PANTS ON FIRE
I'm not really this upset
but despair reads better on the page.
And no one dips into poetry
so they'll know how good I have it.
They're searching
for the anguished cry of someone
worse off than them.
So lying on a beach,
I give them dark and dismal.
High up on a mountain,
I spread the verse with depths.
In love and loved becomes,
with a click or two of the keyboard,
unwanted and alone.
Poetry is the great lie.
There, you heard it from me.
So it must be untrue.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
Now I prize
the reformed alcoholics-
all throats are dry,
all keep this to themselves.
Instead
of ripping at their own skin,
they sit in chairs
too tight for trembling
and let the process work.
A month, says one.
Almost a year, says another.
Over two years, says a third.
Together in one room,
they are a calendar
of willpower and abstinence.
I drink to them
by crushing the glass.
in my hand.
HE PART ONE
He drinks.
He embraces me like an old friend.
He finds his life works best
when people have never seen the like before.
He has developed a number
outside the realm of 0 through 9.
He has the inside track
He hasn’t seen his ex in years.
He can make things out of stone and wood.
He leaves it to others to light his cigarettes.
He nibbles on whatever’s within reach.
He tosses trash at the feet
of the guy sweeping the sidewalk.
He returns nothing he borrows..
He says he wants her exclusively for himself
He survives off a settlement for a car accident.
He transmits pleas skyward.
CARL SMOKES
Ten chimneys worth of vapor
had climbed his nose, his cheeks,
drawn by the amber of his eyes.
His is the satisfaction of expression.
And the relief that it works so well.
For he is an illustration
from out of poetry’s flaming words of poetry
Though just the scaffolding
for he has yet to write anything down.
He’s staving off the pressure with a cigarette,
while he craves the presence of a sperm whale
that writes, with its fluke dipped in ink,
in some elemental alphabet with giant letters.
Yet he’s really clipped wings on a bird.
The Ring Cycle minus the ring.
A dropout from modesty and self-advisement.
A prisoner behind a tall wire fence.
The last breath of a trout in a net.
No one is hypnotized by the yellow of his sun.
No one reads anything into an empty page.
RUSSET CONES
I ask morning, as someone who is never really here,
just how secure is this room, these floorboards,
the walls, my body…and my life.
The light says something like,
“That’s my little secret.
In the meantime, why don’t I just shine in your face.”
I wonder in whose novel I have awoken.
And why the fierce dog below is staring up at me.
His concentration and my lack of gusto are appalling me.
But I agree with the beast that maybe we could rassle later.
I spend twenty minutes talking to the mirror
with my diffident face on.
But glass doesn’t recognize humility.
It only speaks in emojis anyhow.
My downward mouth cannot be held back.
The woman at the kitchen table looks up at me
from her incorrigible remoteness.
How many years has it been since we first thought
we could anchor each other.
Now, she takes me for the back cover of a book –
one that she puts back down,
says, no I won’t be reading you today.
She could, at least, skim through the damn thing!
I try to not to say things that are merely anger.
That’s what pen and paper are for.
The lady of my life has perfected the silence, the obdurance, of the hill.
I look out the window.
Day is out there having followed me from upstairs.
It’s quite colorful, to be honest.
And not so distant that I can’t step out into it.
“Good question,” it says, when I haven’t even asked it anything.
“If you’re looking for the russet cones of red spruce,
focus on the top of the tree.”
I had not intended to. And yet, maybe I just will.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.
Jalapeno Quietly Gazed At
Plump jalapeno
intones shapely strawberry rumpus
green today but one day blush
percolating solar swelling
shock for the curious ovivorous
dangles on aortic question hook
stemmed at a bifolial end (between bilabial leaves)
punctuational singleton frog-plop pepper slung over
Basho’s garden as bosom equation derived into one dimension
concentrated
Keeping Busy
Something to read, something to write
Even conversations can be planned out
To take up a measure of time, and time
Needs filling. It’s a bitch the way it works.
We wake to it, know something must be
Done or the emptiness will haunt us, will
Remind us that our place in life can easily
Be filled by others. “Busy” seems like a silly
Word, something our parents and our early
Teachers would say when they’d notice us
Slacking or preoccupied with the nothingness
That naturally surrounds us. “Get to work”
Became a slogan we turned into this bit
About needing something to read or write
Something to mark the time, to eat up time
Before it eats us up and spits us out.
Time Spent
Retired people go on vacation
Trying to remember what it’s like
To need time off
To need time away
But for them
Time off has become a constant
And time away seems odd when
There’s so little left to get away from.
Retired people vacation
Trying to forget
What all this time off
And all this time away
Are leading to.
About Place
Home game or away
It’s all in how
You play.
Walk down a street in NYC
Let’s say
Or in Buenos Aires
Both are big apples to chew on.
Then walk down a street
Any street
In Winooski or So. Burlington
And feel the difference.
Big apples or small
It’s all in the way you play it –
Big screen or small, big stage
Or just down the hall.
It’s all in the way you walk
And talk about
Being there or anywhere.
It becomes home or away
In what we say
About it.
Chirashi
(Note: Chirashi is a Japanese dish of raw
fish and seafood served on top of a bowl
of rice. It means “scattered.”)
A bright, cold winter day.
The memories are fresh
as the roses in the hall
though they are far away.
They’re light as leaves in autumn.
Like birds lined on a wire,
hopping wire to wire,
like notes of music, charming
as music long remembered
and forgotten even longer,
she seems now to say.
She seems now to say,
from the far edge of the table,
but her words are silent now
like music long remembered
and forgotten even longer
in the jammed restaurant’s clamor.
Her eyes are glittering
like the gleam of heated sake
in its white and tiny cup,
in the laughter, silent laughter.
There is laughter, silent laughter,
warm and silent laughter,
in the memories in the restaurant
concentrated in a cup,
in a modest porcelain cup
hardly larger than a thimble,
a little thing of matter
in the bright, cold winter day.
Between the miso and the shoyu
and wasabi with its tears,
and the sake as it lowers
in the cup and disappears,
like sashimi called chirashi
they disintegrate, dissolve,
and disperse and fly away
like a flight of birds
until there’s nothing left
but a cooling empty cup,
a demolished luncheon tray
on a table set for ghosts
and memories as they scatter
like sashimi called chirashi,
like music long remembered,
and forgotten even longer,
yet remembered even longer
on this bright, cold winter day.
For Keiko
_____
Christopher Bernard’s third collection of poetry, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is a founder and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
do you ever remember the spring or summer sun, the rains that make the wildflowers to blossom and the wooden and metal bridges that lead across the marsh water and creeks? do you recall the hawk and his friends high in the skies near the lakes, or the northern bald eagle way out there agile and like a dream? oh the countenance of the lands- loams and trees old their bark and branches wild shapes that sometimes look like spirits and tell all kinds of stories and make you think of poems and songs. the summit and valley, and oriole and blue jay, a coy deer and a running fox, porcupine in a tree, buzzing working bee, little spider and ant, the moth has its own beauty and the butterflies definitely so don’t you know? think of the grace of the wild orchids that live down the way off the trail, and the hundreds of yellow buttercups that receive the afternoon sun. path journey and scenery. do you remember such sights as those? maybe they can keep our spirit warm somehow, against reason and logic, in the winter air, the solemn dusk, the long night lonesome and witching hour gloomy. oh April-May the promissory notes for a better day. ah sand or June under blue sky, and July’s dawn river washed stones. yes August petals and the world in bright colour. calm let us be. waiting. waiting on light and warmth. waiting for a new dream dreamed by the universe. waiting for love.
storms baptisms worlds
there was a long corridor made of the deepest green painted cement. it was far south, and the off season, w/nobody around. I went along it and noticed that it had begun to rain. yet the rain was warm and soothing and made sounds as it went off metal railings and stucco walls. at the end were steps and the walls had openings so that one could see where they were going on their journey. outside of the dark stairways was seen the sea. even though a storm was half-arrived, you could see the sea, discern the whitecaps boasting up, then dissolving, rising again, and disappearing. to the right a far way was a pier, not seen then. to the left just as far, a lighthouse. I wonder why we always went right and not left, though right was beautiful. if I go back maybe I will travel by foot left instead, to see the lighthouse. but with nobody then, sibling or peer, I was on my own. those were the same storms the pirates experienced. and the first settlers. and the people indigenous to the lands. those storms carried some ancient message that was beyond literature, philosophy, or science. they were mystic storms. I waited in the rains, under the warm sky-water. I looked up so that the water would touch my eyes. I had been borne w/a double crown. I put my head straight again and the water landed on the double crown. I baptized myself in the strange feral storm world before returning to the earth that was normal, orthodox, prosaic.
beyond the forest and near the loam-
there was a large forest and beside it a winding valley. the valley was mysterious beyond belief and the farmer who owned the land was afraid to go there but would not exactly admit it. you could read it in his body language and in his speech when he spoke about the valley. and you could just sense it. but I therefore went deep not the valley alone and walked it’s complete length. and yes it was strange and weird. but i didn’t mind. stop and out from it was an open field. a series of three large fields. in the summers…moth butterfly agate chaga ant insect flower vine chaparral stone leaf abandoned tractor sandpit tree stone wooden fence blue sky and white cloud. in the winter…ice and snow and grey and mystery and loneliness pronounced and actualized. you and yourself and the vexatious winds. and there was at the purlieu a strange beginning to a farmland where feed corn was grown. I stood there sometimes and in the distance could make out the farmer’s house and barn. a solitary hawk sometimes flew. I breathed deeply. I felt I knew something other people didn’t know,- being there so alone, having hiked all that way. but I didn’t know anything. well nothing if words and mind perhaps. and then it would be time to turn and begin the long walk back. step by step by step. sometimes my feet were warm and sometimes cold, but I loved it anyhow,- against odds and reason I loved the winter overcast w/its dark skies and frightening valley. I would overcome it all or it would overcome me. I continued. I carried on. I was courageous and went further than the few others that even went that far. sky sky sky, woods woods woods. season enthral, trees full and tall…….
there are wolves in sky and, during the waltz of the hidden, epistolary episodic belles lettres to the shoreline unknown ~
the past is a long while away, when there was the dream of an orange city and the night, and another and me caught in fright, trying to make our way. or the great and grand cathedrals north. I told the woman, ‘there used to be a church under the ground, and I went there and it was beautiful and old and functional,’ and the woman surprised me by saying first, ‘I know,’ and secondly, ‘it is gone now…’ and I thought about all that and there were wolves in the firmament one two three maybe more. and I listened to so many things, hundreds of things, and read until my eyes couldn’t function, but in the end I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the rainstorms. Mata once read The Thorn Birds near southern balconies whilst I watched the skies over the sea. and one day, someday, I will live in the skies over the sea. why do you long for much? opulence. fashion. power. fame. money. food. the new. the gauche. the decadent. more. more. more. why, if you were different, you could live in the sky ov’r the sea. w/me. we could live there forever. w/the wolves. I will be there anyhow. you should stop by. oh one time I went down there after a long strange dream and walked the coastline at dawn. joggers. yoga people. walkers. the world. but I was always a stranger. I only looked up in the end and yearned for home, longed to live again in the air, w/out a care, where the astral wolves sway by the thousand fold lair.
shadows near dawn, letters home to a soul unknown ~
and the lake is a paramour, a mistress, much loved but not the essential. because I recalled something else forgotten. i remembered suddenly that I had gone out and seen the sea, and it was dawn, and everything was contained there yet bursting out in light. parapets stucco. old catamaran to sit upon. the darkness and shadow slowly being warmed and lit as if from a paced and deliberate spiritual fire. the mind far away, the heart speaking to this hearth, a hearth from and source unknown. and I could hear the waves lapping and thought of all the souls that passed through there during those years, and maybe the years before I knew if it. the whole and existence had brought me there…karmas, providence, fate and fortune, circumstance. and I knew where the sandbank was and the pier that went out and out,- oh all the things. and I had gone alone the path, the sand path framed by verdant palm leaves in humid breeze, yes trees that spoke still a little to the moon and even to me, shadows near dawn, telling the most marvellous and intriguing of secrets that you ever heard.
the other world songs
after the dawn and it’s mist, was the day, prosaic and normal, clear and neither good or bad, and then the strange dusk where shapes melt away and night afterwards overtakes streams and estuary, inlet and lake, boulevard and rural road and city street. that is when the angels used to arrive, or be heard, finally heard. they sang songs together, actual angels, and the songs were melancholic and rueful, crestfallen and lamenting something. I wondered why they sang. I wondered for years and years and years as I listened to them. they didn’t bother me, or comfort me too much. they were on the side of good and not bad. but why were they always sad? oh how deep and intense they were, w/their songs. but now they are long gone and sometimes how I miss them so. oh angels, come back and sing your songs. astral tunes. limbo lyrics. other world whines. complaints from eternity. what would or could a mystic orphan lost soul do in a suburban place surrounded by mediocrity, ambition, modernity? nothing, that’s what. but I miss the songs. please sing a song old friends, just once, somewhere sometime somehow. perhaps in the deep and still witching hour when the wind whistles wild unencumbered through the distant reeds on the edges of towns hardly known, when one is all alone, near lonesome loam, far and far and far my friend, so very far from anything like home.
Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. Recent work appears at The Notre Dame Review.
Genre: HIP-Hop Chorus I see life my own way Never disturbed by what happens But dictates what goes on around me Lalala (3CE)
Verse 1 Started out in consonance with the elements of the earth I’m at the summit, peeps! Punching hard in all-weather like the Mayweather The fire of my wordings so serious that my flows run faster than one seriously pressed from the inside. Dominating the world from the fourth dimension I’m bullet-proof from the deceptions of cynics Politically immune from all ulterior motives of the elite Economically free from pseudo statics and extrapolations Financially more hydro-plane than Wall Street Yeah, y’all can say what you like Afterall, you entitled to your views Check it; My words carry the waters of neutrality But highly inflammable when y’all come with the fires of opposition They carry the gas of subtle influence that the earth can only recognize them at the fifth dimension… Catch me if you can like the Ginger Red Man ‘Coz I’m super-human teleporting in all realms interchangeably like the speed of light, my words hit your sub-conscious magnet at a pace it can’t even imagine…
Chorus I see life my own way Never disturbed by what happens But dictates what goes on around me Lalala (3CE)
Verse 2 Deceptions try permeating my subconscious like a virus Ugly events want to make me dance circus I chose to see myself as the citrus Growing in the fields of Peace Never caught by the weeds of disease I’m hooked with my creativity through my ability To express my service to humanity I see life my own way Decided not to be in social disarray Because it doesn’t matter the name Whose distraction is giving him the fame For I know that’s his game
Chorus I see life my own way Never disturbed by what happens But dictates what goes on around me Lalala (3CE)
Verse 3 I’m all out for the money But not down with the honeys Because they are actually monkeys Pretending to be like honeys I’m ahead of my time like time That’s why you don’t see me all the time That’s the way I chose to see life My Own Way So see life in your own way!
Chorus I see life my own way Never disturbed by what happens But dictates what goes on around me Lalala (3CE)
-I don’t know if Poet laughs or cries What I do know is that he was wearing on his head
A redneck beret
And it has turned into a pumpkin.
Miracle ¡
I would like to come see you, Poet. -No, don’t come to see me, Poet answers.
I piss myself laughing Because it has rained, my Paloma Because it has rained And my pumpkin is grown. Four rednecks passed With their wives By the open driveway
And they all turned their heads saying: –What a pumpkin the Poet has! A shepherd passed One of those of bag with bread Thinking seeing the pumpkin That was his lady
And when he got home, he said to his wife:
Get undressed, my love. Show me your rear That have to mend. –You are not going to mend it Woman answered. Mend the bag for bread! -I fell from my ass Shepherd answered.
