tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82235638595060039812024-02-08T09:55:18.609-08:00The Second Hump Volume III The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-91150860188546498542013-05-10T18:26:00.004-07:002013-05-10T18:26:47.002-07:00A Race of Lonely Giantsby Laura Behr<br />
<br />
Maybe I’m waiting for nothing.<br />
Maybe I’m unearthing instructions<br />
to keep the sky from falling.<br />
Maybe I’m just supposed to sleep here.<br />
Maybe someone will wake me with a squirt gun.<br />
Maybe the highest good, is always a parting guest,<br />
just out of reach.<br />
Maybe the edge of the wind diverts logic,<br />
unveiling limitations.<br />
Maybe limitations could be anything,<br />
the best of days gone by, time punching a clock.<br />
Maybe you’ll let me put our stories in a box.<br />
Maybe I’ll let something good be said for you.<br />
Maybe I’ll take you home and kiss your life-lessons.<br />
Maybe you’ll soon forget lost loves and worn out Sappho.<br />
Maybe at the appointed hour, just before dawn, the last night of August,<br />
a race of lonely giants will arrive, like dark energy outlaws<br />
becoming one nation, saving morning, pulling it through a tunnel of light.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-24982339905445498392013-05-10T18:26:00.003-07:002013-05-10T18:26:36.828-07:00bombs go off everywhere. i am tiredby Amy Soricelli<br />
<br />
everyone is tired.<br />
sleeping head on their arms on their desk their papers<br />
their papers are a pillow.<br />
they tell me this - they say 'i am so tired'.<br />
we carry hate like bricks in a lunch box the apple from 4th grade move over<br />
there is death now - a little chocolate chip cookie of death -<br />
it is easier to spin this on a sunny day but i am too sleepy to think.<br />
three people in the morning said "i am so tired i could nap - i could nap right here<br />
in this spot".<br />
the arrow "you are here".<br />
i would be there snoring away<br />
soundlessly snoring we are all so tired of sorrow.<br />
exhausts us all.<br />
it is tiring to fall down and not get up.<br />
everyone is tired.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-41050902434236838452013-05-10T18:26:00.002-07:002013-05-10T18:26:25.719-07:00Goethe’s Clockby Brian Wake<br />
<br />
Goethe’s clock is ticking in an empty room.<br />
He sits quite motionless. All art, then peels<br />
a curling strip of wallpaper from a dilapidated<br />
wall, begins, he says, from what we know<br />
and seeks connections everywhere. All poetry<br />
gives probability to our disjointed world.<br />
Goethe winds his clock each afternoon<br />
at twenty five to four. I wind the present on,<br />
he says, the shipwrecked man ashore. I will assert<br />
my part in what, until a moment such as this,<br />
has been concealed. I wind a dawn of flickering<br />
light bulbs into something more meticulous.<br />
Goethe winds his clock against the floodgate<br />
swelling with the pressing weight of all he knows<br />
but fears will forget, the force of instinct, reason<br />
and the privilege of art, the walls of books.<br />
I wind, he says, the unexpected footprints<br />
in the newly fallen snow. I wind the barricades<br />
set up against the odds of never growing old.<br />
I wind the passive consciousness of such<br />
impossibilities. I wind, he says, and pours<br />
a quantity of wine into an empty glass,<br />
the sum of almost everything I ever knew<br />
into a time that, for the life of me, I hope<br />
might never pass.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-88113742502978833082013-05-10T18:26:00.001-07:002013-05-10T18:26:14.079-07:00Magnoliasby Lauren Tivey<br />
<br />
Budding in early April,<br />
the bare-branched trees<br />
are candelabras, their tips<br />
flames of white, purple,<br />
mauve, the rare yellow.<br />
<br />
We are allowed to gush<br />
over them, the event<br />
of their opening cups,<br />
their unfolding into<br />
party gowns, as Étienne,<br />
<br />
toiling in his arboretum<br />
for the Empress Josephine,<br />
must have wept with joy<br />
over his hybrids, over<br />
each individual angel.<br />
<br />
Tonight, the maiden moon,<br />
intoxicating scent; I am<br />
thinking of you, how seductive<br />
and perilous the metaphor.<br />
But it is spring, a time<br />
<br />
of indulgence, and we are far<br />
from France, under exotic skies,<br />
flowers trumpeting their magic:<br />
I cannot stop looking at them.<br />
I cannot stop thinking of you.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-64463874131826591102013-05-10T18:26:00.000-07:002013-05-10T18:26:03.783-07:00Old Cityby Stephen Jarrell Williams<br />
<br />
Too many walls,<br />
baloney smell<br />
damp.<br />
<br />
Our minds infiltrated,<br />
radiated<br />
with bogus facts.<br />
<br />
Confusion<br />
slicing us<br />
into stumps.<br />
<br />
Fruit<br />
bloodied,<br />
roots dangling...<br />
<br />
We're mashed<br />
potatoes<br />
heaped on their golden plates.<br />
<br />
They're laughing<br />
at us<br />
spooning us down.<br />
<br />
Closing us in<br />
cardboard boxes<br />
against the elements.<br />
<br />
But when our babies weep,<br />
we sprout thorns<br />
engorged.<br />
<br />
Our old city shaking,<br />
a thousand cities quaking,<br />
dust rising to the sky.<br />
<br />
Stones coming their way.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-4642743056417820322013-05-10T18:25:00.001-07:002013-05-10T18:25:47.743-07:00Stalking Horsesby Jeremy Marks<br />
<br />
I send out at night<br />
my stalking horses<br />
<br />
They report to me<br />
at dawn<br />
behind the firewood shed.<br />
<br />
My children feel that I turn<br />
into a four-legged, centaur-like man<br />
while they are sleeping<br />
<br />
That my eyes are seated behind<br />
a pair of large globes<br />
catching the sinuous, roving robe<br />
of equine landscapes<br />
<br />
But they do not-<br />
<br />
The horses are their own;<br />
they stalk for themselves<br />
through many a darkness<br />
I know not<br />
<br />
And they are not mine-<br />
we merely share this patch of Earth<br />
<br />
I bought off a man<br />
-as I bought them<br />
<br />
And all of us were then turned loose<br />
upon ourselves.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-45857909194750922002013-04-04T14:37:00.000-07:002013-04-04T14:37:05.189-07:00Fantasy Island Redux: “De pipeline, boss, de pipeline!”by Maureen Kingston <br />
<br />
a hot load, a hot shot<br />
through the weakest vein<br />
<br />
the great plains<br />
<br />
<i>where seldom is heard</i><br />
<i>a discouraging word </i> <br />
<br />
where dissent is drowned out<br />
by the global cash machine<br />
<br />
<i>he maketh me to lie down</i><br />
<i>in green pastures</i><br />
<br />
the pipeline’s well-designed,<br />
the engineers assure<br />
<br />
<i>a mighty fortress is our god,</i><br />
<i>a bulwark never failing</i><br />
<br />
the promise of jobs & safety,<br />
a universal hope or a uniscam?<br />
<br />
<i>The Good Life</i>, Nebraska’s motto,<br />
<br />
her citizens gracious to the end,<br />
pouring pitcher after pitcher of tar sands<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-6049961363944843252013-04-04T14:36:00.002-07:002013-04-04T14:36:53.445-07:00Subject Line Poemby Anon Ymous<br />
<br />
I’m a ghost; here, but never was. I’m a wisp of wind, a memory.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-84370699923065908062013-04-04T14:36:00.001-07:002013-04-04T14:36:45.304-07:00When The Gun Goes Off It Always Surprises Youby Anastasia Placido<br />
<br />
Enamored<br />
Not like jade enamel:<br />
Glazed and polished<br />
Amore, love<br />
Lots more than shine<br />
And charmed<br />
Like a snake in a basket<br />
Weaving<br />
Woozy<br />
Spellbound<br />
Cast over like a darkened sky<br />
And awash in air<br />
Insulated, head to chest<br />
A murmuring of the heart<br />
Crack the ribcage<br />
Open up the breast<br />
And let the light beam echo<br />
Unarmored<br />The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-57722905162734670072013-04-04T14:36:00.000-07:002013-04-04T14:36:36.624-07:00Why Daniel Gave Up Painting And Took Up The Bluesby Joe Farley<br />
<br />
When the dandelion wine,<br />
farm fermented, ran out<br />
you turned to whiskey,<br />
and married yourself to a bottle,<br />
adapted the drinking man's diet<br />
and shed forty pounds<br />
and with it all thoughts<br />
of the lover who left you<br />
for a woman and not a man.<br />
<br />
You still saw her naked<br />
when another model posed<br />
for your brushes to dance<br />
colors across a canvas.<br />
The shapes came out<br />
broken and tormented,<br />
so you left the studio<br />
and bought a slide guitar<br />
and learned to paint music,<br />
with blue the only pigment<br />
left on your palette.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-50253958424332727872013-02-27T16:14:00.000-08:002013-02-27T16:14:09.646-08:00Campo de’ Fioriby Bryan Murphy<br />
<br />
Filippo was in pretty good shape, until they burnt him.<br />
<br />
Of course, seven years of imprisonment had taken a toll – his leg muscles had atrophied and his eyes would water in sunlight – but for a man past fifty, well, he looked as though he’d be around for years to come. And that voice: loud and level, a debater’s voice. Not to mention the man’s mind, sharp and lucid as his tongue. Ah, his tongue. The weakest part of his whole body, the only part he couldn’t control. Even that was healthy enough when I examined it. They brought the friar to us, to our hospital on the island in the river. Wanted to be sure he’d survive until the end of his holy inquisition. Some of his holy inquisitors looked more likely to snuff it than he did. Tortured consciences. Brought him here regularly over the years. Always me who examined him, until – Holy Father!<br />
<br />
Yes, we talked. Mostly he talked and I listened. No, I didn’t absorb any of his heretical ideas, all that rubbish about life on other worlds. He did teach me some of his memory tricks. No, it’s not witchcraft. Believe me, I’ve seen a few witches in my time. Tell you one thing, I’ll never be able to forget him. Never forget a word he said. And he says plenty. Dominican, he is. Was. Intellectuals. Not like us plain John-of-God people. We just tend to the sick. It’s true we learn anatomy and cures, but mostly we just talk and listen to our charges. And pray for them.<br />
<br />
So, memory and anatomy and obedience. I’ll get by with them in the secular world. Saecula saeculorum. What a world. Sixteen hundred years after Our Lord came to it. And left it. Poor, forsaken Filippo Bruno: our Brother Giordano.<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-48186127274474632222013-02-27T16:13:00.002-08:002013-02-27T16:13:55.400-08:00Nakedby Susie Sweetland Garay<br />
<br />
Surely, she thinks, they will<br />
believe that a woman<br />
with nothing on<br />
has nothing to hide.<br />
That she is harmless.<br />
<br />
But they only seem to find her<br />
more sinister for her<br />
nakedness.<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-71534217057165564122013-02-27T16:13:00.001-08:002013-02-27T16:13:42.988-08:00Snow Falls in Kansas Cityby Al Ortolani<br />
<br />
You are sleeping when<br />
the first flakes fall, not rising<br />
until the paperboy swings by<br />
in his squeaking Durango.<br />
You have coffee in the morning,<br />
reading yesterday’s news, drinking in<br />
predictions of more snow.<br />
In the afternoon you wade out<br />
into the gray light. A calmness<br />
descends, drifting<br />
in swooping bales between<br />
shut doors. Your peace, punctuated<br />
only by crows, begins<br />
in the belly, extends even to 87th Street<br />
where a single taxi churns<br />
to the edge of town.<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-89668058093630650342013-02-27T16:13:00.000-08:002013-02-27T16:13:29.688-08:00The Visitorby Laura Grodin<br />
<br />
I call you the phoenix lights,<br />
but they only see blues and reds<br />
reflecting on crumbled soil. Nothing above but miles<br />
of hollow air. You hover without touch,<br />
the buzz of air pushed beneath you, floating<br />
above a sand dune you’ve never known.<br />
<br />
There’s something odd when I look up,<br />
I can’t finish my cereal, the bowl in my hands<br />
is unlike grey plates circling. Vibrations in<br />
my slippers on the wet grass, a button undone<br />
on my flannels, near my neck so I can open wide.<br />
You’re coming down soon.<br />
<br />
Flying in V’s like birds of another species,<br />
There is a notable emptiness between earth and soil.<br />
Tufts of air brush my cheeks, hair static.<br />
Stricken from memory you’ll land, nestled<br />
on moonlit craters, cracked from the constant<br />
beating of breath.<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-71134341546357010452013-02-02T13:59:00.000-08:002013-02-02T13:59:08.515-08:00Half Day in Moon-Tone Roomby Jacqueline Markowski<br />
<br />
We lie together never really<br />
knowing who's there between,<br />
or within, or even why, but there,<br />
in that room, moments break open<br />
into tiny little spasms of liquid—<br />
<br />
tears and sweat— viperous guilt.<br />
The moment we reach the place we can't<br />
define we are sudden. The sounds of the birds<br />
screech in and out of the lost stillness<br />
we've created— here? Where<br />
we are least passive, least sedentary,<br />
of all places to make one<br />
quiet consciousness of two<br />
racing alligators.<br />
<br />
As the awkwardness breaths heavily<br />
upward in the smoky room, white<br />
walls darken like wood paneling,<br />
pupils dilate, become round moons<br />
absorbing each other's shine,<br />
each other's light—<br />
and then they are one<br />
Vermont moon.<br />
<br />
Gravity rakes fiercely with its waves, the feelings<br />
that shook my nerves, offering up<br />
to the beach (with its reject<br />
sand castles and moldy, forgotten<br />
beach bags) all losses of<br />
conscientious objection,<br />
paradoxical notions<br />
incased in glowing antique renditions<br />
of nature verses nurture.<br />
<br />
Our moon rang out a silent truth,<br />
spilling dialectics<br />
of truth in/honesty of<br />
emotion; a wave of premonitory<br />
nostalgia swept us both<br />
under the rugged, hateful tide.<br />
I could feel it, like salt water slapping<br />
at my ten year old back (sun-kissed,<br />
damaged; but young skin heals nicely)<br />
pulling at my torso<br />
just at the moment<br />
you hugged onto me quietly,<br />
the man in the moon is<br />
thinking about it, too,<br />
you told me.<br />
<br />
What you didn't say,<br />
what I didn't think<br />
ahead to was that,<br />
inevitably, this violent, sibilant tide<br />
will turn its sights to the next light<br />
house, our nautical parable<br />
interpolated amid<br />
the skeletons and the other<br />
forgotten jewels.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-49941585817015717882013-02-02T13:58:00.002-08:002013-02-02T13:58:57.873-08:00Night Town Edenby David Mac<br />
<br />
Black windows<br />
Black heart<br />
Black soul to look through<br />
The masterpiece has changed<br />
The painting’s not the same<br />
<br />
Town night air swirls<br />
Don’t know no better<br />
Drives you crazy<br />
<br />
Bleeding ghosts of girls<br />
Lips like cigarettes<br />
Smiles like stars<br />
Rats betray the dream<br />
We’ll never change<br />
We’ll never get over a thing<br />
The love of snakes<br />
The fear of apples<br />
<br />
We’re a force to be reckoned with<br />
We do not stand a chance<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-22000557757694752802013-02-02T13:58:00.001-08:002013-02-02T13:59:43.704-08:00the naked soulby Moriah LaChapell<br />
<br />
is a collection<br />
of polished stones<br />
gathered<br />
from roadside ditches<br />
slack rivers<br />
and corridor forests<br />
<br />
these stones become<br />
encased in our viscera<br />
until we someday decay<br />
and some body else<br />
finds them<br />
againThe Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-14431910726397290152013-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:002013-02-02T13:58:38.968-08:00Working Five-Tens at the Plant I Heard Safety Man’s Storyby Jason Braun<br />
<br />
Juarez bound, one night he disappeared<br />
for a week. He emerged like a baby<br />
might, in his underwear. His skin<br />
shrunken and raw in the outline<br />
of the jailhouse doorframe. His wife<br />
bailed him out and must have know<br />
he spent a wallet full, before selling<br />
first his boots, then his hat, shirt<br />
and finally the Levi’s for something<br />
to drink and sex. They hadn’t gave<br />
him water yet that day and his wife<br />
didn’t stop driving until the car<br />
was parked in their Odessa garage.<br />
On a hot day, I think of him and drink.<br />
The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-73993059756192412652012-12-30T06:08:00.001-08:002012-12-30T06:08:20.834-08:00Brackish Streetby Rachel Lauren<br />
<br />
Telephone wires cast its web to all the hungry houses. Connecting us. I know them not by name but the way they live. There’s the blue balloon always been filled with helium two houses to the left. He occasionally passes a nod to the walking wallet tip toeing on debt. Who sleeps with the gold mine at one of his other houses so the damp rag he married can absorb more fallen tears, the two houses across the street. A lonely house falling apart from heartache rots in its grave to the right. I sometimes lurk along its walls following flies. They tell me secrets. “He chops off the heads of crows and harvests them for the winter to wear them on the tips of his fingers.” Who are these people that share the same brackish street name as me? Trapped in this web.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-27455997936831271072012-12-30T06:08:00.000-08:002012-12-30T06:08:06.979-08:00Handsby Sarah E. Alderman<br />
<br />
Sweetest slut-puppy in the whole litter<br />
With green eyes that echo the ocean<br />
Its depth and uncompromising loyalty<br />
To anything that is named love or disguised as<br />
Did I fall out of the box?<br />
Your favorite crayon<br />
Your favorite hue of blue-green<br />
Waiting for you to turn me over in your hands<br />
Until I have turned<br />
Purple, black, red<br />
All the colors of bruised and bleeding<br />
I am no longer my own<br />
You make me wonder if I ever was<br />
I am not a chameleon<br />
But I learn to turn shades<br />
According to your mood swings<br />
The heat of your palms melting<br />
Off such naive and silly things<br />
Like ambition, like identity<br />
Who needs self awareness, confidence, esteem<br />
When in the presence of a supernova<br />
Filling the sky with your temper<br />
Temperamental heat<br />
Eruptions, explosions<br />
<br />
Sculpting spine until it is fragile and brittle<br />
Like the burnt-out wick of a candle<br />
Or the husk of the tallest pine<br />
That cannot bend with the wind<br />
Only sway in place<br />
And still your hot heavy hands<br />
Move over meThe Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-84149539255484973732012-12-30T06:07:00.003-08:002012-12-30T06:07:56.867-08:00Flowering nightsby Reena Prasad<br />
<br />
An earthen lamp sits in smoky vigil<br />
Dusk spreads beyond the courtyard tree<br />
Burning incense sticks smolder<br />
till they crumble into grey dust<br />
<br />
Come home, the roses are sparkling wet<br />
The dew-drenched lady<br />
is quietly walking by.<br />
<br />
Night glances in<br />
through the creeper-draped glass<br />
only to look away and ponder at large.<br />
<br />
The Nishagandhi has bent<br />
under the will of the rain<br />
drizzling sweetness even in defeat.<br />
<br />
Warm breaths hush the talkative bangles<br />
but naughty anklets continue to smile and peep<br />
Drops of water dot the cool, mud pitcher<br />
Drops of water break into sweaty beads<br />
Reality whispers but sleep cajoles.<br />
<br />
Waiting for a bee to return back to me<br />
Spring of my soul, I bloom no more<br />
When darkness embraces my curled-up toes<br />
a gentle need seeps through my inner whorls.<br />
<br />
A bud in precocious bloom, a butterfly sensing doom<br />
a moth settling for a vagrant hue<br />
or am I the colour of a summer night<br />
fading too soon?<br />
<br />
Crushed jasmine buds dot a bridal bed<br />
as a tender night falls into a scented dream.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-67964392006247124372012-12-30T06:07:00.002-08:002012-12-30T06:07:48.018-08:00Metallica Records Its Debut Album in Rochester, NY, May 1983by Daniel M. Shapiro<br />
<br />
The four horsemen flashed the lights<br />
before techs could adjust<br />
the white/black ratio of sky.<br />
In this land of Chuck Mangione,<br />
listening would seldom go easily.<br />
<br />
A studio by the name of Music America<br />
knelt behind a green sign with white letters:<br />
The City of Rochester Welcomes You.<br />
Peeling paint nodded its long-haired nod<br />
at the whiplash-quick thrashers from the West.<br />
<br />
Even boogaloos had to stutter-step,<br />
cowering in the cool basement<br />
of the 50-years-dead social club.<br />
The drummer insisted his cymbals<br />
rotated from the callused ghosts.<br />
<br />
The sweater-vested man enlisted to engineer<br />
had worked the counter at Music Lovers Shoppe,<br />
collected sweaty bills for vinyl at retail price.<br />
He would translate the band’s seek-and-destroy riffs<br />
into the soundtrack of zits that couldn’t be hidden,<br />
<br />
zits that shielded braces, speech mid-voice-change,<br />
threadbare denim or faux leather a daily coin flip,<br />
weed-burned fingers contorting into devil horns.<br />
This would be a symphony for the front window,<br />
an opus to unite the lonely at breakneck speed.<br />
<br />
Six weeks later, the band would flee for anesthesia,<br />
for all the gloom-free cities. The tightly gripped hammer<br />
would give way to blood, jump in the fire midsummer<br />
to go three times platinum, a discarded mirror<br />
of shrugged-shouldered East Avenue clouds.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-27361420906659253102012-12-30T06:07:00.001-08:002012-12-30T06:07:38.659-08:00Mourning the lost poems of an unknown poetHurt- spoken to Vincentby A.V. Koshy<br />
<br />
i know, vincent<br />
this one is going to be as raw as your later ones<br />
and as bitter, angry and ugly<br />
you know those friends, birds of the same feather<br />
but they were not friends<br />
and i would write poems<br />
and poems after poems<br />
and they would say silently<br />
but you are not as good as the ones who write in malayalam<br />
we are better<br />
or the ones who write in usa or uk<br />
or the ones who got prizes<br />
or got published<br />
or the great ones<br />
and i would say nothing<br />
write, read it out<br />
to a few<br />
who would not laugh -<br />
like you had theo<br />
i had them -<br />
and then tear it up<br />
confetti on the sidewalks, so many countless pieces<br />
littering the streets of the city of my cri(m)es<br />
<br />
all my life they have followed me, vincent<br />
and i kiss my girl and say, to her i'm more than vincent<br />
and they say why don't you stop this madness<br />
and i say<br />
anna<br />
is there god's hand's imprint on my heart<br />
am i not like dostoevsky<br />
and they say megalomania<br />
<br />
vincent, sit here, paint with me in my loneliness<br />
while i make love to your golden cornfields and bluest of skies<br />
and let me read out to you my poem<br />
and we can tear it up and let it like blackbirds fly<br />
into your painted sky<br />
for one thing i know of you, vincent<br />
you would not laugh as the gutters fill with boats for boys<br />
made from paper taken from my left-behind poems<br />
alone of all mankind, you would sit and cry<br />
with me and give me your canvasses, to write -The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-62411960704456517972012-12-30T06:07:00.000-08:002018-08-13T16:31:55.866-07:00Ultravioletby Rebecca Gomez<br />
<br />
She enters the spectrum<br />
With ease<br />
And not even the voices<br />
Will scare her away<br />
<br />
She shushes the meanest of them<br />
For she has tired of 3-D<br />
And in this place of bright lights and swirling walls<br />
Her mind is at peace<br />
And she can successfully<br />
Think of only one thing at a timeThe Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8223563859506003981.post-73925698886744267792012-12-06T18:34:00.004-08:002012-12-06T18:34:36.532-08:00Austere Lightsby Ali Znaidi<br />
<br />
No moon tonight. Instead, only bits of<br />
golden fleece adumbrated by mist.<br />
The light faded away bit by bit<br />
to the rhythm of the lunar eclipse—<br />
something akin to distant lights of a plane<br />
swallowed by a hungry sky’s mouth.<br />
Thunder. Lightning. & a cigarette<br />
between two frigid fingers—<br />
I was beginning to wonder if<br />
these lights would hold;<br />
if I would hold.<br />
I wonder if light tonight was<br />
administered to fit into<br />
the austerity measures.The Camel Saloonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17466326145539153263noreply@blogger.com0