your own little-boy
fantasy that hurts me more than you can seem to know …”

“OH CUNT!” indeed

But oh cunt I still love thee—but now I hope like a child
who wants to grow up, like a suddenly young artist who is
finally taking the time to learn the rudiments of anatomy …
the line of a cheekbone, the oval of the mouth, the chambers
of the heart … both my subject’s and my own …

I will always paint cunts, but those soon slick with love, I hope,
slick with love as well as tongue and groan … as sparkling eyes
look down upon my work in shivering approval ...

Richard Woodard © 2006.

My Formal Sleep...

2006-03-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

The ridged perfection of my sleep: on my semi-side (which side
doesn’t matter of course) leg cocked in balanced tension with what’s
going on with my arms, shoulders, neck, and everything
in between and beyond, like some very formal sculpture, where
every muscle, tendon, and twitch is accounted for with an exact
counterpoint, whether I’m in Greek Olympic shot-put pose or
tightly gripping my hard dick in sexual frustration beyond
blinding or bitterly coiled and ready to strike out at this terrible life
and all it has done to me …

OH GOD OR GODS! OH MYSELF!—ALLOW ME TO TRULY SLEEP!

Allow me to release the pain and anger of my failures that so
haunts me, that drives me into a rage where I’m continually
taking swings at the empty darkness of my walled eternity
thru flailing dreams remembered or not, while also plotting
new ways to hate myself, new ways to punish myself for all
the lies I’ve told myself that shielded me from the flowering
cowardice that has always kept my life from being what
it could have been, should have been, what it should be …

Oh God or Gods! Oh myself!—Allow me the gift of deep sleep,
allow my body to splay wherever it needs to under covers warm
and luxurious, as a by-product of a life that is finally on track,
a life that has finally been accepted by a man who has always
hated himself, by a man whose heart seems to have been broken
at birth by a world that he doesn’t feel has ever really wanted
him, by a world that seems to have commanded that his love
be left forever dying on the vine …

Richard Woodard © 2006.

Coffeehouse Poem (to Michelle)...

2006-03-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

What if I were to place my head in your lap
while we’re lounging on some coffeehouse couch
and you were to begin running your fingers thru my hair
with great understanding, and this was to go on
for a full hour without either of saying a word
because we simply felt no need to talk?

Would this make us lovers, or would we have
to actually fuck before it became official?

Most people I meet seem to be living their lives
hemmed in by layers of rules they never question
while shooting for benchmarks carved by the averaging out
of generations of dreams—by the dilution of each of us,
in other words

But this would all crumble on such a coffeehouse couch,
with such fingers caressing in silence—and we would find love,
I’m sure, in the simultaneous understanding that love reveals rules
to be non-existent, while also seeing that this knowledge can make
our lives truly different than the lives of those who surround us,
at least when we’re together …

Richard Woodard © 2006.

After Richard Hell in West Hollywood...

2006-03-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

For Michelle Murufas

It’s coolish outside standing on the street—fall night
in West Hollywood—but the little bookstore in which
we just saw Richard Hell read from his novel GODLIKE
is hot and stuffy

So, not wanting to go back into the cramped airless bookstore
to stand in the long line to get our copies signed,
we walk down the street a ways to this bar we saw on the
way to the reading—where we sit on the patio so Michelle
can smoke—and order draft beers and a plate of fries, which
we’re enjoying as out of the corners of our eyes we watch
1960s-era Bob Dylan sing on the giant Tower Records video screen
across the street, while we talk warm and personal about things
that really matter to us, like why love has hurt us so much and how
we’re somehow moving on from this pain and I think about
how surreal the Richard Hell-enormous Bob Dylan-
West Hollywood night probably is, even though
I’m not really noticing this because the conversation Michelle and I
are engaged in is so easy and truthful and without pretension
that it’s actually drowning out fucked up Hollywood,
actually emerging as something that’s usually impossible:
everyday life triumphing over myth …

“Do you want another beer?” I ask Michelle

She does not, but I do, so I order one from the
silly L.A. blonde waitress who I can tell is
a little annoyed by the fact that I care only about
Michelle at this moment and am not noticing her bleached
“beauty” which she needs to be sure is so much more attractive
than Michelle’s coffee-and-cigarettes post-punk pallor,
while I feel happy because I’m so locked into this
conversation with Michelle and also because the waitress
is interested in me enough to be jealous and because
everything is just so perfect that I wouldn’t change one
moment of the simple humanity we’re somehow discovering
in ourselves on Sunset Boulevard of all places …

Richard Woodard © 2006.

Two Poems...

2006-03-19T04:24:00.000-08:00

SCAPEGOAT TWIGGY

Waif skin
and fat lashes.
Your space-age smile
made us all
healthy
star-
vers.

OPTIMISM

Is a theory proposed by stomachs.
As a girl,
she invades my mother's house.
Eats our frozen chicken.
When she's full, she starts to hurt-
like this situation's too optimistic.
It's bound to go wrong.
I sigh out flowers on the deck.
The petals rip one by one-
the girl lives-the girl dies-the girl lives,
I hope.

In Ham Lake, helicopters
have been circling for a week.
In the woods, they swoop in low.
I sit with my mother on the deck.
She claims a dealer is loose,
another meth-lab discovered.
In front of tomorrow's headlines,
I tell her helicopters can't be
that bad.
My stomach's empty.

Glenna Myles © 2006.

Glenna Myles currently lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA.

The Complicity of Paul Celan...

2006-03-19T04:00:00.000-08:00

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This provocative essay has recently caused a flurry of online responses, most fervidly from Mark Thwaite and Stephen Mitchelmore. Ellis Sharp has also published a response. Although Short Term Memory Loss's sardonic effort had all here at Scarecrow guffawing endlessly. We expect this one to run and run. The views published below are not necessarily those of Scarecrow's Editorial team.]

Two pieces of writing define the poet Paul Celan’s relationship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. One is his inscription in Heidegger’s guest book, which translates as: “Into the Hütte-book, while gazing on the well-star, with a hope for a word to come in the heart / July 25 1967”. The other is his famous poem ‘Todtnauberg’. Both pieces are reasonably interpreted as obliquely alluding to Heidegger’s relationship with the Nazis. Celan evidently hoped for some kind of acknowledgement of error on Heidegger’s part – an acknowledgement which Celan, as a Holocaust victim, was surely entitled to expect.

Notoriously, Heidegger kept his silence. Heidegger, delighted by ‘Todtnauberg’, seems to have been oblivious to the poem’s inner meaning and its verbal and historical resonance. At the end, Celan wrote of ‘die halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel- / pfade im Hochmoor,’ [‘the half-trodden log-paths through the high moors’]. But as John Felstiner notes in his fine critical biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), “in an explosive wordplay, Celan’s term for ‘log’ (Knüppel) also means ‘bludgeon.’ Translating Night and Fog he had used that word for death camp prisoners “ ‘bludgeoned awake’ at 5 a.m.”

The meeting between Heidegger and Celan is both legendary and enigmatic; it is invariably defined from Celan’s perspective. How could it not be? Celan (1920-1970), an East European Jew whose first language was German, is generally regarded as the the major European poet of the period after 1945. His best known poem is “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), which is probably the finest poem to emerge from the Holocaust. It originated in Celan’s personal experience. During the Nazi occupation of Romania, Celan came home one morning to find that his parents had been taken away. His father died of typhus in a concentration camp; his mother was shot. Celan himself was made to do forced labour in the Romanian camps, but survived. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he remained until his death, apparently by suicide.

And yet to my mind there is a curious absence in a book such as Felstiner’s, which is Paul Celan’s own complicity in oppression and injustice. It is even more curious bearing in mind that the year in which Heidegger and Celan had their famous encounter is also the year which brings out in Celan’s writing an obtuseness which surely, at some level, parallels that of Heidegger.

Felstiner notes that in 1967 Celan had started to insert Hebrew words into some of his poems. He concludes that “Celan’s poems with Hebrew in them, especially with Hebrew ending them, trace a meridian of Diaspora yearning.” (p. 240) He relates the enigmatic poem “Ziw, jenes Licht”” (“Ziv, that light”) to the deteriorating situation in the Middle East: “By the date of this poem, 10 May 1967, Syrian raids and shelling had been met by Israeli air attacks, terrorists had struck the Galilee, and Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.” (p. 241) Celan then wrote a poem ‘Denk dir’ (translated by Hamburger as ‘Think of It’ and by Felstiner as ‘Just think’) which appears to be a direct response to the Six Day War.

THINK OF IT

Think of it:
the bog soldier of Massada
teaches himself home, most
inextinguishably,
against
every barb in the wire.

Think of it:
the eyeless with no shape
lead you free through the tumult, you
grow stronger and
stronger.

Think of it: your
own hand
has held
this bit of
habitable
earth, suffered up
again
into life.

Think of it:
this came towards me
name-awake, hand-awake
for ever,
from the unburiable.

This is Paul Celan’s poem ‘Denk dir’, taken from the dual language edition published by Penguin Books in 1990, translated by Michael Hamburger. In his critical biography, John Felstiner translates the title as ‘Just think’.

It’s a cryptic, elusive poem, like most of Celan’s verse. Felstiner carefully unpicks the historical and literary threads of the poem, interpreting it as a response to the Six-Day War and to Israel’s victory. The “you” of the poem is the Jewish people. The poem is being about the Jewish “homeland” and the Jewish people. “Now free, they go from strength to strength”, as Felstiner puts it (p. 242). Felstiner notes that an early draft of the poem carried an echo of the words “yad vashem”, which is Hebrew for “hand and name” and the name given to Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Felstiner glosses the last word of the poem as follows: “Finally, Celan’s word ‘unburiable’ fuses the two halves of one idea: Jewish victims who could not be buried and their spirit that will not.” (ibid)

Felstiner supplies the background to the poem. He describes how the Six-Day War broke out, “stirring him to an unambiguous poem. Starting on 7 June, when Jerusalem’s Old City was regained, Celan worked closely on it for two days at the clinic. His title ‘Denk dir’ registered the jolt that Jews everywhere felt”. (ibid) Celan felt an urgency about this poem: it was published straightaway in Zurich and twice in Israel’s German-Jewish press. Celan sent it to the German-born Israeli poet Natan Zach, who published a translation in Israel’s main daily paper. Later in the year it appeared in Germany, and it was the final poem in his next collection Fadensonnen (“Threadsuns”, 1968).

If Felstiner is right, in this poem Celan conflated Jewish identity with the Jewish state. It seems a plausible interpretation. The Jewish “home” is Israel; it is a refuge which has now been “inextinguishably” achieved against “every barb in the wire” – not just Nazi genocide but also, perhaps, Arab aggression. The Jewish people have come “through the tumult” – again, both Nazi genocide and wars with Arabs – and “grow stronger and / stronger”, in the shape of the victorious Jewish state, “this bit of / habitable /earth”.

If Felstiner’s interpretation of the poem is correct – and I see no reason to quarrel with it– it seems to me it indicates an imaginative failure on Celan’s part. Paul Celan was not a Zionist, and preferred to live in Paris rather than anywhere else, but in conflating Jewish identity with Israel and telescoping the Holocaust and the Six-Day War he produced what is surely in essence a Zionist poem. Like most of Celan’s output, ‘Denk dir’ is an oblique, elusive work. But John Felstiner’s plausible reading both of the poem and its context makes it clear that ‘Denk dir’ is, implicitly, under its abstractions and ambiguities, on the side of Israel, and hence of imperialism and sectarian persecution – though Felstiner is incapable of perceiving it in those terms. That the author of “Todesfuge” should be capable of such a poem is, I think, interesting, and worthy of discussion.

What particularly intrigues me are the lines

this bit of
habitable
earth

If I have understood the poem correctly Celan means, in one sense at least, Israel. If he does mean this, then I think the reader is entitled to feel disgust. Firstly, because this land was land stolen by brute force. In 1948, the year Israel was artificially created, no more than 7 per cent of Palestine was owned by Jews. The remaining 93 per cent was held by indigenous Palestinians. Secondly, having stolen more than half of that land the Jewish state then set about seizing the rest, using a pitiless violence steeped in racism and sectarianism – a process which has continued up to the present day. Today only 3 per cent of land in Israel is owned by Palestinians, a land theft of quite staggering proportions. That theft was not simply accomplished by force, however. An essential component was the sectarianism built into the Jewish state. By definition, it exists to promote and prioritize its Jewish citizens.

This is the corrosive legacy of Zionism and the Jewish state to the history and culture of modern Judaism: that Jewish identity must be conflated with the bellicose, blood-drenched, pitilessly sectarian state of Israel. That coarse identification is taken for granted by Felstiner, whose own Zionist bias is revealed when he speaks of the origins of ‘Denk dir’: “Starting on 7 June, when Jerusalem’s Old City was regained, he worked closely on it for two days in the clinic.”

Jerusalem’s Old City “regained”?

*

In the Zionist version of history, Jews in the Middle East are always the victims, never the oppressors. It’s worth looking again at Felstiner’s version of the origins of the 1967 war: “By the date of this poem, 10 May 1967, Syrian raids and shelling had been met by Israeli air attacks, terrorists had struck the Galilee, and Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.”

In reality, Felstiner’s account of what was happening in the Middle East at this time is a meretricious, self-serving one. Israel had signed up to a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between itself and Syria. In the words of Ahron Bregman in his book Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947 (Routledge, 2003), “The Israelis – who had signed up to this arrangement voluntarily rather than under a Diktat – later regretted this, and attempted to regain control over these lands by provoking the Syrians and then taking advantage of military clashes to expand control over the DMZ.” (pp. 65-66) Israel was the bellicose aggressor, not Syria. What Felstiner is referring to by “terrorists had struck the Galilee” is puzzling. None of the standard histories mentions guerrilla activities in early 1967; perhaps he is alluding to attacks by Fatah on Israeli water pipes in 1965. If so, the word “terrorist” is fairly meaningless in this context, since Fatah guerrillas were legitimately resisting the colonisation of their land by an army of occupation, and their actions were no different to those of the French resistance in the Second World War. The theft of Palestinian water resources by Israel has always been a central aspect of the conflict, though rarely if ever mentioned by the media.

What caused the 1967 war? In his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin, 2001), Avi Shlaim concludes: “Israel’s strategy of escalation on the Syrian front was probably the single most important factor in dragging the Middle East to war in June 1967” (p. 235).

Finally, Felstiner says that “Nasser’s Egypt was threatening in the south.” But this again plays down the reality of Israeli aggression. In 1967 Egypt was in the sphere of Soviet influence. Nasser was firmly told by the Russian prime minister Alexei Kosygin not to attack Israel: “Should you be the first to attack you will be the aggressor…we are against aggression…we cannot support you.” (Cited Bregman, p. 82) The USA was not so scrupulous. Israel was informed by the CIA that the Americans would welcome it if Egypt was attacked. When the Israeli delegate to Washington, Meir Amit, told the Secretary of Defense that he would recommend to the Israeli government that an attack be launched, Robert MacNamara replied: “I read you loud and clear.”

The surprise Israeli attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria which occurred on 5 June 1967 happened with the advance knowledge and enthusiastic support of the USA and Britain. The extent of British complicity is revealed in Jeremy Bowen’s book Six Days (2003). Shiploads of armoured vehicles, munitions and other weaponry sailed from Felixstowe in Suffolk, where U.S. military police guarded an arms dump. Israeli transport planes ran a shuttle service out of RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. The Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had agreed to help Israel, but insisted that “the utmost secrecy should be maintained.” Arms for Israel poured in from the USA. In the surprise attack that followed Israel duly wiped out the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. With complete air superiority, Israel had no difficulty in defeating the land armies of those states. 12,000 Egyptians died in the Israeli offensive. The result was the occupation of the entire Sinai peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

In short, Felstiner’s book is both classically orientalist and Zionist in its attitudes.

*

Felstiner’s complacency becomes particularly acute when he describes how in 1969 Paul Celan visited Israel for the first time. Celan made a speech to the Hebrew Writers Association in Tel Aviv on 14 October, in which he said:

I have come to you in Israel because I needed to.

As seldom with such a feeling, I have the strongest sense, after all I’ve seen and heard, of having done the right thing – not for me alone, I hope.

I think I have a notion of what Jewish loneliness can be, and I recognize as well, amongst so many things, a thankful pride in every green thing planted here that stands ready to refresh anyone who comes by; just as I take joy in every newly earned, self-discovered, fulfilled word that rushes up to strengthen those who turn toward it – I take that joy during this time of growing self-alienation and mass conformity everywhere. And I find here, in this outward and inward landscape, much of the force for truth, the self-evidentness, and the world-open uniqueness of great poetry. And I believe I’ve been conversing with those who are calmly, confidently determined to stand firm in what is human.

Celan enjoyed himself in Israel. He said he was “happy to have lived so intensively, more intensively than for a long time… I’m already thinking of coming back.”

Felstiner comments, “Celan was also struck by the memoir a veteran Israeli writer had given him and by how, during Arab attacks on Jews in pre-state Jerusalem, Christians put crosses on their doors for immunity.” (p. 268) Felstiner adds: “Celan wrote to this writer of his ‘anxiety for Israel’.”

And that’s the only way in which Arabs are, very briefly, registered in this book. Aggressive Arab nations make trouble for the Jewish state which is obliged to defend itself. Arabs attacked Jews in pre-state Jerusalem – for reasons not given. In the index of Felstiner’s book you will find 36 references listed under “ant-Semitism” (together with the recommendation to ‘See also Nazism; Neo-Nazism’). But “Palestinians” are not listed; nor is “Arab” or “Arabs”.

As far as I can tell (though there is a vast commentary on Celan in German which has not been translated into English) Paul Celan seems to have had no perception at all of Israel as a chauvinist sectarian state founded on the violent persecution of the indigenous population. The dogged anti-Zionist Mark Elfrecently defined the basic problem of the Jewish state:

Israel exists on the basis of three things: colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and racist laws. As far as I know it is the only state that exists on that basis. Now recognising Israel's right to exist recognises its right to those three things.

As far as I can tell, Paul Celan lacked the insight of Marek Edelman, recently cited by Elf:

Why did Marek Edelman remain in Poland [after the Second World War) as a doctor when almost all his Jewish political colleagues and people close to him personally left? Edelman used to come, now and then, to Israel, to see old friends, but no one had ever publicly asked him this question, though he had a very good answer: he didn’t like the idea of the ‘new nation’. In fact, Edelman was always very critical not only of Israelis’ attitude to the Holocaust, but also of more sensitive issues – such as our racist laws of citizenship. In a late interview he told a Polish journalist: ‘Israel is a chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!’

Celan is the great poet of the Holocaust and one of his central themes is that of loss – one of his greatest poems is ‘Aspen tree’, about his dead mother. But as far as I’m aware Celan seems to have had no perception that the invention of a Jewish state involved the ruthless sectarian persecution of a people, who also suffered and who also experienced loss. Paul Celan happily accepted the privilege of travelling to Israel, because of his identity as a privileged member of the master religion.

Celan’s complacency needs to be contrasted with what happened to to the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. After Israel invaded and occupied that rump of Palestine known as the West Bank in 1967 it forbade native Palestinians abroad the right of return to their homeland. It did so for no other reason than racism and the basic ambition of the sectarian Jewish state of combating democracy by artificially maintaining a Jewish majority. The demographic problem was initially dealt with in 1948 by expelling the Arab majority; it was perpetuated in 1967 by the simple device of refusing to re-admit Arabs who lived in the newly occupied territories and who happened to be outside them when the Israeli army took control.

As he describes in his memoir I Saw Ramallah (2004), Barghouti found himself stranded in Cairo. He was not alone. In his words, Israel forbade “hundreds of thousands of young people to return. And the world finds us a name for us. They called us zaiheen, the displaced ones. Displacement is like death. One thinks it happens only to other people. From the summer of ’67 I became that displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else.”

And Paul Celan? His personal knowledge of sectarian persecution and displacement was as bitter as anyone’s can be. But he could only perceive Jews as victims, not as racists and persecutors. There was, apparently, not a glimmer of knowledge or understanding of the plight of someone like Mourid Barghouti who, like Celan, became a poet out of his experience of persecution.

Visiting Israel, Celan enjoyed his sectarian privileges as a Jew. Though a total stranger to the Middle East, he was a welcome guest in Israel. While Celan read his poems to admiring audiences, Barghouti was exiled. Barghouti, a native, was banned from his homeland. Barghouti was prevented from going to the places where a foreign Jew like Paul Celan could travel freely. And Barghouti, after 29 years of being excluded, found himself, on his return visit, still persecuted: “The others are still masters of the place. They give you a permit. They check your papers. They start your files on you. They make you wait.”

Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944. In 1996, briefly, he was permitted to return to the land from which he had been excluded in 1967. He was able once again to view the room in which he was born, “four years before the birth of the State of Israel”. He revisited the sites of his younger days. The wood at al-Nabi Saleh, for example. But now everything was changed. “Israel seized the wood and large tracts of the lands surrounding it. It built houses and brought in settlers. The road leading to the wood – like all roads leading to the settlements – is closed to Palestinians and for the use of the Israelis alone.”

On his visit to Israel in 1969, Paul Celan gushed about his “thankful pride in every green thing planted here that stands ready to refresh anyone who comes by”. Anyone? No, not anyone. Celan’s complacency and ignorance is stupefying. Here, he reminds me of nothing so much as a gullible West European Communist in the 1930s, visiting Stalinist Russia and discovering there a workers’ paradise.

Mourid Barghouti’s experience was rather different. On his return to Ramallah he saw that “There is less green now since Israel has been stealing the water since 1967”. The pitiless theft of Arab land and Arab water has always been a central feature of Zionism and the sectarian state it gave birth to. So, too, has the denial of access to water to Israeli Arabas. Even today, 80,000 Israeli Arabs are deliberately denied access to clean drinking water and sanitation. They are forced to rely on contaminated water. Children contract hepatitis and die. And yet Paul Celan, blind to the chauvinism and racism of the Jewish state, could see only delightful and refreshing greenery.

The issues of land and water, touched on by Celan in his poem and in his speech, remain every bit as relevant to day as they did in the late 1960s. Referring to the withdrawal of Jewish colonialists from Gaza, Mustafa Barghouti (no relation to the poet) noted [‘The Truth You Don’ Hear’, 9 January 2006 AL-AHRAM Weekly Online]:

Israel had already exhausted the water resources in Gaza by tapping the flow of underground water east of Gaza resulting in the seepage of seawater into Gaza’s coastal aquifer and through the over-pumping of the existing aquifer by Israeli settlements. As such, Gazans have been left with brackish water resources that cause high rates of kidney failure. The maximum accepted level of chloride in drinking water, as set by World Health Organisation standards, is 250 mg per litre. In most areas of Gaza, the level stands between 1,200 and 2,500 mg per litre.

*

To Paul Celan, Israel’s victory in 1967 was a cause for celebration – a free people, the Jews, going “from strength to strength”. Mourid Barghouti saw it differently:

Our calendars are broken, overlaid with pain, with bitter jokes and the smell of extinction. There are numbers now that can never again be neutral: they will always mean one thing. Since the defeat of June 1967 it is not possible for me to see the number ‘67’ without it being tied to that defeat. I see it in part of a telephone number, on the door of a hotel room, on the license plate of a car, in any street in the world, on a cinema or theatre ticket, on a page in a book, in the address of an office or a house, at the front of a train, or a flight number on an electronic board in any airport in the world. A number frozen in its frame.

John Felstiner’s book on Celan no longer seems to me as admirable as it once did. And neither does Paul Celan. It is dispiriting to perceive how the great poet of loss and suffering was silent about Israel’s victims. And Celan’s silence about Jews as persecutors and their victims appears to be reciprocated by everyone who writes about him.

Ellis Sharp © 2006.

One Of My Old Jobs...

2006-03-19T03:57:00.000-08:00

‘One of my old jobs was working as a locksmith.
I had to break into cars and houses, all that stuff,
and change the locks when people couldn’t afford rent.
So I would go along with the landlord and the cops
while the bailiffs got all heavy,
chucking people down the stairs,
and I said to the cops, aren’t you gonna step in?
And they said, fuck ’em.
Once, they chucked this mum
and her two little kids into the street,
and the landlord said,
you can swap the locks now mate.
And I couldn’t.
I was really shaking.’

Merrick Palmer © 2006

Merrick Palmer graduated from Bath Spa University College in 2002 with a first class degree in Creative Writing under the tutelage of Philip Gross and Tim Liardet. His poetry considers how the transience of the surrounding world shapes the inner landscape of daily living. It examines a number of voices and personas, both child and adult, and not always his own, moving within a terrain where experiences conjure significance beyond the banal.

Her First Dance...

2006-03-19T03:49:00.000-08:00

I was looking forward to bluebells.
The woods droned with April –
Stretching out of winter,
Tuning-up for spring.

But I was early.
One frail beauty among empty stems,
First up to dance, bent under inspection.
I plucked her away before music.

Several years later
She’s too fragile to exhume
From this hardback. She’s wept her bloom –
Her dress is nearly white.

She’s poised,
Then she twists
Away from the spine –

Spins all the way down.

Merrick Palmer © 2005

About Florida, France, Germany and everything else...

2006-03-19T03:48:00.000-08:00

You haven't watched the news this evening
therefore
you'd hardly catch
that in France the trains have run off the rails
that in Germany
the snow-storms have obstructed the highways
the others round them have escaped the frost somehow

and this summer
Florida was devastated by the typhoons

France Germany and the others
that have escaped somehow
not that they are not used to it
to stand the rage
icy spell
and to anticipate the next big wave

not that they are not used to it

But just dare to tell me that the world
in some child's notebook is a cute heart
almond-shaped in the left side

Observed from whatever angle on the map
Florida resembles a phallus
frankly speaking it's asking for
the typhoons

slight echo of the arch
slight earthquake
everything else

what else what more
there are no victims, are there
or there are some

Everything else for which I started all this
is only between you and me
the only culprit for love's not around any more

Rositza Pironska 2006.

A yellow spot...

2006-03-19T03:39:00.000-08:00

I cast it off that pain, I gave away one of my rings, the other one with the little white stone has disappeared, my eyes ache terribly, I found a heap of handkerchiefs, the old cracked cap's broken

One vast beach. Love too. The water is green. In Sozopol, I was dropped again in that vagueness of not knowing where I am. Most of the time I thought about Antibes, ‘cause of the bend of the beach

Love too is the vast beach. That's so because of the couple I spot at the end of the beach, the man resembles very much the one I want to make love to me. This was what first struck me. The sky is slightly drawled, the dusk grows out from behind the horizon, only the green water still glows

The next day the man I want to make love to me was squatting at the edge of the water and I heard him speak about doves, gazing at one yellow spot, I heard him repeating now and then "Turn me around". Before long he stood up, went to the parasol, got dressed - my, in this heat! - and went back to the edge squatting again

He squatted for quite a long time then he threw the yellow beach towel on his head and followed the sun, the water and the foam, carrying his slippers in his left hand and I didn't see him disappearing, just suddenly I perceived that he'd simply gone . . . the man I want to make love to me, with a head more yellow than the sun

For a few minutes I was bewitched. That huge resemblance. His eccentric behaviour attracted me more and more. How his legs didn't ache to squat days on end, dressed in this sultriness!

The meteorologist reported on the century's hottest summer, all around poured in the sea, but he continued squatting under the parasol looking fixedly at his own hands, which he moved so as though playing with a web . . . until she appeared . . . until she came back from the sea with her ruby hair

They didn't speak to each other, nevertheless they understood each other. They hardly stayed together. Either she bathed, or he walked along the coast with his towel on his head. He was missing for quite a long time. When he finally came back, she plunged once more into the sea and so on until they left the beach. In the meantime, when they were together, she spotted that I was looking at him and that he was carried away. The resemblance was to blame

I couldn't resist and one night I made up my mind that I would introduce myself to them the following day. I coined various scenarios how I should explain to them that I had took him for someone else and that as a matter of fact

The next day they didn't come, neither did they come the day after next, they escaped . . . and me? I remained looking at one yellow spot

Rositza Pironska © 2006

Logical Engineering...

2006-03-19T03:22:00.000-08:00

FIGHT THE LAW, FIGHT THE LAW.
Thing is if my mum got raped I would call the law
So I painted DON’T FUCK THE FUZZ after it
Some old girl with her afghan hound comes along
She scoffs and rasps and coughs

Then I felt confused because really the law are alright
Because of when some cunt nicked my car.
So I just left DON’T FUCK THE FUZZ
I scratch my head and then so does Bobby
Dirty fingers smell of dirty knickers

Us ragged faced philanthropists
Dragging a brush on the floor
Pincer our fags between cracked lips
Bobby drew a big cock and I carried on squinting and thinking
Dripping, smoking, straining and crouching

We fought the law and it was a draw.
Everyone just went home,
Johnny, Bobby, Vince and me,
We aren’t bank robbers or anything
We just wrote on the floor

DON’T FUCK THE FUZZ
BECAUSE THE FUZZ AREN’T CUNTS.
U ARE A CUNT THOUGH
IF YOU NICKED MY CAR.

Andrew Venner 2006.

Andrew Venner is a full time artist and writer. He is currently working on a collection of short peices about builders called 'Slindon Social'. He lives in worthing.

What I am really angry about?...

2006-03-01T00:35:00.000-08:00

1. There is no national health care. Why does India have national health care and we don't. America has more money than india and less people. I am confused, I have a childlike confusion about this. I feel like a child who hit his sister, then his daddy tells him not to. Then daddy hits mommy. I am confused. I am so fucking confused by that. Also what confuses me is the fact that one bad action movie, just one can cost up to 100 million dollars to make and there is even one person in this world who doesn't have full health care.

2. Why don't we have a parliament like England or New Zealand, or every other industrialized nation where more parties can enter the political system. We have two, that is stupid. And there is no way to another get one in. That is stupid and backward. We have a dictatorship within a democracy. Iraq will probably have a better democracy than ours before all this is finished.

3. That the Republican party exists at all. It needs to be wiped off the face of the earth. And its leaders in office and in the media should be brought to court on crimes against humanity. Dig up Nixon.

The democrats should be the far right party. Throw in the Green Party and a Labor Party and some other kind of party, maybe an Information workers party. It would be great. The Republican party is all shit all the fucking time, and it has been for forty years. It does nothing but harm humanity. You can't even argue with them. We don't need to agree all the time, but fuck, those assholes aren't even in the ballpark.

4. We need to Recognize that computers and high-tech machines have changed the economic field. That it takes less people to produce more shit. Therefore less people are needed to create the products humanity needs. How many fucking cups do humans need. One example: In 1970 the chevy plant in youngstown needed 14,000 workers to produce its cars. Now it needs only 7,000. The number has been cut in half. Computers, technology, has and forever will be making the workforce needed smaller, not bigger.

5. America's extreme form of capitalism. First, there is no real justification for capitalism. Here is one example of the absurdism of what capitalism does. Magic Johnson, a famous basketball player bought 30 Starbucks. He just bought them. He gets the profits from coffee shops. Now Ayn Rand's version of capitalism is that they deserve the money because of their genius. Well, in reality capitalism has nothing to do with genius. He bought those, and he makes the money because he owns the instruments of production. He worked to become a famous basketball player. But he didn't do shit concerning coffee. and that's the reality of capitalism, a rich person buys the instruments of production and reaps the profits. and they get white collar people to design the products, and advertisements. They get normal people to make their products, design, and sell them.

A moment in my life: My friend's dad who worked at Kmart distribution when I was in high school came up to me and said, "You know who the highest paid person at Kmart is?" I said, "No." He said, "Kathy Ireland." The model appeared on the posters. Capitalism allows some random famous person to get paid more for one days worth of work, then the employees do all year.

Now, don't call me a commie. I don't have problems with local businesses, or even some person owning like five pizza shops etc. But fuck, some of this shit just don't make any fucking sense.

6. America needs to be weaned off of religion. This religious shit needs to die. There is no afterlife, God does not matter. I don't think taking away religion cold turkey would be very prudent , probably some violence would take place. But there needs to be a process where schools and the media show that thinking about religion is harmful to one's life. I would support and pay extra taxes to having people who were religious get counseling to help them with their low-self-esteems.

7. Racism needs to be stopped. The government actually needs to be pro-active about that. Being racist is not freedom of speech, it is fucking bullshit. People are born equal, that is a fact. You can't have an opinion on a fact.

"The fact that the citizens of our country are pretty complacent and do nothing to uproot the status quo?"

In history the bulk of humans of a certain country only disrupt the status quo during time of economic change. When a new instrument is placed into the economic field, the computer will eventually cause the uprooting.

But calling Americans complacent would be wrong. I know many uncomplacent, very angry people. Not punk rockers either. But regular, hard working americans, who are pissed. Look at the signs people are holding at Chevy rallies. Chevy is going bankrupt, the protesters are screaming for a political party that represents labor.

One the things about America's media, is they never show news like that.

Another example would be: In Youngstown last, there was a shoot out between gangs and the police. The gangs fired on the police. You don't fire a gun at the police if you are complacent. To explain the total event. In two days a gang war broke out, five people got shot. Two people just sitting in their house watching television. A woman was taken hostage. All kinds of crazy shit. A total third world scene right here in the America.

That was just in Youngstown, there are a good amount of areas in America worse than Youngstown. So I wouldn't be surprised more incidents like that have occured. (But I suppose that rich guy who killed his wife and went to england is more important and crucial to the survival of the american people.)

If the bulk of America was complacent why wouldn't they vote at all?

People don't vote because they see the options as shit. Or "disgusting" as a heard one woman say.

The problem isn't that they aren't complacent, its that no one bothers to learn what they want, to learn what they are like, what would make them leave their house and do something about it.

In my opinion: The working class and the poor are angry. And the only way to make things different in this country is to tap into that anger. To direct their anger. Instead of them being violent and mean to other people of their class. Show them why they are angry. Show them they are intelligent, that they can think and reason. That they are people too. That they are humans and need to be treated with respect.

One of the biggest problems, is the masochism of the poor and working class. They have been taught that they are dumb and that thinking is useless. For example Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed. Her disguising herself and going down into the lower classes teaches that poor people are stupid. What she should have done is just did interviews with poor people. There is too strong of an emphasis on what college you went to, was it state or private, was it Harvard or Bowling Green, did you go at all.

I can easily imagine someone from Bowling Green discrediting what someone from a state university said, then I can imagine someone from Harvard discrediting what someone from Bowling Green said. Based solely on the fact where they went to school.

The academia must recognize that normal working people are intelligent. That if you show the facts, %90 of them will understand.

Example: I was work and talking to a 19 year old kid who didn't graduate high school. For some reason I told him about Chomsky's Critical Hypothesis Theory. How there are muscles in the brain that need to be used by the time a kid is seven, or they will never be able to use grammar. I said, "it is like a muscle, it needs to be used. etc." The kid understood.

Normal people understand facts.

I went to college for awhile. Political ideas aren't biology or physics. A political or a psychological idea, if it is any good and based in reality. Can be understood by anyone.

To finish this: I don't think communism will lead to there being no state, or that there will be a utopia, or that an utopia would even be very fun. But fuck, things could be better than this.W

Noah Cicero © 2006

Noah Cicero (born 1980) is an American novelist, essayist, playwright, short-story writer, and poet. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and is the author of two books of fiction:

The Human War [2003, Fugue State Press, New York]

The Condemned [2006, Six Gallery Press, Pennsylvania]

His stories, poetry, and essays have also been published extensively on the Internet. His prose is spare, extreme in its directness and force, and addresses with brutal Absurdist humor the day-to-day lives of urban-wasteland characters who are painfully aware of the futility of their existence. He notably depicts crumbling urban America, in particular the bars and strip clubs of Youngstown, with a bleak black humor. The work, while highly accessible, is imbued with political critique and an existential examination of reality. He has cited Sartre, Hemingway and Beckett as central influences.

His essays are both political and philosophical in nature, sometimes using the tools of psychology and philosophy to crucify those political leaders or followers he sees as acting in bad faith. Some of these essays have been written in collaboration with Ohio journalist Bernice Mullins.

There Is A Tune...

2006-02-28T01:55:00.000-08:00

There is a tune (pause)
I am a note you can not mark upon
Yet your blind folded brain,
Withering wafer like wit, turned sour...

OOPS! She's just sculled' the curdled litre
Her mouth now fountain, projectile missile
Alas she is a putrid hose... Alas she is a putrid hose
She is a putrid hose

(repeat) Yet your blind folded brain,
Withering wafer like wit, turned sour
Draws you to strike a blade where it hurts or
Annoys or simply peeves my patience OR I pity you

You want to paint over the blue sky?!
You want to erase the sun?!
You want to seize the stars out of the night sky?!
Annihilate the moon?!

Niagara is NOTHING! compared to
Earth's tears

Fools, who are not really fools have simply just (pause)
Given up there tools of humanity
Fools! Accidental tourists; zygote accidentals...
Ohhh the patchwork planet, will we ever learn?

I'm a gutless wonder, talk and think, don't activate my drive desire
I just contemplate (pause) and drink, reaching high fantastical plains
Of a wondrous existence, in my minds eye.
SOMETIMES! fantasy and reality copulate, procreating a NEW production
Thus I am induced with an atomic ecstatic insertion to give birth
To a new life form, that I think shall always only begin on paper
NOT in the embrace.
(pause) I can always destroy my poetical procreations and simply start again.

Chance always calls... often beckoning

I reach...
I reach not far enough

I try...
I try not hard enough

Chance keeps calling me!

I bang my head against the wall, careful for no blood yet at the same time
Wanting the swell to break, just because I'm angry... angry with myself.
Nohhh, I wouldn't write in blood with my finger tips. There wouldn't be enough anyway.

You know what to do, act on it.
"Do what you wanna' do, be who you wanna' be, yeah"...

Why can not you fly?
Your brain consists of an imagination
Use it! (pause) Wings (long pause)

Oh I've had a hellovaday'!
In fact I've had a fucked day.
In fact, it's a fact I was fucken' fired today.
Therefore it's fair that I take the fact that I was fucken' fired today
Out on you!

Oh really (pause). Well you see I think this is where I really! penetrate your front door
Do not vomit on me. Your crap of a dour day has not a scrape of shit on your shoe, to do with me. I want to make you feel better not worse. FOOL!

I!...am not perfect

Get with it!
- Get with what?
Get with the program!
- What program?
The human behaviour program!

(accent strine) How many times have I told you?!!!
How many times have I told you about EMPATHY... SHARING AND CARING...?!

(end accent strine) Or are you simply a being where spite and cynicism
keeps your engine running as you gradually rot inside thus dying a premature death?
Or just a breathing sultana, grumbling in regret of all the things you coulda', woulda', shoulda' DONE! before you became a BREATHING SULTANA. Perhaps you are a breathing BITTER sultana, contemplating revenge in your old age?

Wanna' turn the clock back do ya'?!
DO YA?! DO YA?! DO YA?!

There is a tune (pause)

There is always a tune... and I am
A hog for pleasure not to mention
(fade out) LOVE & PEACE LOVE & PEACE LOVE & PEACE ...

There is only one way to use the lint remover... (unless you wannit')

I am not perfect... well of course I am not perfect

Why not?
(angry) LOOK! It's a long story...
Come over to my place and I'll make you the best banana smoothie in the whole entire universe...

(demonic and distorted voice from nowhere in particular) "Don't be so hard on yourself. Don't half cock your life, whole cock your life".

Cathy Flower © 2006.

Pagan Cunts a Virtue, She Says*...

2006-02-27T13:39:00.000-08:00

but I won't listen to your thoughts. Granny cooks away her distress in
the kitchen, little Petey comes over with a frying pan and pretty soon
the whole garden is at play, broiled rats and all. Ensconced in father's
lessons of the moment, newspaper weighs its course through bat-bitten
days of sandpaper and toiletries. When pa chokes on a bone, another
master of the house will take his place until the next mystery leaks out
of granny's bra (Arsenic and Old Lace), steering the kindergartners away
from the old wench's gnawed hambone face towards another reality to
chase. I

love you mama when you put on the mittens in the way it makes me feel
fresh inside which you know by now is a fallacy after all you've smelled
and tasted, sensory by-products of an era you never imagined yourself
keeling - but you never had much of an imagination now, or did you hide

it lasso milky weighs the cupboard. Mirrored agenda a faze I knew how to
interpret before I lost the guide, now I dream in black and white, but
my fans say I'm more colorful now. A peep emerges from the muted
conscience. Meted choke of victory perhaps a cornucopia in the bodily
dilated eyeball the spots on that blouse seem to unearth, whether
spotted on purpose by the perilous designer or merely stains to coincide
with a subconstrued warmth in the hands of the enlightened few. I want
to blanch you out of my system. I know you're already there, happening,
love.

*This poem is taken from Travis Jeppesen's new collection: Poems I Wrote While Watching TV.

Three Poems...

2006-02-27T13:27:00.000-08:00

Eyes

One day
things happened

Everything shifts
eyes opened
and changed the world.

But now lids

are lead
and all that is dead.

things happened
one day.

You are too scared

Dry yourself
filth. filth.
cut it open.
deeply fuck
an open wound.
you already did.
finish the job.
you are too scared.

aren't you?

Legs

Wading through the woods
I do not want these legs
They are heavy
and have only taken me
to trouble.
My mind is one.
It is not here.
I am not here.
But my legs always
take me to trouble.

Samuel B. Milsom © 2006.

Sam Milsom is a student and University of Reading, Berkshire. He enjoys his eating, drink and the occasional blinking. And he writes things that he believes he needs to write, else he is prone to the odd psychotic outburst.

Four Poems...

2006-02-27T13:04:00.000-08:00

Another Night

I had a headache
took two pain killers
the bright lights don't help my condition
neither do the laughing bouncers spitting on the floor
outside Norwegian blue.
Moving on through bottles and pint glasses
hours go by
endless wasted nights
slutty girls dance who pick out identikit haircuts
to dance with,
boys with tight t-shirts emblazoned with retro
Americana slogans
hula girls
welcome to the Bronx
Boston university
white, brown and ambient yellow.
I watch these peacocks present
drunken compliments
bitter rejections.
that’s harsh.
We walk back like we always do
in search of a taxi
I drunkenly push a wheelbarrow
through tombland
Glenn helps me lift
and we hurl it into the wensum
drunk and disorderly
eighty pound fine,
what a waste of time.

Rise

Maybe it’s just the winter,
the cold Siberian sun
which has replaced the Mediterranean sun
which appeared occasionally during the summer
in amongst showers of rain
which was neither one thing nor the other.
my orphaned hand
it rests on the mouse
whilst the other rubs rampant.
during the day I struggle to get a rise
maybe a bit of morning wood
as the dawn sun shines throughout the trees
her hot little ass
floats past in those tight denim jeans
nothing
but now I’m worried
trapped in the midnight pub
as the drinking clock
circles
time moves forward pushing the boundaries
like an upside down cross inverted in blood
that other girl with sunken eyes
anaemic gothic beauty
a body to die for
a partner to rest with
in an oak coffin lined with pink velvet.
In my mind
I was whipped and spanked
hoping something different
might give me a rise
but still nothing.

Friday, like any other day

Thank you for letting us see your work, we're sorry to return it
in the stamped address envelope that you kindly sent.
I wake up to this and wonder where all the good mail is gone
leaflets about Car Insurance, letters about Credit Cards with criminally low APR and pyramid scams, oops I mean schemes.
As I writer it seems hardly worth going on, it’s like punching yourself in the face.
Today is Friday the 13th.
Work, went well
which was nice
had fish and chips for tea
didn’t go out Friday night
Saturday is tomorrow,

Glasshouse Showdown

At times it pays not to retaliate.
This guy pokes me with his middle finger
right in the middle of my chest
what you gonna do about it
nothing I guess,
as I don't know how to fight
I could have punched him
but if you don't fight on instinct
and just take a drunken swing
then its pot luck in the dark.
It’s even more hopeless when you are slow off the mark
he walks away with a smirk on his face
and the chance of retribution
has been and gone

Richard Wink © 2006.

Richard Wink was born in 1984 in the 'Fine' City of Norwich. His poetry is based upon real life experiences and the complications of life, reflecting both the sacred and the mundane

Trapped...

2006-02-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

It’s my belief that all great artists
do their best work inside a trap. Whether it’s a wheelchair
a bottle
a needle
or a bad marriage with a few kids thrown in for good measure

Everybody knows their names
but for the hell of it, here are a few:
Dostoyevsky (his own epileptic brain and gambling compulsion)
Bukowski (the bottle)
Hitchcock (fat)
etc., etc.

The thing is that we’re all trapped
Whether it’s the decent job that turns sour
or the lawn that you have to mow
or the wife who devours us
We’re all in our own little prisons

Even the maniac flying down the highway on a Harley is in his own cage.

Maybe it’s best if you know from the get-go that you’re
caught
Because that way the pressure’s off
You know you’re finished, and you don’t waste time and
energy trying to thrash your way out
and into another snare

Some call it resignation
Others call it enlightenment
I prefer the truth:
Ever see a fly trapped between a window and a screen?
Ask him.

Mark SaFranko's stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and journals internationally, including the renowned Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Savage Kick. He was cited in Best American Mystery Stories 2000 and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2005 he won the Frank O'Connor award. Mister SaFranko is also a playwright. The Bitch-Goddess was selected Best Play of the Village Gate One-Act Festival in New York in 1992. An evening of his one-acts which included The Bitch-Goddess recently made its European debut at the Derry Playhouse in Northern Ireland. The production then moved south to the Cork Arts Theatre to strong reviews.

Another play, The Promise, was produced at the Millenium Forum in Derry in June, 2003. Other plays have also been seen at such New York venues as the Samuel Beckett Theater, Belmont Italian American Playhouse, the Harold Clurman Theater, the Creative Place Theater, Wings Theater, the Madison Avenue Theater, and the Riant Theater.As an actor he has appeared in several independent films, including A Better Place, Shoot George, and The Road From Erebus.His novels are Hopler's Statement and The Favor, both available through all the dotcoms. His novel, Hating Olivia, is published by Murder Slim Press. The sequel to Hating Olivia, entitled Lounge Lizard, will be published soon.

The Noose...

2006-02-27T12:52:00.000-08:00

In the middle of the night
Every night around 3, or 4 a.m.
Just before my eyes snap open and
I struggle out of bed to take my old man’s piss

I have this vision
A simple vision
Of an empty hangman’s noose

Gracefully I step up to the executioner’s platform
Slip my head in
Feel the cord tighten ever so slightly around my neck

What’s to come requires no explanation

But I can’t quite figure out what the vision means:

Whether it’s just my chronic clinical depression
rearing its ugly head
Or if it’s supposed to represent you, my wife
and the kids sleeping peacefully in the next room

Or that one day I’m going to find myself on the gallows after I lose my grip once and for all and commit
bloody mayhem

Or maybe the noose is nothing but (right, nothing but!)
A symbol of our existential dilemma down here on earth

And so I lie there, stymied
Waiting breathlessly

For some explanation to emerge out of the blackness

It never does
And I’ve lost all hope that it ever will

Then I find my legs
Stumble to the jake
Sit on the fucking thing like a woman

And let go

Back in the bedroom
The iridescent digits on the nightstand clock say
Two, or three hours
Before I have to get up again
And slip my neck
Into the noose
Of another day.

The Lawnmower...

2006-02-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

We moved out of the city when the kid turned four
The wife couldn’t go on even one more night with
all three of us
sleeping in the same bedroom

“We’ve got to have more space,” she said
“before one of us loses it.”

So we came out to the suburbs
mortgaged ourselves for the rest of our days

It’s going to be better, everyone told us:
Cleaner air
Less noise
Better schools
No violent crime to speak of

Well, what the hell
I went kicking and screaming
But I went
because I wanted to keep it together
make sure my son had a daddy
I even pitched in, painted the basement floor
and one or two of the walls of the place we bought
to show my good faith in our new, improved life

But I missed the city every day
missed hearing the Spanish and Mandarin and Hebrew
whenever I walked down Canal Street
and the sirens the horns the jackhammers
the shattering bottles and screams in the night
the sweet smells of piss and puke
the rats the winos the maniacs
the magnificent ass swarming over the filthy asphalt
like cockroaches wherever you looked
the way you never knew your neighbors’ names

But in the end
I had to admit “they” were telling the truth
about the crime and the noise and the filth
and the air quality, that is

Now we’ve got peace and greenery:
trees, flowers, and lots of grass

The wife likes it out here
The kid likes it out here (he’s got a backyard to play in now)
And it’s true that we couldn’t continue pissing away all that jack
on rent and a parking space in the city

But there is one thing about living on
Ashbrook Lane that drives me to the edge:
The lawnmowers
which roar outside the windows like mad bull elephants

Seems out here everybody’s got one
They’re gas-propelled
electric
hand-operated like in the old days
some you even ride like a tractor

And mowing their lawns
(and fertilizing, seeding, edging, clipping and pruning)
is all these brain-dead
motherfuckers seem to want to do with their spare time

Now the wife wants me to join the ranks
“It’s exercise,” she says
“and since you’re out of work again,
we shouldn’t have to pay someone to cut our grass.”

This evening I hiked over to the ATM
to deposit my unemployment check
and since summer is just around the corner

all the feudal lords were out there guiding
their mechanical beasts

Well, the din of those infernal engines
got to me
when all I wanted was a quiet stroll in the fresh air
“Shut the fuck up –- I’m trying to think!”
I yelled at one prince
but under his sound-proof earphones he was oblivious,
so he smiled benignly and waved

And moving on I said to myself, No, no, no -– not for me

“No way, honey,” I’ll tell the wife,
“you’re not gonna sucker me into it.
What did I tell you when I agreed to move out here?
I’ll do it for the kid,
but I sure as hell ain’t no lawn service.
No, I got better things to do with my time”
(like write poems and stories and novels
that nobody seems to want)

She was putting the kid to bed when I got back
I didn’t say a word to her
It could wait until tomorrow, I figured

I tried to push the ubiquitous grass-cutters out of my mind
Tried my damnedest to forget that I was stranded in the limbo of suburbia
To that end I switched on the TV
flopped on the couch with a beer
and watched Celebrity Boxing II

And that
is what an army of lawnmowers
will do to a man

OHMYGOD! An End to Cinema...

2006-02-07T03:12:00.000-08:00

We relied too much on cinema
to create feelings and situations.
In the background, I always thought -
I didn’t love you. I couldn’t love you. I only love
The attention you lavish on my lonely
American scenario -
The one you must have seen before studying
Martin Luther King in Georgia.
The women who threw themselves at your accent.
Or maybe in the office.
I was the easy, American intern spread like footprints
In the rain.
I remember walking through London intersections,
Umbrella in hand,
Hating the prospects of slave labor, but looking forward to,
Perhaps, you making an excuse to touch my shoulder.
In front of co-workers, I blush all vodka drunk.
Our battleground - your London bed. My time of the month
This kind of honeymoon virginity
As unplanned as your proposal.
I wanted to be the Sylvia to your Ted.
We were over.
I cried
Not because the film was sad, in particular,
But because I knew I was Charlotte and you were Bob Harris.
We were both actors looking to be more than actors.
And it was then that I realized
I loved you.

Glenna Myles © 2006.

Glenna Myles currently lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA.

Conversation in a Hammock...

2006-02-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

I start to look at the trees,
then their leaves.
Look Noah, look.
Notice how that one is slightly different.
It moves while the others stay quiet.
Kind of like this hammock.

Oh shut up, he says.

What? What was wrong with that?

We continue to sit in the hammock,
only looking at the trees.
You just encourage it, he says.
You encourage the craziness.

Let's just look at the leaves, I say.
Come on.
Me, you, and the leaves.

Let's just avoid life, he says.
I'm tired of looking at the leaves.
We're people,
not leaves.
Sometimes, we have to admit that.

He lifts off the hammock, walking down
to the dock.

Fine, I think.
Leave. I don't need you.
I still have this hammock, the movement,
and the leaves.

My feet push on the ground as I grind
the twig into the dirt.

I haven't encouraged anything.
The wind made him speak crazy
like the different leaf.
It falls.

Noah skips a stone across the lake.

If only it would rain, I think.
Everything would really
sparkle.

Glenna Myles © 2006.

Glenna Myles currently lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA.

Poems...

2006-02-03T04:08:00.000-08:00

Mono Eden

Plastic Skunk,
Comedy garden ornament.
I’ve never seen a skunk in the flesh.
I try to decide what
Other Black
and white
Creatures exist;
1.Zebra

King’s Sugar

King’s Sugar
Is bitter
To taste
Strangely
Soft
To touch
Queen’s Honey
Amber, Glass, Syrup
Sticky
Smelly
Sweet
Summer
Modern Nuns
Don’t keep bees
I know this
Because
Email exists
Praying 4u
Holy
Sista

Spores

Spores
Like the
Secret Garden
Infect you silently
Fruit Bodies
In the grass
In a ring
Kill or cure
Seeping poison
Via ostiole
Skin
Ripe
Picked
In the forests
Of Finland

£20

Underbid
Antique set
Of twin decks
In brown leather
Box
Sellotape damage
Exposes
Suede
Like dead skin
On a
Grazed knee

Diction

How to Talk Correctly
Do not speak at all
For
I do not want to listen
I can’t hear you
Nor do I want to
So I shan’t
Concede
Self-inflicted
Deafness

Little Orange Stamp

Bee Hive
And
Scythe
H
A746470
REGD TRADE MARK
Little Orange
Stamp with
Perforated edges
Cut off-centre
Showing green
Of another
Lost stamp

Child of Our Time

Wild Will
Dream-child
Little Owl
Reu
Kimba Toad
Sammy
Kevina
Cam
9 going on 19
Spooky
Rude
A right darlin’
Ritalin
ADHD
Backward
Forward

Little Old Lady Next Door Neighbour

Corporal Sherwood
Was in Singapore
Mrs Smith
In the Hotel
Raised pencilled eyebrow

Lauren McCarthy © 2006.

Lauren McCarthy currently lives in the heart of England’s Black Country, somewhere between a rock and a hard place.

Murder Leisure...

2006-02-03T04:03:00.000-08:00

It’s so cold in here I want to cut my left arm off. The kids at school will all get murdered. They don’t know the edge of my plan, what it’s all about. Pink dogs are barking out my window; buy a machine gun and fuck the rest. I’m so limited at times in my gallant apprehensions; wanna buy a new grenade? Thick riffs emitted from stereotyped letters. No more coughed museums for sale up the asshole of zero. Whose concert is worth fighting for. The outward dementia. Give me a compliment, I’ll hand you a knife. Videofuck smells nice in the aftermath, I must admit these things to my self. “You don’t want to risk some black business and get deported from the planet.”

Maybe cut her breasts off stick them in the stew that would help things. Get educated before you chop someone else’s cock off; inherit the wind. Orange jehovah bled on the tile, seething mass of mistakes all wrapped up behind the same glass case. We have no respect for your law, your penetrationary mass of absolutes farting down from the ceiling. The attic’s mass of squirt lotion secures a cold place in the shadow of the architect’s eye; who knows how many bones one has to spin through before arriving at the final showdown. The masticated affair knows no parallels when finality gets drawn out. I’m forming a splinter group anyhow; maybe we’ll learn how to re-finance tomorrow.

Under a funeral moon...

2006-02-03T03:59:00.000-08:00

Swords wrapped around the cusp of our leaving off in silence. Tongue-torqued and holy roller tide the beyonder moonlight and dry ice to get the real effect down we’re fucked satanic breaking moonstream whatever we’re settled for it’s less than what we taste momentarily hark here the straits of the world. Maximal undoing spider form fucker blasting. What lies beyond the gates, it flies into your mind the spirals. I’m a goddamn automaton the cat’s bobsled meow karma. Yellow barbarism.

Black gates form a horde, reused words and forms, goddamn how I delimit myself play a musical instrument laugh defeated. Over there polaroids an instant affinity for the carved self thrown away: eternal misery, he screams. That girl over there. The sofa shits out a moon.

War songs.

Mistress molester, Fenriz’s drumming. De-adjectivize that last phrase please. Try not to describe. Cool nuggets of what I never have. Call iodine. Planted nutjob in the middle of the secret. Hear needs an other tool to fuck righteous. They wait on me to vacate the species. Can’t feel sorry for the deliveryman. Black blocks spin on a cancerous axis. No holes allowed to spew empire. Corpus spells ancient relief from the real Siam. Build for me your sweatsuit, the lion is a king. Plastic tannenbaums gunned down on wooden suede, how long’s it gonna take for the putrid scent to put its tongue in my mouth. Am I alive or else a gun. It always turns into this.

(Not so nervous now as puke once allowed me so. All that eternal plunder. You face gulleys blown fuel of rejection. But the or plane. Panic in the paracide.)

One day we all fall back blood. Less the sped-up galore to shift into height queen hoolahoop mary. We aren’t the future.

You are my anything...

2006-02-03T03:33:00.000-08:00

I can only aspire to be as fried as you were then, at that age. Blacksmiths were coming to visit the gold of your mother-in-law. Another version of Scandinavia admitted from the stereo’s vixen. How you could succeed through the sudden bubbling of life and mortar, big dazed sunglasses wore thin. Reversed men flash dividend eyeballs. Testimonial showroom flourishes the sign of the dilated testicle, venus attacks the squawk. Hello to be alive. My amoeba, destitute pleasure. Perspiring in the breeze. Put that over here. Dusted burghs erupt sense of true freedom ouch. The allotted savior howls. Rainbow falls over on the insect farm all right. We dance up and off to the side in order to elicit holy how. Articulate grandeur my finger smells. Exaggerate black beauty width to go downtime in tune with teen happenstance chaser, stretch glances across lengthened gorge corridor; howls lightly just to splay you, remember my originary reprimander. Down holey and connoted, the spinning bog devours next assertion. Bury it with the fleas, I’m a corrosive container, riders in the seed. Mountaintop reindeer dancing. Jobs blow up winters away from here. Glam countertop provides refuge from lingering question mark avalanche. Who aren’t you smiting. Nectar in the ass sponge baby tonight. Sunburned embargo melts quietly across the muse. Pancake attack on my shoulder. Motorcycles in the stars fat fucker. Lustified in the relapse, where you going now. Take off that skin, I wanna see you go rabbit-style.

Maurice Blanchot, the absent voice: an introduction.

2006-01-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident - perhaps Fascist - nationalism of his pre-War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that is similar to, but more significant than, Pynchon's and Salinger's; his deep influence on more famous French thinkers (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). And, finally, in this list, his return to public life to oppose French colonialism in Algeria and then to support the May 1968 student uprising, during which he drafted pamphlets released by those opposing General de Gaulle's autocracy. But to concentrate on these facts, relevant as they are, would be to ignore what Blanchot offers, which is a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That is, why do written words have so much power over us, yet also seem completely estranged from the world they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature takes us to "another world", we say more than we might imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to us relentlessly. "There is an a-cultural aspect to art and literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly" he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself, so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced even, Blanchot's resistance makes him, in my opinion, one of the most important writers.

In my opinion. What is that worth? The question of authority - mine, Blanchot's or anybody else's - is the invisible centre of our cultural ideology. We all know that Liberal Democracy is based on choice; each individual is free to choose and each individual's choice is as good as any other's. So, when I write in my opinion, I remove all weight from the judgement. The complete opposite is equally valid. Despite this, we still make definite choices in what to read, watch or listen to, as if hoping, despite everything, for something more than nothing. The act of choice itself speaks of a need: for nourishment, entertainment or distraction, or all three combined. But we have little guidance on what and why to choose. Perhaps the recent proliferation of award ceremonies and prize competitions for each art form is no coincidence: the award-winning novel, the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie. We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitigation of one's apparently random choice. At the same time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of Liberal Democracy.

Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect. Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather, he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offering in the process a startling revision of our understanding of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art and world be what makes it vital and important? In a short essay from 1953, published in a new translation by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates' preference for speech over writing.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One can ask questions and receive answers; there is always the movement of dialogue with those involved always mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible. On the other hand, written words can only maintain a solemn silence: "if you ask them what they mean by anything," he says, "they simply return the same answer over and over again." The philosopher links this to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to "the sacred voice" emerging from a stone or the stump of a tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation with written words:

Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself. Behind the words of the written work, nobody is present; but language gives voice to this absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the god himself is never present in his words, and it is the absence of god which then speaks. (trans. Leslie Hill)

If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the human project represented by Socrates. What can be done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet in literature, luring truth into "the abyss where there is neither truth nor meaning nor even error"? Blanchot reminds us what was done: "both Plato and Socrates are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved for moments of leisure". Of course, Socrates went on to pay with his life for his commitment to the more serious matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains emblematic of our notion of the freedom of speech, his dismissal of writing and art sounds very familiar, very now, particularly to anyone searching for truth in art. We can see the correlation between postmodernism (no truth, no meaning), popular culture (no error), and the ancient philosophers' dismissal of art. It is attractive as there is another correlation, perhaps the most important: both are also liberations. In each case, freedom is granted to those previously enslaved to truth. Writers can let their imagination run wild; there is no comeback.

Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed in the written word. He wonders what it is that disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants, to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social, psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer, he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher, pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle "neither speaks out nor conceals, but points". From this Blanchot deduces that the "language in which the origin speaks is essentially prophetic." However, he clarifies the final word:

This does not mean that it dictates future events, it means that it does not base itself on something which already is … It points toward the future, because it does not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent that it is like a future language which is always ahead of itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification. (trans. Leslie Hill)

It does not base itself on something which already is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind of literature that does not engage with current events or familiar social relations, and where the style, language and subject matter - or lack of it - resists the utility of common understanding. Is modern literature, then, prophetic?

The nature of the question means the answer cannot be stated as such, only experienced. The moment it is answered, the language of the future is negated and drawn into Socrates' dialogue of utility. However, this is not to distinguish experience and literature. Contrary to popular opinion, literature is intimate with daily experience. Blanchot puts it this way:

Upon the background noise constituted by our knowledge of the world's daily course, which precedes, accompanies, and follows in us all knowledge, we cast forth, walking or sleeping, phrases that are punctuated by questions. Murmuring questions. What are they worth? What do they say? These are still more questions. (trans. Susan Hanson)

We don't experience the world without this murmuring, a kind of voice-under codifying and animating an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainment-distraction, drugged socialising, or plausible theories of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot's unique attunement to these murmuring questions - to what resists the Socratic demand - which distinguishes his work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking news of the moment, he asks certain questions that emerge from the experience of reading the book itself.

This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable [see note at bottom of page]. Here is a book that has no justification. It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to efface the author with the usual means of the suspension of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal free fall. Blanchot asks, "Who speaks in Samuel Beckett's books? … Who is the tireless 'I' who seems always to say the same thing?" At first, the answer is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel's terrible dynamic.

Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent mother's room. This is the usual displacement of the author's own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another narrator, Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says this a "slightly disappointing" allegory of the author's search for something more original than itself. Beckett is having fun with the conventions of the novel - which is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work. Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassuring presence like normal characters in a novel speaking through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us from what Blanchot calls "a greater threat".

That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone's death would provoke the "ultimate disaster which is to have lost the right to say I". Malone is bedridden, having only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables him to turn his room into "the infinite space of words and stories." He tells stories - a simple pastime - to fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism; everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:

All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand, to begin to understand, how such creatures are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding. Of what then? I don't know. Here I go none the less, mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good. The last word is not yet said between me and - yes, the last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.

And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies, we're never quite sure, for how can death occur in a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins without his support for the stories. So really, it cannot continue.

It continues anyway. And according to current understanding, this is where "the real" author should reveal himself, the one "behind the scenes". Again, it is no coincidence that when producers of "Reality TV" proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of "what really went on" - endless promises of a definitive intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn't. In The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a consciousness stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot, this is the "malaise of one who has dropped out of reality and drifts forever in the gap between existence and nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being born." As readers we undergo:

[an] experience experienced under the threat of impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar, excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced because it is what is unceasing and interminable. (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)

This is the language of the future. It is "a direct confrontation with the process from which all books derive": language itself. By asking the simple question of who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of communication, and thereby the limits of our power in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to the point where we are taken to another world ("transported" as so many naïve readers put it, neglecting the recent history of the word). Beckett's Trilogy exceeds this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the confines of novel. The author's great achievement is to take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to stay this side. To declare his work 'absurdist' or that it 'mirrors the breakdown of religious belief', as might be heard wherever Beckett's books are discussed, is unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Trilogy has never been accepted into our culture in the same way as, say, Joyce's Ulysses.

[Note: Blanchot's essay on Beckett, "Where now? Who now?" can be found in The Sirens' Song: Selected Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage in a translation by Richard Howard. However, both are long out of print.]

Blanchot's own novels, such as Thomas the Obscure, have a kinship with Beckett's work; there is constant dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though, they are closer to Kafka's; there are many mysterious landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both these authors' humour. His narratives are often insipid. However, in the late 1950's, the critical writing and the fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a novel appeared called L'attente l'oubli (Translated as Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room. Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from the rest by a printed diamond or star (like this: ). The spaces disrupt straightforward narrative progress.

She was present, already her own image, and her image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself. When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten. Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remembered, sometimes remembering the forgetting and forgetting everything in this remembrance. (Trans. John Gregg)

In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says that novels "show the possibility of what it is like to be someone else". Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through that someone else. As we begin to understand the person in front of us, the understanding takes his or her place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative. No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Perhaps significantly, McEwan's latest novel Atonement is about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning. In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists compulsive interest.

Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes in on itself. When infected with another however, not only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in The Law of Genre - a close reading of Blanchot's very short novel The Madness of the Day - this infection is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre is basically the effacement of that infection. As the dynamic of absence and presence frequently drives Blanchot's writing, the direction was perhaps necessary.

In a remarkably condensed early essay, How is Literature Possible? this movement is prefigured. In it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan about the opposition of what we might call traditional and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) has dominated our conception of literature for 150 years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo's rejection of rhetoric, Verlaine's denunciation of eloquence and Rimbaud's abandonment of "old-hat" poetry. Sixty years on, it hasn't changed that much. Think of Martin Amis' famous "war against cliché", JG Ballard's expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett's Trilogy could itself be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tradition. Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled auto-de-fe and so destroy the complacent world of bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does is to point out that in order to do either requires a scrupulous attention to language. "Whoever wants to be absent from words at every instant or to be present only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied with them so that, of all authors, those who most eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e. using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most exposed to this reproach." Does this, then, destroy all hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according to those who do not consider themselves writers, because writing is a work of distance from the "ecstasies" of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot:

It is the same for those who through the marvels of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing themselves from all literature. For having wanted to rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics as they would conventions and forms that they complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the visible framework and the foundation of their works. […] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, religion, and emotions take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre - in a word, literature. (trans.Charlotte Mandell)

The experience of these systems of expression, however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become "monsters of ambiguity" when we read. How are we, as readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of life to continue while the victims are all dependent on the vampire myth for their living. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before: authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only in the inscrutibility of their presence.

If literature relies on comforting demarcations of genre to procede, yet demands a naked openness to the world for the sake of authenticity, then the apparence of the printed star in Blanchot's work is perhaps not just a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blanchot's famous late work, The Writing of the Disaster, a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obsolete definition of the word disaster is "an unfavourable aspect of a star". The star helps us to grasp the possibility of meaning, which we return to at the end of each section, while at the same time threatening break down. The book is in part about how one deals with disaster, the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also about the disaster of language itself:

The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience - it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual. (trans. Ann Smock)

That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself through opinion or style. Blanchot's impersonal voice, so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster.

To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest - the other, the reader - entrusting yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.

We are absent from one another as the disaster writes through communication. We are absent even from ourselves as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We saw this emerge in Beckett's Trilogy. Yet it is precisely this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together. The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is central, remains the only medium for the possibility of a community, even if it is a community of those who have no community. The growth in sales of intimate self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public figures, and the pathological obsession with personalities and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal democracy functions by removing an effective public life. As in Orwell's 1984, Big Brother, or at least one's biographer, is always watching. It is a political environment that has redefined politics into a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the absent voice of a community denied by a misreading of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the apparent emptiness of art:

Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe .. is empty - at bottom it doesn't exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend. (trans Ann Smock)

The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at the end of his essay on Beckett:

Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into an artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty, animated space where art's summons is heard. (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)

But how is this done? The fragmentary work, perhaps the apogee of 20th Century Modernist literature and philosophy, is Blanchot's approach. Its refusal to insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, means both reader and writer are constantly moving toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, "a combat of passivity - combat that reduces itself to naught". Some might see this as needlessly equivocal or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end, leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot says that art's summons might not have been lost on Socrates - the great emblematic thinker of positivistic Western culture. He might also have sensed the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only guarantee for speech was the living presence of a human being, he also "went as far as to die in order to keep his word."

Maurice Blanchot died in February 2003.

Stephen Mitchelmore © 2006. [This Space, Spike Magazine and The Gaping Void]

William Burroughs.

2006-01-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

“What do you know of the hard man of Hip?”

Where do I start trying to tell someone about Burroughs? I could start with he was born on 5th February 1914, the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, older than Kerouac, Ginsberg & Corso. He took on the role of teacher encouraging them to write fiction and poetry. The Moroccans called him “El hombre invisible”: a man so ordinary he could walk by without being noticed.

It’s been said that he was a literary force both stylistically and socially. This can be said of my two favourite books; Junkie (Junky UK version), an unsentimental account of his drug addiction, published under the author’s sobriquet, William Lee, that chronicled Burroughs descent into the dirty underworld drug culture of New York, Mexico and New Orleans. The second book Naked Lunch is a surreal Dante’s inferno of narcotics, urban nightmares and explicit sex.

So what would I recommend reading? If you really want to get to know Burroughs read The Ticket that Exploded, the Soft Machine, Nova Express, Port of Saints, the Adding Machine, the Place of Dead Souls, the Western Lands and Cities of the red night.

“I am a man of the world. Going to and fro and walking up and down in it.”

Did he consider himself Beat or Hip?

“I have some close personal friends among the beat movement: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso are all close friends of many years standing, but we’re not doing all the same things, either in writing or in out look…I don’t associate myself with them; it’s simply a matter of juxtaposition rather than any actual association of literary styles or over all objectives.”

So why do I want to be a writer? Well it certainly isn’t because of wanting to hang out with other writers or looking cool at open mike sessions or attending readings and book signings.

I’d probably go with why Burroughs wanted to be a writer…

“As a child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in yellow pongee silk shorts. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”

If that really had been the spark that fuelled his writing, would we have had the Burroughs we all know and worship?

Anyone who’s hot on Burroughs knows of a well-documented fact that’s been on hundreds of websites and in at least two films. On the 6th September 1951 whilst at a party, Burroughs suggested that he and Joan (his wife) do their William Tell act. Joan balanced a glass on her head; Burroughs shoots and hits her in the head, killing her. Later on in life Burroughs is quoted as saying:

“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.”

This tragic incident gave him the drive to become a writer. The rest of his life would be atonement for his inexplicable act.

In May of 1982, he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. William S Burroughs died on 2nd August 1997 of a heart attack in Lawrence, Kansas. He was 83 years old.

So back to my original question. In a nutshell Burroughs influence on literature is without a doubt indisputable. He not only gave birth to the Beat Generation, he helped to inspire the generation X counter culture and the punk movements of the 60’s and 70’s, and I’d go so far as saying that he influenced Bob Dylan and all this punk rock influenced pop.

Before I sign off here’s one of my favourite quotes on what he thought about Britain.

“A socialistic police state”

Now that is pure “Burroughs”

Sean McGahey © 2006 [This article was first published in The Beat].

"On The Road" - The Movie?

2006-01-16T14:34:00.000-08:00

Would the film have the same magnetic pull as the book? I guess Sal and Dean’s disregard for conformity during the post war America would strike a chord with the youth of today, or would it? Are the youth of today ready for Jack Kerouac?

1950s & “On the Road”

Back in the late forties/early fifties a number of writers rebelled against conventional values. The “beats” went out of their way to challenge the patterns of respectability and shock the rest of the world. That all sounds very rock’n’roll, but why did it start?

During the 1950s, a sense of uniformity pervaded American society. Conformity was common, as young and old alike followed group norms rather than striking out on their own. Though men and women had been forced into new employment patterns during WW II, once the war was over, traditional roles were reaffirmed. Men expected to be the breadwinners; women, even when they worked, assumed their proper place was at home. Jack Kerouac reacted strongly, as did the other Beats, to the post-WWII 1950s consumerism. He tried to break out of this suburban consumerist middle-class conventional lifestyle, and this is reflected in his writings. Kerouac captured the turmoil of a restless generation caught between the cold war values of the Eisenhower era and the dawning of the “Age of the Aquarius”.

Kerouac typed his best-selling novel “On the Road” on a 75-meter roll of paper. Lacking accepted punctuation and paragraph structure, the book glorified the possibilities of the free life. Musicians rebelled as well. Elvis Presley popularized black music in the form of rock and roll, and shocked Americans with his ducktail haircut and undulating hips. In addition, Elvis and other rock and roll singers demonstrated that there was a white audience for black music, thus testifying to the increasing integration of American culture.

So now we know a little of what’s behind “On the Road” How will Francis Ford Coppola breathe life to something that’s more than just a story? Would he focus on the relationship between Jack & Neal Cassidy who provided the impetus for Jacks adventures?

Will it be the ultimate road movie of two friends travelling across the country looking for something new, possibly the new American dream or old American values? I sincerely hope it won’t end up an over the top start studded film that loses the true meaning of the book due to the ego of a couple of actors. It’s almost like the ultimate collaboration “Kerouac & Coppola” pretty much the coming together of two artists similar to the collaboration of Kerouac and Robert Frank’s photography, the jazzy poetics of Kerouac’s writing & Frank’s black’n’white prints. That distinctive and irony-drenched wisdom of Franks photographs framing the twisted words of Jack Kerouac. Will Coppola do the same?

For those who haven’t heard of Robert Frank, in 1955, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank travelled throughout the United States by car and returned with a bleak portrait of what the American road had to offer. Jack pretty much had done the same thing with a pen; some would argue Jack wrote of the pure beautiful side of his own America. And Frank captured the bleak side?

I guess through the lens of Francis Ford Coppola we’ll see new images of joy & sadness found in the look of waitresses, gas station attendants, general food stores workers, bars and jazz clubs.

I presume Coppola will draw upon what he had previously done in filming two of SE Hintons books Rumble Fish & The Outsiders by presenting a landscape of people and places looking for new hope and promise. Whoever plays the part of Jack I hope he’ll bring back a little of him, just like when I heard the tape of Jack reading from “On the Road”. It was electrifying! Originally recorded in 1955 it captured my imagination and brought words off the page and into the air.

As for the film soundtracks Coppola could use a song funnily enough called ‘On the Road‘ - music by Kerouac, based on an old French Canadian folk tune. I suppose you could include anything by Muddy Waters, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley. Although it wouldn’t be a beat film without Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

I guess it would be a sin leaving out Bob Dylan, yeah I know his music came later on down the beat time line, but to leave out such classics as Desolation Row & Subterranean Homesick Blues would be blasphemy! It’s a shame Dylan never met Kerouac.

So to sum up, would it be a narrative driven black’n’white road movie loosely based on Jacks book or will it be a nostalgic look back on the exciting birth of a new generation and the start of Jacks descent into loneliness and despair. I suppose it could also be a good honest down to earth adaptation of Jacks life. Whatever Coppola does it’ll hopefully turn a few people on to reading a true all American classic.

Sean McGahey © 2006 [This article was first published at The Beat].

Travelling Poems...

2006-01-16T14:06:00.000-08:00

The sunshine is looking at my eyes
There’s sound waging war on my ears
The sun is going down
The sound is getting louder
Home is getting further away
Home is becoming nearer
Those whom I love reside many miles away
She who I adore is no longer by my side

Can I have two sugars please ?
Sweeten the journey's blow

The trees are naked the bushes blush
A mechanical beast makes time
Like Withnail but not approaching London
The sound is gentle now
Only one guitar and one man's opinions
I thank Robert for his company
Though I would rather have her as well

Can I have two sugars please?
Not as sweet of whom I know

Someone likes my bag, the one I got for Free
I like it because it takes me through time
To the sorbonne and there are paintbrushes
Someone is pouring coffee for me
I don’t need to find the caffeine fix
Not the speed of sound
But the sound of speed that lulls a weary man
Reservations make reservoirs more beautiful

One more cup of coffee for the road
Too many bad for your heart I’m told

Stephen Monaghan © 2006.

Oh pray tell what am I to do?...

2006-01-16T14:04:00.000-08:00

Oh pray tell what am I to do?
You are in a foul mood
And there aint nuthin that I can do
I can talk in silly voices
Curl my tongue make animal noises
But theres still an expression
Did I forget to mention
It looks like death, and I'm a dead man

Yes I am oh yes I am

Turn the television on
Monosyllabic now for two hours gone
What can I say, what can I do?
I'm trying too hard to get to you
So that’s it then
It's play hard to get
I can be rotten too
Lest you madam forget

Yes I can o yes I can

Eleven o’clock and it's time for bed
Not a word since 8
And lady were still not friends yet
So what exactly is it that someone did?
If it's not me let's get to the root of it
Just one word would make me smile
And then you draw a smiley face on the steamed up tile
Can I sleep now? Mmm can I fall asleep?

I bet I can I bet I can

Stephen Monaghan © 2006.

to G.G...

2006-01-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

mornings
wistful streets
people walking slowly
like wandering water-lilies
it hears their
arrhythmic
steps

for nothing wistful is
like that
like tropics

someone touches you
embraces you
loves you
it is not the end
the end is
someone else touches you
someone a third a fourth
a fifth and so on

You are the guilty one Alice
what did you say?
A little cream in the spring's dish
some prelude oh oh
Once upon a time there was a little heart
which became a big heart,
I said You are guilty
come on, confess you
at a quarter to ten
amidst a whizzing calm
a glass of wine it was red, wasn't it?
I don't remember, really I don't mind
How don't you mind?
I dropped it I didn't drink
You didn't drink
I didn't drink why should I
when the seconds stayed uncounted out
in the missing time
am I right?
I don't know
about the time I don't know Alice
And I'm not the guilty one
Then it's simply ended in Nitza
later on I knew
it has begun again
with the orange-red bird's singing
and the blossoming blacktorns
Once upon a time there was

Rositza Pironska © 2006.

THE DAY I QUIT METHADONE...

2006-01-16T13:57:00.000-08:00

we were meant to move out of the hellhole we were living in
but I blew the 4 o’clock appointment to get
the keys, due to a gas leak that closed off the street
where my dispensing pharmacy resided
and the soulless bloodsucking ghouls who ran
the clinic gave me this ultimatum:
Get your arse to the clinic or you’re out of the program –

the trains were fucked up and at the clinic
it seemed as if there were an army of shivering dope-fiends
in front of me waiting to get dosed
and in the waiting room 3:30 rolled around
I tried to call the landlord to explain
but found myself suddenly grabbed and manhandled
shoved into the street by a slack jawed gorilla in a cheap
security guard uniform screaming
NO MOBILE PHONES! GET THE FUCK OUT!

so at 6 o’clock she walked in
3 months pregnant to find me sat in bed
in bitter frustration, with
no keys until Monday morning now:
just the roaches and the mice writhing half dead on
glue traps and a blob of cocaine melting
down a strip of tinfoil –
another weekend of no heat, no
sleep, no dignity and I told her
that’s it I quit. I’m out of the
program I’m coming off.

she’d heard it a dozen times at least
after New York, after every airless meeting
with doctors and shrinks

but somehow
I don’t know why
I actually meant it
that time.

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

DEATH POEM # 1...

2006-01-16T13:53:00.000-08:00

when I die

burn me up and smear the ashes
over the shadow drenched alleyways,
scoring spots, whore-parades
and blinking neon motel rooms
of the inner city wilderness

when I die

give me a loving bullet in the head
or a suicidal razors slash
or accidental oblivion
in the barrel of a syringe

let my daughter remember me
as I am: terribly alive
burning and screaming with the beauty
of it all

still digging for a way out
of my prison of weakling flesh
and cracking bone

let me trade off those extra years
to save her from some
etched image of me
betrayed by my own tenacity:

when I die

don’t remember me as some
old, complacent pot-bellied fuck
drooling and nodded out
in front of a wall of television static

Tony O'Neill © 2006.

Ewan McGregor...

2005-12-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

Ewan’s parents were very understanding.
When he was sixteen they said,
‘You can leave school if you want to’.
So he did.

With his Mum’s help he got his first job.
He worked backstage
in a theatre in Perth.
He was paid £50 a week.

Ewan stayed there for six months.
Then in 1988 he went to college
to do an HNC in drama.
Even at this stage
his friends saw he had talent.

James Davies © 2005.

Tom Hanks 3...

2005-12-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

Today Tom Hanks can afford
to turn down $20 million.

He was offered this to make one film
but he didn’t want the stress.

He is the Hollywoood actor
who can do no wrong.
Whatever he does, the world loves him.
He is Mr Nice Guy.
He is one of the most popular actors
in Hollywood.

There were no clues in his childhood
to show the star he was going to be
or the joy that he would bring
to millions worldwide.

James Davies © 2005.

Tom Hanks 2...

2005-12-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

In High School Tom joined the drama club
because it looked like fun.
He was always the class clown
but he was shy.

Even so,
in 1974 he won his first Best Actor award
for his part in a school play.

After leaving school Tom went to college.
He joined a drama class there also
to pass the time.
He was soon hooked
on everything to do with acting.
And today is one of the Hollywood’s greats.

James Davies © 2005.

Tom Hanks 1...

2005-12-12T12:45:00.000-08:00

Tom was born
on 9th July 1956 in California.
He was the third of four children.

When Tom was five years old
his parents split up.
They never spoke to each other again.

Tom’s baby brother Jim
stayed with his Mum.
She married again
another three times.

Tom, Larry and Sandra
stayed with their dad.
He re-married twice.
Tom’s dad was a chef
in Massachussets.

James Davies © 2005.

A Walking Thought 11...

2005-11-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

toes finally broken through
touching the dirty path
to being clean

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 10...

2005-11-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

countless lessons of insects
ceasing to twitch timefully
then dragged away by others

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 9...

2005-11-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

a glass lake
magnifies and worships
feathers across spectral sunset sky

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 8...

2005-11-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

when movement is stillness
rocks fall to flow
and water is their constant path

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 7...

2005-11-15T14:25:00.000-08:00

dancing characters of meaning
only incidental happenings
of a brushes playful glide

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 6...

2005-11-11T00:37:00.000-08:00

just shiny wet ravens
eyeing gutter confetti flowers
in rain running off my road

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 5...

2005-11-11T00:36:00.000-08:00

blisters within blisters
from walking towards having
faith in faith

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 4...

2005-11-11T00:34:00.000-08:00

above all things
I will want to see
the performances of mountains

Neil Cantwell 2005.

1987...

2005-11-01T09:48:00.000-08:00

i
The gale was among the woods, wading –
On the brink of my hearing.

Foliage clotted from the dark outcroppings
In my bedroom – then immediately

The path, straight through to the heart.

I slept with an eyeful of stars.

Mum sat with me all night
And slipped away before I woke up.

ii
The evergreens are standing around,
Trembling open,

But the wind has broken the redwoods.

The new clearing gapes like a mouth full of broken teeth –
Flashes where the sky’s bulk snags. This

Was a walk’s darkest stretch,
Where any sunlight scattered

In flies’ wings.

Merrick Palmer © 2005

twenty imaginations...

2005-11-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

I denounced a bomber:

the authorities
could not see him
he was camouflaged
against the climate
in combats
patterned with paranoia

I identified an abandoned package:

the authorities
could not see it
it was hidden in a bin
under yesterday’s Metro
and a crushed packet
of twenty imaginations

I see civilians divided into limbs and organs and blood:

the authorities
cannot rescue them
the five entrances are sealed
by two eardrums
two eyeballs
and one tongue

Jamie Huxley © 2005.

spells for the new millennium (part one)...

2005-11-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

ingredients:

1. take two decibels of babble
from a gastropub
where the witchcraft of switchcards
sinks in the ink
of sunday supplements

2. purchase a pentagram of produce
from the organic paedophile
peddling vegetables
vending various vitamins
at the farmer’s market

3. add one lung
of air inhaled in awe
at the absence of an edifice
eternally unerected
at Ground Zero

method:

“hubble the bubbles
we blow in foamy globes
around ourselves

abra the black cadaver
towed by the flow
of the rotting river”

4. now sip the soup
the sorcerer serves
(before the copper cauldron cools)

Jamie Huxley © 2005

the shining...

2005-11-01T09:32:00.000-08:00

these clinical indications
turn right
then left and then
to death
on the straight white base
of the snowbound surgical sheet

they say as much
about madness as

lunatic footprints
left in labyrinths

say about
why men freeze to death
gripping axes

Jamie Huxley © 2005.

the new genes...

2005-11-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

the new genes
are dividing
behind the eye

the pupil aches
like a gum

diverging things
are merging
and curving like corners
on credit cards

this town is a clone
of that town
which is only a tone
on the phone of a clown
who is a hooded courtier
in the new court
that is a cinema
and a supermarket

the new genes
are dividing
behind the eye

the pupil swells
like a gum

agents consult agents
about research agencies
intermediaries ooze
through cracks and channels
in media space-time
which expands
employing talons
and ravenous keyboards
to consult and consume
its own hands

until everyone
and everything is an artist
and there is no art

the new genes
are dividing
behind the eye

a new tooth
pushes through
the pupil
that is also a gum

Jamie Huxley © 2005.

Sherry...

2005-10-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

Vinnie Jones (1)...

2005-10-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Vinnie once threw toast at Gary Lineker.
He promised to rip Kenny Dalglish’s ears off.
He bit a reporter’s nose.

However, he once gave £80,000 to a hospital.

He is like a bull in a china shop.
He loses his temper.
But he is loyal.
He is determined.
He works hard.

Vinnie Jones is a winner.

James Davies © 2005.

Jacob's Ladder 2...

2005-10-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Jacob's Ladder...

2005-10-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

A Walking Thought 3...

2005-10-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

rain like an orange frog
occasionally leaping upon
leaves fallen like rain

Neil Cantwell 2005.

A Walking Thought 2...

2005-10-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

fishermen meet
in the shade
of a shrine

Neil Cantwell 2005.

She...

2005-10-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

A maiden so fair
So fair as to have breached the code of conduct
Held in highest esteem by gamblers
Who from rushing for gold
Were distracted by the glittering prize
A subordinate unfortunate
Knowing the prowess of the mistress
And the meandering thought process of a man in distress
She would face the mirror and lift up her corset
An asset that has managed by many
Yet rarely a man in finance
Hers was the role of the mother and the lover
Both would put a meal on the table
Yet one cuisine was more juicy than the other
Through her culinary delights
And starry eyes like clear sky nights
She made her money in the towns
Of bars, that overflowed with crowns
Her currency ... anatomy
Her reward a thousand husbands
Her quandry a conscience
Her aim .... Not quite true

Stephen Monaghan © 2005.

A Walking Thought 1...

2005-10-05T15:19:00.000-07:00

affectionate old buggied ladies
like sunset crabs to the sea
to glimpse where the day was best

Neil Cantwell 2005.

4% Tourettes...

2005-10-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

I speak what others merely think
The banal the inane yet the profound
Their thoughts are guarded by fear
Mine are encouraged by fear
Fear of silence
Chasms of nothing
Like in my dreams
But what are good dreams called
The bad ones have a title at least
Like rich people do
To be bad is to be named
And then I open my mouth
And out come the words
From the recesses of my troubled mind
Other people do it too …
I saw a documentary with people in it
People who liked to fill the silences with words
There’s one in my local park
He shouts at everyone
Except his dog
In summer he rides a horse topless
It makes me laugh then feel sorry
He never catches eyes
Probably just a cold to be honest
But he likes to ride his horse
Walk his dog, and shout
Each to their own
So why my hang-up ?
I read that at Manchester United
The goalkeeper has my problem too
He has 4% tourettes
How do they know its not 3% or 5% ?
Maybe I should communicate with him
Share my thoughts
Break the silence together

S. Monaghan © 2005.

Bards and Vicars?...

2005-09-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

Like a reverend yet irreverent as such
Satire more noir than a rockabilly’s comb
The man ordained a thinker and a messenger
Delivers the sermon from the good book
Bound and flogged by conscience
Guided by voices who never give reason
Excuses made for the path chosen
Only at night when the angels turn out the lights ...
Can the desires that lay in the hearts of men
Be drawn out of the cave where they dwell
Under the duress of a higher power
They lie dormant yet pulsating
Congregations shiver subconsciously
At the thought of bearing witness
To a terra firma saint who walks alone
With only the rules once written
To aid his time and prophetic rhetoric
The collar that he wears is stiff
His lip that he curls is soft
His delivery ... Right arm fast ... With spin
Grasping the written word that lives in ragged pages
He steps to the lectern swift, a predator
The congregation hushed, anticipating venom
The poet prepares to strike ...

Stephen Monaghan © 2005.

Your Cushion

2005-09-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

I never wanted anything from your house
Except that cushion.

Take something to remind you…

Nothing here does.

The associations of others are wasted on me.

I feel hawkish intruding upon your jewellery
And half-full bottles of perfume (many the same).
I never noticed you were glamorous,
Though you were known for it.

Mum referred to you as Flossy during her speech.
I’d never heard her call you that before,
But I smiled with the laughter of others
Who attended memories before mine.

The cushion was my steering wheel
As I burned around your house in my socks.
In the car after each visit I was ashamed
To be discontented, even a little angry:

You were so generous,
And I was your grandson,
Yet you hadn’t given me the cushion.

She would have said ‘but of course…’
If you’d asked.

A Family Breakfast

2005-09-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

We found mushroom flocks
Above our campsite. Hunched against the snivel
Of winter’s Wales, your morning desolation,
We strummed with creamy fingers
Until our box was clogged.

You begged us not to eat them -
A school lesson had made you wary
Of mushrooms. You blubbed
On tip-toe by the rustling pan,
Seeing withered irises.

Unwilling to be left alone,
You confided in us by eating them
That you were committing suicide,
And each mouthful was new courage
To die happy.

Merrick Palmer © 2005.

Outside The Window

2005-09-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

Pavement chat grew louder, then
The carnival exploded
With a billion silver dancers.

But heads went down
And shields went up -
I realised with sadness

It was a riot-swarm breaking out,
Like a bombardment of bees:
One sting per bee and they died.

Merrick Palmer © 2005.

Five Tips to Avoiding Total Disaster as a Novelist

2005-08-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

...from a Poor, Wretched Fool Who Had to Learn the Hard Way.

The problem with should advice is that it’s either something you already know, i.e. your diet should include more fruit and vegetables than cheeseburgers and martinis -- or it’s something really difficult (like consuming more fruit and vegetables than cheeseburgers and martinis). So, based on my own stumbling, fumbling experience, I offer the following list of things I would strongly advise aspiring and despairing writers not to do. I doubt that simply by avoiding these pitfalls you will be guaranteed international fame and fortune, but I’m confident that you will at least escape many unnecessary frustrations and defeats, so that you can be fresh for the really poignant failures and setbacks that will either make or break you -- and with any luck will do a bit of both.

First Tip. Do not spend years gathering interesting material -- odd quotations, overheard remarks, colorful phrases, bits of trivia, weird statistics and obscure facts in the hope that you will one day find a story to contain them. I ended up with a literal warehouse of such stuff and I can tell you now with considerable confidence that the larvae of the human botfly bore into the skin and gorge themselves, emerging as centimeter long maggots, while a Joshua Hendy nine-thousand horsepower steam turbine delivers a cruising speed of 16 knots at 78 rpm. There is nothing wrong in knowing that if left underwater for years brass gives off a bright verdigris stain or that the first Birds of Paradise shipped back to Europe had their legs chopped off to facilitate packing, but the collection of details is like any acquisitive habit -- potentially obsessive. You can end up with a novel that reads like the Gospel according to St. Matthew translated into the Duke of York Island language and a response from the publishing industry reminiscent of a deserted poolroom on the shore of Sheepshead Bay. Put bluntly, burn your notebooks and clear your head.

Tip #2. Do not spend years experimenting with different forms of writing and various intellectual follies such as cut-ups and verbal collages, intricate multiple person narratives, dream stories, recipe books, anatomies, imaginary academic theses and the like. Yes, it’s true that some of the world’s most interesting literature has elements of these forms -- but that was then and this is different. If you are serious about getting a work of fiction published today you need quick sharp answers to the following questions. In what section of a bookstore or retailer’s website will your book be found? Which authors can your work be likened to? In three sentences or less what’s your novel about?

Tip #3. The Puritans believed in covering the body for modesty’s sake. Yet they developed a sexualized fascination for the ears of women and the noses of men. My point? (See Tip #1) In apparent restriction there is unexpected release. Dickens created over 800 individual characters and laid down some of the most intense cultural satire in English -- but his writing really came into focus when Wilkie Collins hipped him to the detective story. I struggled for years trying to find a form for my writing, flitting around like a Ulysses butterfly. The moment I gave myself permission to write an action/adventure story, things started falling into place. Modern art has provided artists with unparalleled and some might argue paralyzing freedom. Don’t waste time trying to create a new form. It’s given to very few people in any medium to do that -- and many of their achievements end up looking like legless Birds of Paradise later. A seemingly simple repetitive musical style like the Blues has proven capable of expressing the full spectrum of human experience and has inspired countless variations and mutations. Give yourself over to an established structure and follow its guidelines, and suddenly interesting points will emerge to surprise you.

Tip #4. Read your work aloud, to some willing victim ideally, but at least to yourself. Storytelling began as an oral form and the ear (however erotically appealing) has a trueness to it that will reveal what’s working and what’s not in a more immediate and decisive way than simply scanning the page. This discipline will also slow you down psychologically and bring you into more intimate contact with your story. In the end, it will take no more time than reading back a page silently.

Tip #5. Ignore all reasonable sounding advice like “write about what you know,” “read as much as you can,” or “try to write every day.” If you need to hear this advice you are in the wrong game. But more importantly, reasonableness won’t get the job done. One day in an ice-stricken back alley in Boston I saw a fat little Irishman beat the daylights out of four larger, stronger assailants. When it was over, and it was over astonishingly quickly, he brushed himself off and said simply, “I had to get unreasonable with ‘em.”

Unless you are willing to face the unreasonable in yourself -- unless you are willing to entertain some strange notions (and deal with them when they stick around) -- unless you are willing to get lost, confused and even terrified -- then what you’re doing won’t have any meaning. The famous device of conflict upon which all stories are supposed to hinge starts within the writer. You are all the characters in your dreams and so too with a novel. You can’t put your creations into jeopardy or into embarrassing or miraculous situations without going there yourself, and that is not a sensible ambition for a grown person to have. As a writer who has made more mistakes than most, my goal above all else is to be very, very unreasonable.

Copyright © 2005 Kris Saknussemm

Kris Saknussemm [author of Zanesville: a novel] grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but has for a long time lived abroad, in the Pacific Islands and Australia. A painter and sculptor as well as a writer, his fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Hudson Review, The Boston Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters and ZYZZYA.

House of Dreams...

2005-08-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

Grey stone walls and darkened ceiling
Empty rooms, an eerie feeling
Roof now open to the sky
Sheltered me in days gone by
Now Ivy grips its every wall
Where once it stood so proud and tall
It stands neglected and alone
A crumbling heap of slate and stone
How long ago, yet close it seems
I lived my childhood, dreamed my dreams
Not knowing then what lay ahead
How time has flown, how years have sped
Now old and worn, the house and I
Hold memories of days gone by
That time can’t fade or take away
My house of dreams, my yesterday...

Evelyn Tilley © 2005.

'Words to the wise'...

2005-08-06T05:42:00.000-07:00

What do we do to feel good now
How bad do we feel before we entertain decadence
In a store that masquerades as a village
Larger than a town that’s shanty
Shake hands with your neighbour? Mmm?
Sit down in a glass walled box with food from far away lands
Next to a conduit of water facing real estate
What's real about that estate, belongs to the man
Why does one smile when an robot approves your wealth
Only to fool you into believing with its automated stealth
Attaching status to a multinational acceptance
Acquiring grandeur through a plethora of plastic
We buy, we buy, goodbye to the melancholy
Wake up to the loss that was there previously
Doesn’t go away, no, loss lives in the shadows
And it can’t be paid off by capital one, two or three !
So I suggest what an old man said
When he was barely alive in his bronchial asthmatic bed
"You can smile at the sun and dance in the rain
Woo a lady with fine wine in southern regions of Spain"
But one thing you cant get these days and one thing that’s mine
Is some polish on a cloth to make old shoes shine

Stephen Monaghan © 2005.

'It's like what Neil said ....'

2005-08-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

The absolute helpless sense of love I want to keep
As she lies in pain between awakening and sleep
Facially unaware, and not trying to appear concerned
The lessons oh the lessons that I have learned
How to feel as a part of something that I desire
I focus on technology yet always a glance to protect
Something that I have been able to connect
Funny how when the least of my expectations
Come along and make me ignore the plight of nations
And make me forget that I ever had a friend
But I don¹t want to be forgiven
As I know this will go on until the end
The light that will come in 8 hours time
Will shine on the resplendent beauty divine
But ownership is not mine, it’s an agreement that suits
As I reminisce about nerds in black moon boots
And there it is again the feeling of protecting
That resurrects my will to advocate respect and take direction
The signs in my head that point me here there and everywhere
Confuse a man that's easily scared, but wants not to run
He wants to stay and he craves the invitation
To belong and experience the hitherto denied sensation
It seems that a chance has been given
And previous mistakes have been forgiven
It’s not so hard as to find your soul
Residing in the head of the one that makes you whole
So I look above with no religious attachment
And ask someone that this may have commitment
Something that requires no effort nor pain
As I don't want to be hurt again
It’s as simple as that and as simple as this that the feeling I crave
Can be given with a kiss
And a look from the eyes
That are the only ones that I care to stare at
And don't worry my dear I can see the discomfort as you embrace the slumber
But I’ll carry the weight like a woodsman carries his lumber
And when the light shines through in the morning I'll be smiling as I am yawning
Thank-you for the smile that does not fake nor takes effort break
As the fact remains if I did not have my vision of you
Then I fear my heart would break

Stephen Monaghan © 2005.

The Astonished Man - Reading Blaise Cendrars...

2005-08-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Everybody needs a place to hide, it’s a natural instinct. We all need solace, away from everything - anything. It just so happens that I’m like most of you and six years ago my particular place of sanctuary happened to be the French Literature aisle in the library at the University of Sussex. There’s something extraordinarily wraithlike in losing oneself down a darkened aisle in a rather large library. I know this because I have done it often. And no, I wasn’t studying there. I was meant to be working and I sometimes did, but the drudgery, the sheer mindless Sisyphean banality of each working day would often outweigh my better judgement and force me to seek shelter away from each buffoonish panjandrum I encountered. And libraries are my first love, always have been always will be; I was a broken man.

Now, this aisle wasn’t chosen because of the tomes it contained but because it was in the deepest, darkest underbelly of the library; the light wasn’t working (it hadn’t been repaired for months) and for some unknown reason this gloomy aisle had fallen into some considerable neglect - inexplicably Sussex students just didn’t seem to care about Camus, Celine, Duras et al. It was fine by me, in fact, it was perfect. With rows of books towering above my ears and eyes, forming a protective cocoon, I was untouchable; and the very smell of them alone was enough to make me want to scream. But I didn’t. With as much reading material as I could muster it was, quite simply, heaven.

I remember the day quite clearly, it was overcast and raining; which shed an altogether melancholic, yet pleasing, hue over the library. I remember squinting whilst running my finger along a shelf as I walked happily towards my favourite kick-stool dreaming of escape and slumber, then suddenly stopping as its title caught my peripheral vision, my brain slowly twitched into gear: The Astonished Man. The Astonished Man? What a truly wonderful title. B-l-a-i-s-e C-e-n-d-r-a-r-s. Blaise Cendrars? What a name. What a glorious name. This human being is surely a literary genius with a name like that? Arguably, I turned out to be right.

Reading Blaise Cendrars for the first time is like stepping into another universe. It really is. But did Blaise Cendrars actually exist in the first place? Born Frederic Louis Sauser in the provincial city La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland of a Swiss father and Scottish mother he always felt at odds with the world from the very start. The name was invented after travelling extensively in his youth and devising a poetic voice that transcended the current trends in Paris. In fact, a direct translation of the name Blaise Cendrars can be read as the first name from braise (embers) and the last from cendres (ashes) and this meaning was wholly intended. With a gratuitous placement of ars (art) thrown into the mix his name was complete. Fire is an important symbol repeated throughout his work and this idea of dancing on the burnt ashes of outmoded styles was concomitant to Blaise Cendrars centrifugal philosophy: be different and create anew. We’re talking about a man who, after running away from home at fifteen and at various intervals in his life, kept bees and sold their honey for a living, made films in brazil, wrote influential poetry (enough to make his peers weep long tears good-bye to their turgid, staid and stalled stanzas forever), shovelled coal on Chinese trains, cooked in cafés for the rich, played piano in picture houses, became a watchmaker, witnessed the Russian revolution in St Petersburg, travelled with drunken gypsies, lost an arm whilst fighting for the Foreign Legion in WWI, become an art critic (championing, amongst others, Picasso, the Cubists and Surrealists), amassed and lost vast fortunes in wealth, sailed the seven seas, had a column in a Hollywood newspaper and much, much more besides. Or so he would have you told.

When you look at a picture of Blaise Cendrars you look at a man that has lived. You look at the man John Dos Passos called a “son of Homer” - the whole face a labyrinth of wrinkles and carbuncles that make Bukowski and Auden look like suave catalogue models. When people first see portraits of Picasso they immediately speak of the eyes - with Blaise Cendrars it’s the whole face.

So what did I find so fascinating about that first encounter with Blaise Cendrars all those years ago, sitting alone with his bedraggled book, nobody had read, in my hands? The voice, it just had to be the voice, it hit me immediately. Press-ganged into his world without a second thought. Think an elongated world of surreal humour, deadpan caricature, heartbreaking melancholy and a virtuoso prose style matched by few - after all, this is the man who, allegedly, changed Apollinaire’s way of thinking. So what is The Astonished Man? Firstly it’s part of a tetralogy (although I didn’t know this sitting on my kick-stool reading when I should have been working) including three other titles: Lice, Planus and Sky. This tetralogy encompasses almost 1,000 pages in length. The scope of these works is quite staggering, involving subjects such as war, travellers, shadowy figures of the night, wastrels and scoundrels, vagabonds, fictional pimps, different countries and conflicting cultures; the earth, its fruits and passions, women and the universe. Secondly, it’s a memoir with a difference - the simple difference being it was written by Blaise Cendrars. Bare with me here, I’m not being flippant. As a writers’ writer Blaise Cendrars knew many, he also mixed with actors, filmmakers, poets, artists and aristocrats; yet none are mentioned in this so called memoir. In The Astonished Man Cendrars litters his narrative, not with the artists of his generation but with the gypsies he met on his travels, the pimps, the prostitutes, the thieves; he takes the reader from the First World War trenches across vast continents in sprawling, complex, sonorous sentences that lift the reader out of the humdrum.

Blaise Cendrars wrote against the grain in a style that preceded boorish Gonzo luminaries such as Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe a good thirty years or so. His reportage was assiduous, garrulous and inimitable, but above all poetic. Taciturn in nature with an honest voice (well as honest as the mythologizing Blaise Cendrars can be) that, somehow, manages to shine through the vainglorious bombast and braggadocio. Admittedly, this rather boastful book is quite difficult to absorb on first encounter, but, as in most of his books, the unique structure and prose style lift you away from such thoughts; you’re snatched in the blink of an eye, hoodwinked and bundled back for the remainder of his journey - like it or not.

Just as The Astonished Man broke the long silence in me, that of not having read him before, it was this very book which broke Blaise Cendrars’ own, self-imposed, silence whilst living and refusing to write in occupied France. In breaking his silence the book is deliberately loud - written by a man who could no longer contain himself. Cendrars embellishes fact with relish, exploring every possibility within his whole range to grapple with any willing reader. Plagiarism plays a role and we see a genuine love andfascination of reworking and reinventing the imagery and narrative of those before him, always subtly and tastefully. But, oh no, hold your horses folks, this isn’t lazy writing by Cendrars, this is a celebration, the new from the old, a literary hoax formed from one imagination to another. In this Cendrars honoured the creation of literature, the written word, the voice; he devoured this creation and created a glorious pomposity to accompany it - but above all he moved the creation of modern writing onwards. There is no hypocrisy in Blaise Cendrars’s plagiarism, just a refreshing honesty. In a famous letter to Robert Delaunay circa 1917 Cendrars tellingly writes:

“I don’t want to be part of a gang. I am not behind, as you say, but ahead.It all belongs to yesterday, not today. I will be visible tomorrow. Today, I’m working.”

During the writing of The Astonished Man Blaise Cendrars was, indeed, at work. He created a style of writing jam-packed with topsy-turvy celebration of life that, when read today, can seem showy and brash. I can’t begin to think what people made of him then and, yet, maybe this is the crux of his now lowly profile. Maybe we just don’t get him? Maybe this audacious blurring of fact and fiction is just too much for our realist, face-value-prose climate? But most probably, and I hold this to my heart, maybe we just haven’t caught up with old Blaise Cendrars yet? I hope we do, because once he’s in your warm grasp, wherever you may find him, whether it be the darkened aisle of you local library, an old aged second-hand bookshop or a brash, bright coffee-book-and go-conglomerate, he’s hard to let go.

And so, I may not work in that library anymore, and so what? Something tells me with Blaise Cendrars on my side I’m going to be just fine. It’s funny, I often wonder, to this day, if that aging copy of The Astonished Man is still forlornly sitting there where I left it, all those years ago, just waiting for another bored Library Assistant to absentmindedly wander along and pick it up. I hope they do.

Lee Rourke © 2005. [this essay was first published in The Beat]

Heart transplaition*…

2005-08-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

riding waves of mysterious language in the house of a heart
threading made string things through many secret eyes of nets
catching fish tasting like the knowledge of the quintessential truth
of existence
talking, what talking...putting a hand between two trees,
just the Buddha’s opinion, stones in the grass
kokoro scripture, holding in nature

oneself waiting for the sun in a deep temple
the sound of trees under the sky,
going in straight lines as far as walking eyes could see
into the rustic ascetic country where people appear to be called
Bodhisattva
and when they speak, this compassion

all mouth power sees five shining substances
migrating clusters enveloped in clouds
crossing days in a sky that is hollow
all the whole and everything illuminated to redeem misfortune
cutting pain and suffering
blood frequently in trouble delivers an empty blazing void

but not emptiness, un-different
stay for the benefit of a child like this
colour circle side interest advantage other
a stop relic

name other words immediately and consider them to have the correct
colour of the sun
in the sky of the approved colour of the sky

spoken sound of the best consciousness taken red from a woman’s mouth
go back knowing feelings, change sense, heart confectionery, tree
activities, eye thoughts
get perception acquaintance, conceptions of discrimination
have an idea

various methods here
phenomena things characteristic of emptiness laws
look speak dharma
rule of earth
a French phase
fill in an aspect form, man

not not not not not not
pure ruin, a fire is born - impure and noble

get hungry scum
wear down dirt
measure and destroy clean breeds proliferating and diminishing
stained life
raw gain multiplying
defiled increase decreases
subside and rise pure lessons

therefore the late origin cannot be found
zero colour, missing a centre
nothing all through the nil sky
absence of loss, free from gain
the church has gone, without a middle
do not have a lack of being without
go to the base of old straight lines

the physical question of the touch of a blade
body opening, meat reason crying songs of the mind
notes of ones heart cause noise to look and doubt the feelings of a
wooden voice
emotion grounds ear beginnings, taste constitution, thought flavour,
aroma gossip, tongue spirit, eye scent, sound odour. appreciate a
persons fragrant nose smell
this is a din pivot

thou world circles between sight and sphere
namely, dhatu consciousness
that is, up to, until
vision faculty realms
and so on

a bright light exhausted, discernment grown old
the sun and moon ending elderly
used up death ignorance and the obvious passes away
write insight and run out aged
no clear knowledge, only answers

craving truth, causing annihilation
accumulation of paths and concentration of roads
by extinction and suffering gather like the origin of a carved tree
a collection of ways remain
cessation comes and stays together

looking into and around places of attainment
sharp-witted and old
a spot of profit, using, having, knowing nothing by means of
realizations gains and benefits of the intelligent sun, late in the
sky

these words in one's hands
bodice of wisdom
a supreme display of the earth
dwell and rely here
due to, based upon, because
the deepest dependence possible

a trap set for obstruction hangs suspended
caught in a net
disturbing existence and hampering the mind
obstacles prevented from view
hinder not hindrance

fall from fear, separate sacred dreams and perverted possessions
black with dirt
inverted fantasy judged far from getting pleasure upside-down at the
top
frightened and believing daydreams
the summit of a water surface with no waves
the washtub of illusion awakened to being afraid of the ultimate
believe, enjoy and part from imagined thinking having upheavals
contend, compete, consider
go away

the third generation of public things
practices awake the past
the world wisdom
deep perfection depends wholly
the future
all rely
a present

the shore most unsurpassed
highest nook
perfect corner
flatter land
enlightenment attained shame

therefore know this practice perfected no knowledge ought

big identical great gods of charm,
equivalent to the illumination of the most vivid shining heart
supreme and large, a bright curse of natural phenomena
up spelled mysteriously
higher equality
peerless

lies have ripened
now capable of real empty truth
faithful false fruits
cut and thoroughly removed from the void
the sincerity of mistakes
suffering seeds become vain vacant nuts of futile facts

so, set forth and say

fly, hoist, soar
abandon, give up and universally clarify
gone to the other shore
beyond the beyond
fulfilled

*A note on the word "transplaition" - this is a neologism designed to convey a sense somewhere between 'transplant' and 'translation'. This word has been invented to rectify a perceived poverty in methods of conveying religious experience across languages. Therefore this word describes the practice of attempting to interpret a religious text non-literally whilst being informed by the spirit of the tradition that the given text has been encountered within. The above is a transplaition of what is known in Sanskrit as the prajna paramita, in Japanese as the hannya shingyo and has commonly been translated into English as the heart sutra.

Neil Cantwell 2005.

Fast mover...

2005-08-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

Golden light does more.
Evolve Through every moving pore,
And I'll do that
When this mountain moves
There, In five million years
At a pinch.

You're right,
Might be rushing it.

Let's sit back and see how it goes:
This evolutionary super show.

Will Hone © 2005

Six new poems - Ashok Niyogi

2005-07-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

MAZAMA VILLAGE

a man a woman a boy and his dog
a fire that has to be nourished
in darkened woods the party has begun
the smell of cooking sizzles fry
woman’s laughter woman’s shriek
on the shoulder of the forest road
in car headlights a deer blinks
I twist and turn in my sleeping bag
zippered between memories and desire
I look in corners for some leftover warmth
shadows in the tent gather near
weigh my eyelids shut and then the dreams
of cobalt blue lighter fluid
in the caldera of an imploding life
after this the precipitations will matter
love and hate and sheer indifference
and inch upon inch of falling snow

SHASTA PEAK

it is a beautiful brown mountain
of considerable girth at the base
as it rises from the Cascades
it has a peak and a ridge and hump
snow cap patterned down the slopes
into tapering snow melts
meandering into sparse pine
it catches the whites of morning
the gold dazzlers of a bright day
and is dutifully pink and rose
and orange blush with the setting sun
like a performing artist
orchestrated with the violin chorus
maybe on a full moon night
it will quietly glow
and the violin will come unstrung

CAMP SUNDAY

the sun is perversely bright
on an empty camp awakening
I cannot pretend to be busy
like a humming bird or a bumble bee
so I nag at raisin from a Pine tree
squirrels have read the morning paper
they are out gathering
as are people for tit-bits of life
black ants climb up single file
to carry away booty
from a half eaten donut
in a half squandered morning

bodies come together
and break apart into multicolored pieces
as in a brass kaleidoscope
in the hands of a very old man
there is much vigorous wagging
of dogs’ tails and a few excited barks
tighten the leash on sounds
that camp dwellers have thrown
women in shorts
read hardback books in garden chairs
men wonder
what to do with their feet and hands
small puppies yelp and want to act

I kick pine cones into squirrel holes
I foreclose

WHITE BARK PINE

the white bark pine
bends windward
the west wind
roars in from the west
mercilessly flogging
flurries of snow
the white bark pine
turns away
and doesn’t want to know
it does not have to swivel
and twist through human debris
it just must ride the winter
arthritic as it is
and show up living white
in next year’s summer sun
without articulation
of twisted pain

CRATER LAKE

from the depths of your inner core
you wailed so primal
I saw desire indestiny implode
from structure to dust
like lust sealed for ever
with a red hot lava flow
you scattered tatters of life
over continents and oceans
pumice and scoria chased
galloping horses that flew

and then the purest snow
sans gravitation in meditation
wafting down the heavens
you had challenged with your fist
braceleted with lightning
the snow enveloped all
snow soothed your angry womb
snow was a salve
for the ragged tatters of your belly
snow numbed your umbral pain
insane you had vaporized rain
now it fell as salt less tears
that are without recrimination
only incredibly sad

the seasons change
snows melt into pristine flows
open eyed you mimic the sky
in shades of blue with truant cloud
such blue as will color me blue
before it mirrors my pock marked sins
even as I bathe my eyes
I ripple all over in cobalt shade
near the shores are magic greens
touched by pink even as
we are touched by madness
when confronted with excellence

this phantom ship
with lowered masts and drooping sail
cannot be anchored it is impermanent
hewn in fragile sensitized rock
it will float delicately away and break up
in the reflection of a wisp of cloud
to sail forever the starless sky
and watch with hollow delicate eyes
the sun draw lines across the blue
ruffled by a westerly wind
that cleanses and cauterizes
and makes it entirely proper
for gods to kneel in noiseless prayer

PINNACLES

this is how hell must have looked
to dinosaurs full of fear
now it is a lazy stream
threading its way through time
loose scoria give way to gravity
but what does the stream care
it adjusts and changes course
between dormant chimneys
shored up with rage
now the cement is weak with age
now the pinnacles mock and grin
mouthful of cracked and ugly teeth
once they bled at the gums
now they are empty inside
but madly angry with the sky
opaque cement evil gray
shadows are arthritic fingers
down the pumice gorge
shaped by grotesquely ugly
giant flaming hands
in everlasting unbearable pain

we have railed off this abomination
it is an awesome geological marvel
now that hell simmers like steak
sin everyday pots and pans

Ashok Niyogi 2005.