I assume much the same as you assume,
& I regret as much as you do,
but I’ll be damned before I rocket a brutal stone
above the eye socket of innocence.
I won’t do it,
& if you know what exists in the uncertain hour,
just before, just before,
just before, just before,
& after all that,
before sliding fetus-like into the ether,
just before & afterwards;
afterwards I promise
I’ll sing the blues
like Muddy says, It’s nine below zero with nowhere else to go.
Joan Beebe (left)and fellow contributor Michael Robinson
When I am alone in the early morning darkness,
My mind takes me back to the times when
I was growing up with my family.
It was a time of nurturing, tears and laughter.
The warmth of love, encouragement and the
Sounds of a family taking care of each other.
The house was always filled with the kindness of
My mom and dad who took in friends, a relative and
A family who was forced out of their home due to
The flooding of our river each year.
Time has passed quickly and I only have my memories
But they are sweet, comforting and full of gratitude.
A bird flew just touching my head over
It flew away flattering its feathers
I looked again and again
It spoke to me how and what I do
And should do
It’s my love, O bird
You wanted to whisper that I can’t
Flew away over my head
The shade before my eyes
While flying to the sky
Draws hundreds and thousands miles to go ahead
I observe and move forward till I reach my destiny.
Whatever outcomes are realised by errant dreamers,
love shall transform the season over and over.
Phenomonology of the Soul
Where is the soul of man to be found?
In dreams? A boy prays,
struggling with the thought.
“What if I should not wake tomorrow,
but continue to dream
and if I should not wake
from that dream, but find myself caught
in a perpetual dream-loop,
then what of the real world,
father dear and mother?” As a younger child
he imagined himself unable
to escape his world of dreams.
Now he believes he is still dreaming
when he thinks
he might be awake.
“Perhaps I’ve been stuck
in this dream for as long as I am
able to remember.
Perhaps there is no way out.”
His heart leaps within him, stirring his soul
to doubt God.
As a grown man, the former boy dreams
of waking from his trance,
no nearer to finding God,
his only consolation
to be found in the music of his dreams,
between earth and sky.
Precept and Prayer
for Helen Bullas
Town full of revelers, couples, beautiful girls.
Not a soul to step forward for me,
Except for you, my most beautiful friend.
Your tears hurt me more than I can tell,
But I’m still capable of bravery,
Laughter and forgetting, like a man
Who hasn’t entirely lost hope.
Sometimes there’s nothing to do, but write
Our poems as if it really made a difference.
As if, somehow, it mattered more than a jot.
At last, I beg you not to cry for me
Because my feud with god isn’t yet over.
So come pray with me now
And all the unbelievers, as if praying
Were the only sacrament missing from our lives.
Law of the Past
This poem is the only artefact that’s left
after all the years
of my loving you in secret. Even now
we hope to hide our identities
from the world. You are still L, and I, M.
This is how it must be, with all the resolve
of heaven and Earth.
Perhaps this will be the last thing
I ever write about us.
Remember when you played guitar for me?
Now you are married with a family
and wish to forget.
Only the past has a way of catching up,
catching us off guard, forcing us
to account for our strange, conflicted selves.
Dead Dog Paradox
Was the dead dog man’s best friend?
Did the dog deserve to be burned alive?
Did the dog deserve to be beaten to death with a stick?
Did the dog deserve to be poisoned to death?
Who set the trap to cut the dog in half?
What was the dog’s name?
Was the dog troubled with rabies?
Did the dog deserve to be hanged in the street?
Who sanctioned the killing of the dog?
Had the dog played at ball in the fields?
Had the dog run wild in the woods?
Had the dog run amok in the town square?
Did the Mayor pay local citizens to murder the dog?
Who threw the first stone?
Who beheaded the dog?
Who skinned the dog alive for its pelt?
What had the dead dog done to warrant such cruelty?
Self-Portrait, 2019
for Frank Bidart and for Nora
He’s no longer young at forty-nine, but looks younger,
or does he? Certainly, he feels younger
than his years, but the baggage under the eyes
has justly recorded a decade of sleepless nights,
the greying hair, the almost white unkempt beard
betrays
his exit from the world of bodies, but signifies
a wider, more pressing change of heart. The one time asexual
poet, grieves no more for the pejorative virginity
of yesteryear, but looks at the tear in his right pupil —
not as the symbol of a once broken heart,
but a super sigil, denoting and demanding a rare optimism
in place of doubt and denial. In the mirror, nothing
is missed, the yellow worn out teeth, the metaphorical
lumps and bumps of ageing, his mother’s sensual mouth,
his father’s Roman nose, the desire still to be loved.
Mark A. Murphy is the editor of the online journal, POETiCA REViEW. His poetry collections include Tin Cat Alley (1996), Our Little Bit of Immortality (2011), Night-watch Man & Muse (2013) and his next full length collection, Night Wanderer’s Plea is pending from Waterloo Press, UK in 2019.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is trapped in suburbia, wondering where the lonely housewives are. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Record Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash, Mad Swirl, Word Dish and Rusty Truck. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
“fame don’t take away the pain / it just pays the bills / and you wind up / on alcohol and pills…” Todd Snyder
last Friday, we were looking for someplace to go… it is summer so weekend flights to lots of places are full but we found some open flights from MSP to Memphis… so, Friday afternoon, we caught a flight to Memphis… and rented a car… found a cheap hotel…
Saturday morning, we decided to drive to Graceland Mansion, Elvis Presley’s former home which is the main tourist attraction in the area… so, after driving around the city on the I-40, we found ourselves on Elvis Presley Blvd… a ramshackle street of used tire shops, closed storefronts and weed grown lots… across Elvis Presley Blvd. from Graceland Mansion, is a visitor center which consists of several large gift shops, a museum of cars that belonged to Elvis and two large airplanes that also belonged to Elvis… the actual house across the road is hidden by trees and a curving driveway that goes up a hill… there are three prices of tours and we opted for the cheapest one ($29 for seniors) which did not include a close up of the cars or the airplanes… but did include an unguided tour of Graceland Mansion and the grounds…
today is Thursday, August 16, 2012, so 35 years ago today, I was driving my 1976 Dodge station wagon on I-494, when I heard a radio news bulletin that Elvis Presely had died… funny, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing during most of the big media events of the 20th Century, but I do remember hearing about Elvis… so, last Saturday, we arrived at Graceland at the start of what is called among aficionados, “Elvis Week” and which has various concerts and celebrity appearances in a tent set up near the entrance to the visitor center which one could attend for payment of a fee… events, I think, at which Elvis’s old cronies sit in front of a microphone and reminisce about their days with “The King…” which seemed to me just a bit beyond morbid curiosity…
anyway, with Elvis Week in full effect, the crowds at the visitor center were still not really large and the parking lot was about 1/2 empty when we got there a bit before noon… so we waited in line for the shuttle bus that would take us through the famous music note gates across the street and up to Graceland… the mansion itself is not really imposing but more a big 1960’s style house than a real mansion… later we learned that Elvis also had a real Mansion in the Los Angeles area someplace… the tour through the house only takes a few minutes and thankfully includes only the downstairs and not the upstairs bathroom where the poor guy breathed his last, evidently overcome by a pill induced heart attack while trying to take a shit…
still, the cameras were clicking around us nonstop… it was fun to see the living room with its 50s fancy dancy furniture… I can remember when the big Magnovox “color” tv was a luxury undreamed of by my proletarian peers… and a 15 foot long white couch… oh la la… the kitchen is larger than in the ordinary house of my youth, but not huge and with two refrigerators, one almond and one avocado… and Formica counter… with a black and white tv, what we used to call a “portable tv” at the end of the room… well, it was not opulent by any standards… at the back of the house is a large rec room that Elvis added in the 1970s full of green shag carpet and that clunky wood furniture that we all had in those days… well, for me, the house was a time machine… I remember that furniture and style… the basement was “professionally decorated” with a yellow and black design painted on the block walls… in the 1960s, I lived in my parents basement and painting the block walls seemed to us the height of sophisticated city living… back home on the farm, a basement was a dirt cellar for storing vegetables and canned goods…
so, it was kind of funny in the sense of unexpected, as I had expected not to be moved at all by visiting this shrine to Elvis, I found it very moving to see the things a poor boy got rich would have spent his money on in those days… namely a 15 foot white couch and later a room full of shag carpet… behind the house were horse pastures and outbuildings with white painted fences… inside and out, though nice, the house was in every way modest… but, two of the buildings behind the house were designated as trophy rooms, an old pool house (there was a small kidney shaped pool) and racquetball court that Elvis built… and a walk through these rooms was not only a ride on a time machine for me, seeing all the old album covers and vinyl records… but it was impressive… really impressive to see what this man had accomplished in his short 42 years on earth… how many musicians have one “gold record??” Elvis had dozens… the walls of a long room are lined with them and many many other awards, just about any award a musician of his era could have earned for record sales… in his lifetime he sold a hell of a lot of recordings and the young men and women who were boogying to Elvis back in the 50s and 60s, and who were growing old while he wasted his time on idiotic movies and growing fat while Elvis grew fat in Las Vegas put their money on the line and bought the music…
well, at the side of the house beyond the little swimming pool is the place where Elvis is buried… due to it being Elvis week, I suppose, there were piles of garish home made wreaths and memorials… around the oblong brass plaque under which he presumably lies… kind of sad and pathetic, I guess… like the whole place… I sat and made some drawings of the visitors and then left to go eat barbeque on Beale street and visit the Gibson guitar factory… I played a three thousand dollar guitar that sounded almost as good as my old 1966 Gibson LG 1 (that I bought from a coworker in 1969)… then in the late afternoon, listening to a very good blues band in a small outdoor market, I made a few more drawings… then back to the hotel…
I am not sure what to make of Elvis… I have always sort of liked his music in spite of myself… and thought he had a very beautiful singing voice… early and late in his career… his charisma must be unquestioned as his singing and dancing certainly gave everyone, especially screaming hordes of females, a thrill… back when I was a kid, I had the old pre-Beatle duck bill pompadour haircut, so I can relate to his style in those days, and I can remember the excitement of hearing a song like King Creole, back in 1957 when I was used to Perry Como or some lame ass crooner… on the old radio in the barn… at age 9… still, the music was pretty shallow, compared to where pop music went later with ragged hard edged poetry of a Kurt Cobain, for example… and his acting career, after a promising start with Love Me Tender, is a farcical footnote in cinematic history… will he still be remembered when the last of his old time fans dies off, when there are no good old boys left to reminisce during Elvis Week??? well, who knows…
his rags to riches story, born in a shotgun house in Tupelo, is certainly the American dream… who after all does not crave a 15 foot white couch?? and his addiction to drugs (mostly speed and other prescription pills) and early death from that addiction as well as from, perhaps eating a pound of bacon a day… well, his life certainly was quintessentially American… as we are a fat, unhealthy, wealth and drug obsessed people… American men are like Elvis, the boy child who never grows up… dreams of eating pounds of bacon and has all the fantasies that Elvis lived out, a horse with a fancy saddle to ride, success and fame, 14 year old girls named Priscilla to fall in love with, three tvs and a fancy record player, a pool table to hang around with your friends, pills to make everything seem nice and fuzzy and, and a 15 foot white couch!!! as I said, I am not sure quite what to make of Elvis but, I like the fact that Graceland is a shrine to an artist and not to some general or politician and I find it sort of interesting that in the past year, I have visited the homes of arguably the two most famous artists of the 20th Century, Elvis Presley and Picasso… hmmmm
Sunday morning, on the way to the airport, we stopped at the hotel where Martin Luther King was murdered… the area now includes a large civil rights museum and preserves the very site where Dr. King was assassinated… I found this just overwhelmingly sad… and this unhappy display shows, I guess what happens if an American starts talking about peace, equality and human rights and promotes peaceful non violent solutions to personal, national, international and political problems… in our gun totin’ race hating country them’s fightin words and whether your name is John Lennon or Martin Luther King some idiot with a gun will find a way to shut you up…
well, we flew back to MSP on Sunday arriving in time for Mary’s book club meeting… I bought a delicious barbeque sandwich to eat on the plane which turned me into one sticky human being, but it was very delicious… and to my surprise and delight, I did not spill the barbeque sauce on myself or my fellow passengers… I had forgotten to get a spoon so, wound up scooping the coleslaw out with the cover of the plastic bowl it came in… yum… I found the trip very moving and thought provoking… and I am not sure why…
