Charger



The battery of my iphone was down
The red circle indicated mostly out of commission.

Only thirteen percent left 
The circle was whitening, slowly closing in

I was in my car driving a long distance out
Precisely, I put my car charger on my iphone.

I heard the iphone sounding beep, beep, beep.
It rhymed a pulse of my own heart beat under the skin. 

Every bit of my heart pumped out a rhythmic wavelength
The body battery was also low at some point, my take.

It had to be plugged into a socket somehow
A socket of lifeline fed the blood life.

Without the collection of ion 
The iron of the blood would congeal otherwise.

The iphone battery was up in no time
While one charged on electricity, the other was plugged into the stars.


Both batteries of the body and the iphone 
Starved when a star burnt out.

"Road Walkers"

Sunrise solitude
trees hiding my footprints

a few hours reflecting
the past unfolding

way back chosen few
many of us had to run

heavy backpacks
stuffed with prophetic poems

word bombs
exploding the supposed peace

quick copied
and buried

hiding in the wilderness
they caught some of us

sentenced
to a choke of silence

my old friends now in a blur
their screams in the crackling leaves

their flesh left against cracks in the walls
pinch of prison bars

inventive years the rest of us staying alive
around campfires and crammed inside caves

star gazers and wall painters
tasting sugar honey when we slept

remembering before our good deeds
became unbreathable and illegal

yet the world underestimating
you should never cheat the Creator

now reaping with endless lines
toxic food in plastic bags

on their knees with bent straws
sipping gutter water

strangers becoming stranger
giving hand signs in a cryptic rage

broken fingers
swollen tongues

somewhere books still telling the truth
pages burning to keep warm

wilderness closing in
beside the mountains of dead

finally out into the open I run
looking for my lonely cross

not many of us left
to torture

truthsayers into the sun.




"Someday Flowering Lands"

Some of us seen in the distance
shadow stick figures

disappearing in the flowing mist
fog of lowering clouds

passing they hear our whispers
thought arrows prickling inside their heads

later in the evening quiet
rubbing their chins

wondering why they're thinking
pre-dreams of flowering lands

paradise people
singing to the stars

angels dancing
with tambourines and harps

breaths from heaven
everlasting

no fear
no hate

no worries
no cliff falls

down
to an expired world

hopefully our prayers have an effect
on the spoiled and mega rich.



"End of the Road"

She steps lighter than air
upon the stones

telling me on our last trip
before she passes her final test

wings won't be needed
God lifting whenever we want

I wasn't sure at the time
if she was hallucinating

with her fading breaths
tender touch to my hand

until a soft glow of light
embraced her that night

in a clearing of grass
beside the highway between cities

she was queen of the road walkers
everyone had seen her

on the gradual slope of plains
and the paths to mountaintops

her voice sweet
as her spirit

everyone weeping
at the end of her road.

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer and photographer. Recent work appears at The Notre Dame Review. 

Spirit of a Place, Spirit of a Thing (Artist Statement)

In an off handed remark during an interview, U.G. Krishnamurti, called by some an anti-guru, and by himself, ‘Something like a philosopher,’ said that he once thought he could sense the spirit of a place. But then he brushed it off through words and body language. It didn’t fit in with his philosophy and message. But I resonated with his statement anyhow, because I had always felt that I could feel the spirit of a place and also a thing. Old town, lake still and wide. City street, carnival game vendor and prizes. Bee. Spider. Flower. Vine. Ridge. Summit. Stone. Petal. Stream. Sun. Cloud. Bird and dusk, horizon and dawn. Lock, denoting love, affixed to lonesome bridge alone in the rain. Artifacts. Areas. Some saturnine and some sanguine. Hundreds of places and things, their spirit, against reason and logic, somehow speaking out, not with language of course, but calling out nevertheless. Semantics and nomenclature could argue what spirit means. Is it the atmosphere, the daemon, the angel, the area, the vibration, the feeling? Is it physical, metaphysical, true and there, or purely imaginary and projected? Difficult to know conclusively. But there is something I think in all that mise- en-scene, and so on the rural footpaths and metropolitan worlds also, I try and photograph it and also write about it, this spirit of a place.

Title: Where am I headed 
Genre: Pop (Spoken word)

Verse 1

I was lost in myself; I hardly could figure out why
But when I tried asking ‘’why?’’
It became very blurry the answer
Could it be what I thought I knew
Or what is happening around me?
I looked at the completeness of my world
Only to realize how vague it has become
My perception , I thought, would guide me
But the contradiction, compared to what I’m encountering, is something else
Am I just becoming ignorant or in a conundrum?
Then, I’d say, ‘’time would tell’’
However, time, I realized, was my foe
So, I have to really figure out where am I headed?

Verse 2

Come to think of it, I was educated
Educated?! Okay, I was taught in school what’s right from what’s wrong
On second thought, recognizing the anomalies in my life and the world as a whole
I’m observing that everything is so wrong that what’s left isn’t right!
What I was taught was ‘’the good’’ seem to be the bad
And vice-versa
Can this really be?
Hmmm…Trying to think through
But wait, can provide an answer to what I don’t know?
Well, perhaps, the wrong answer!
To the issue at hand, did I learn the right thing?
Can I change the situation around me?
I believed in the world of possibility
But my perception is fighting against what is around me!
Oh yea! Something isn’t right
So, It’s time I looked at the mirror and ask
Where am I headed?

Verse 3

Can anything worth learning ever be taught?
A question I was forced to ask myself
I have to re-evaluate what my thoughts are about everything
A friend really challenged when she asked
‘’what if all you knew about everything and what you are being told and taught about everything were all false, what you goinna do?’’
Till this day, i have no concrete answer
Yet, I’m poised to challenge myself and move in this light
‘’How?’’ I asked, looking to the heavens for answers
After lengthy years of thinking and asking people questions,
I came to the realization:
Unlearn the inconsistent to relearn what ought to be ingrained in mindset of my formative years for a proper learning
That, I  knew, would help me change what I encountered
‘’Afterall, a change in my thought-process, better yet, my perception, would change my circumstances, my world, that is.’’, I thought. ‘’And  make the world at large a better place’’
‘’How do you want to go about it?’’ someone asked me, as I talked to him about my situation
It’s going to be a long path to illumination
Then, I would know where I am headed

Loneliness
By Abigail George


I am cooking loneliness in a pot. I am making a broth with it. I add garlic and ginger, leaf masala and meaty bones to the pot and more boiling water. I throw salt in to taste. 

I think of the neverending invasion of war ingredients in daily life. I think too much. I overthink. Stop. Ants tripping, crawling with life. The world is filled with people who don’t care about me or who love me. There were billions of them at last count. I am a tree and then I grow into a branch, arch my back into a stretch. Small and red is my heart now. Just a curious ribbon tied to my hair. I remember when the man climbed me, climbed into me. The bliss I felt at this feeling, this encouraging emotion filled me with hope. I climb into the boat made of wildflowers and somehow land on the moonlight. I make a cave out of the night air.

I have experienced love for the last time. This is the last wound I will ever experience. I think of the Dutch English poet, Joop Bersee, and our friendship. The call I answered was to write poetry. The sum of being a poet is solid inside of me but as temporary as conceit. The man is still visible to me but he is walking in the direction of a church. He wants to pray me away and put me inside a box, confine me to that box. I want to honor him in some way. Of course he wants me to forget all about him. In the same way he has forgotten about me. All I remember about the relationship is this. That I was helpless in his arms. When we kissed, my hurts turned to stone and his kisses turned into a killing machine of the hardness that surrounded that stone. I pulled him into me and he became a siren and the ink in my pen. I gently stroked his face and he turned into a secret. 

You are despair and beauty. You are my beauty and despair. Gil, who are you because I am a mess without you. I have become a virgin again. I remember your pale hands, the strength in your hands. I brought you steaming mugs of black coffee and tea. I brought you roasted chicken and rice to nourish your soul. I no longer have a man. The man who was my man turned into a waterfall in my bathwater. I think of him and my heart goes doom, doom, doom. I don’t have room to dream anymore about him. Politicians have that kind of time.

Air is singing to the solitary world I frequent. To me, to all of me the peas are dazzling green glitter. Burnt mixed vegetables. Coffee is getting cold on the kitchen table. Lukewarm water in an Energade bottle. Mother makes ice tea. Ice tea with tea bags bought from Woolworths. Pale sister with Slavic cheekbones. Middle sister, Middle East, middle of nowhere. So many middles. What is beautiful, what is the prize for being beautiful, give me a horse that could ride to the stars or to Mars. Dazed naartjies spilling over onto the countertop. 

The beautiful one with red lips. Her high heels in a box. Her red shoes flattered her ankles. Father reads the paper. He cuts out articles. The plate is yellow with turmeric powder. The rice is spicy. I put whole chillies in the pot. My father didn’t notice. The fruit is warm. Sweet. Dishes piled high in the kitchen sink. Memories of Collegiate. I was a bullied Model C schoolgirl. Bullied at home by a domineering mother. Bullied at school by teachers. My sister’s hair is straight. My hair is curly. Wild. I can’t tame its galaxies. The yellow of the egg could’ve been a fetus-chick. I live with no resistance from a man. All my life I have carried these war ingredients with me.

See their beauties, see their prizes, see their dead march. The hereafter calling. Plants harvesting seeds that will not grow. I grow older, colder, infirm, weak at the knees until I am winter. I have become just like those depraved wildflowers. Needy and slim. I am a warehouse and in this warehouse I store blackened images that turn into shrouds and these shrouds have veils. Too many of them. I am grateful for the negatives. Grateful for these copies. I make copies of heartbreak and write poems about them. I take them to the flea market and exchange them for books that I read in my spare time. I am happiest in these moments, for when I am alone, I am with God. In the hours I meditate and pray my thoughts convert themselves to only do good. Good deeds. Good things. I pick up a jar of olives in brine that I found at the back of a kitchen cupboard. 

My galaxies for your galaxies. Are you alright? Are you okay? And the voice came again (louder this time) are you alright? Are you okay and then it went away when I swallowed my pills with water. Until I heard the music of angels. I felt safe then and I remember my mother’s face when she wasn’t tired or stressed. I remembered the beauty of her face. I remembered a time when I didn’t feel tragic, when I felt brave and galaxies were in reach and war ingredients were not in reach or kept in safekeeping or treasured or cherished. The man keeps telling me that soldiers are angels too. And heroes and fallen comrades, stalwarts but I am tired. I am tired of shame and being tragic. So I don’t listen and because I stopped listening, he turns and walks away. I only notice when I turn into a bird and feel hungry and the wind picks up and begins to carry me to a distant land on the continent that I love so much. That I call God and church. And the only sound that comes out of my mouth is chatter and birdsong. I don’t like people who are dishonest.

“Open your legs,” he instructed me. I sat up. My back very straight. Watching him as he fumbled with his pants.

It has been three years since I have seen the man. I don’t know where he is or what he is doing. When he picks up the phone he pretends he is someone else. I am in denial. I am in love with a ghost. I have nowhere to go but meet these lines on this page. The female protagonist is waiting for me on the page. The good citizen is made of light. The good citizens are made of heat. The good citizen is a witness. The good citizen needs space. I need space too, to be creative, to be a thinker. The man is a business insider. I am waiting for my man to appear in the doorway of the restaurant. In the meantime, my spirit tells my soul a story about a Native American chieftain who went to war and never returned home again to his wife and children. I am staring at a jar of olives in brine remembering the brown eyes of the man. My brown eyes meeting his. Debussy’s Clair de Lune is playing in the background. I stare at the boneless loveliness of the wildflowers. The trees are unhappy. They are just as unhappy as the woman in the picture hanging against the wall is. The woman is unhappy because the man has left her and returned to his wife. There is a hunger within me now that cannot be sated. The woman is as I am  at war with silence. Her face is as holy as the river phoenix. Wasps blame the sunlight. The lull of the day hovers. The woman’s brother is a drug addict. He has been to three rehab centres. The woman thought the man would save her but he didn’t. I thought the man would save me. 

The woman and I are in the same boat. When the man told the woman that he loved her, she believed him. The house was hurt. The walls and ceiling were wounded. The floors were carpeted. I am not a good girl. Recovery is possible. The doctors tell me that they think sobriety is possible. There were pages turned. I can’t face this light and heat, this chare=ge of energy, the flow of the velocity of interpersonal relationships. Did he love me, did the man in the picture love the woman? I want to ask the woman in the painting, why is she crying? You see, I know why I am crying. I am crying because I will never be loved again in my life and no one will ever be kind to me the way the man was kind to me. The man told me to take my pills in a caring voice. 

It’s been years since I have seen the man. I don’t know where he is. I lay on a towel in the garden sunbathing. I felt sick but still I lay there, not getting up, tolerating the heat. I remembered a man from my twenties. He walked past me, turning his head and meeting my gaze. I remember the heat in my face. He wore a leather jacket in a photograph in a magazine. He was a producer of films. Handsome and clever. He was thin and the colour of his skin was dark. I was not asked to see my brother’s child when his daughter was born in the hospital. I remember when his son was born he would ask me not to kiss his son. I was allowed to hold the child but not kiss him. I remember how the mother slept for a few hours in the morning and how instead of looking after the baby, he gave the child to me to hold. It is afternoon. I am sitting in the lounge writing. I am writing largely for myself I suppose. To amuse myself. To distract myself from the war and war ingredients.

I am Greta Garbo and Pablo Neruda. I am Fiona Apple, Grace Kelly, Vivienne Leigh and Jean Rhys. I have made a temple out of an alien spaceship. Are you paying attention? I am in need of emotional support. I am depressed. I cry the tears of an orphan. I have no one in my life to call family. On my own again I am flying solo. I make a tuna fish salad. I think of the sea and pollution. I think of the blue sky and climate change. I think of the genius of this fish, and eating if eating the genius of this tuna would turn me into one. I make a dressing with black pepper, sugar and vinegar.. I butter bread, sit down at the kitchen table and eat happily. I don’t have the man in my life anymore but I have food.

When the man kissed me, I wanted him to extinguish me. These  days I practice doing good. When I do good, I feel good. I have hours, days, and silence ahead of me. I am as strong and peppery as a jalapeno and disciplined. I turn books into old friends and call it natural progression. I don’t know what to do about the anger inside of me. Please tell me what to do about the anger inside of me.

CHERRY BLOSSOM SEASON:  HAIKU BLOOMS IN THE UNITED STATES 1959--1961

The New York Times wasn’t ready to declare it a real craze, not yet, and it certainly wasn’t consuming the country the way coonskin caps, hula hoops and telephone booth stuffing did.  Still, there was something in the air as the decade of the 1950s faded, and other observers felt the same wind.
 
In January of 1959, The New Yorker noted a “current passion in the country for things Japanese, from A (for ‘Architecture’) to Z (for ‘Zen’).  H would be reserved for Haiku, described as the primary literary industry of the island nation.  “To the Japanese,” the magazine said, “the composition of these hauntingly vivid little poems would seem to be almost as natural, and necessary, as breathing, and every Japanese who is able to read and write is therefore likely to be a practicing poet.”  
 
That same month, Dolly Reitz, writing in her “Occupation: Housewife” column, told of reciting haiku back and forth with a friend over holiday tea:
 
A childless housewife
How tenderly she touches little dolls for sale.
 
You hear that fat frog in the seat of honor singing bass? 
He's the boss.
 
Swallows flying south
My house too of sticks and stones
Only a stopping place.


Cherry-Blossoms, the third in the series of haiku anthologies issued by Peter Pauper Press, was published the following year.  The poems were arranged in four lines to conform with illustrations on the margins of each page.  To follow through the seasons (New Years was considered its own season):

New Years

In the New Year Dawn
Solemn and 
Deliberate
Tall cranes go marching
--Kikaku

From the mountain pass
See the sunlit
Castle town . . .
Flying new-year kites
--Taigi

Spring

Endless Maytime rain . . .
Sneaking back one
Night, the moon
Perched in the pine-tree
--Ranko

Dull dreary rain-day . . .
Dripping past
My gate a girl
Bearing irises
--Shintoku

Summer

Ah roadside scarecrow
We’ve hardly
Started gabbing . . .
And I have to go
--Izen

Stubborn woodpecker . . .
Still hammering
At twilight
At that single spot
--Issa

Autumn

On this plain of mist
Nothing but flat
Endlessness . . .
And red-rising sun
--Shiro

Within pale silence
Spreading from
Evening moonlight . . .
Sudden cicada
--Hajin

Winter

Bitter winter wind . . .
Won’t it blow
Right off the sky
That day-old crescent?
--Kakei

A harsh-rasping saw
Music of
Cold poverty
In winter midnight
--Buson

1960 also saw the publication of Harold Stewart’s A Net of Fireflies.  Stewart titled his translations and composed them as couplets.  The Baltimore Sun quoted eight for its review of the book.  Among the selections:

RETURN OF THE DISPOSSESSED

The same old village: here where I was born,
Every flower I touch—a hidden thorn.
--Issa 

THE SILENT REBUKE

Angrily I returned; awaiting me
Within my court—the tranquil willow-tree.
--Ryota
 
MORE THAN FORGIVEN

Plum-blossoms give their fragrance still to him
Whose thoughtless hand has broken off their limb.
--Chiyo-ni

AND SO

And so the spring buds burst, and so I gaze,
And so the blossoms fall, and so my days . . ..
--Onitsura

A sixth-grader from Honolulu might have written the best haiku published in 1960:

The house on the hill
Is always full of laughter
Until the friends go

Elizabeth Gordon, the editor of the American interior design magazine House Beautiful, felt the Eastern wind blowing sooner than most arbiters of taste, fashion and literature.  Over the span of five years and seven trips, Gordon spent 16 months in Japan in the late 1950s.  Her travels there laid the foundation for a landmark two-issue report on Japanese culture published by the magazine in August and September of 1960. 

Described as “[one] of the most influential issues ever by a design magazine,” the August issue carried articles on Japanese food, gardens, music, and other topics.  The magazine saw and felt haiku everywhere it went in Japan, and something of the enthusiasm for the 17-syllable literary form rubbed off on its American audience.
 
Haiku and Japanese poetry readings were held at coffee houses, libraries, and universities in California, Florida, Maine, Texas and other states. Speakers at the events included exchange teachers, Japanese wives of college professors, and domestic devotees of Japanese culture.  Flower-arrangement and origami were also presented at the gatherings.

Delayed a day by a snowfall, a writers’ club in Mason City, Iowa, studied haiku at a dessert luncheon.  Composing greeting card verse was announced as the subject for the club’s next gathering.

Scientists introduced six chimpanzees at the Baltimore Zoo to typewriters.  Most ignored the contraptions, but one named Spunky seemed to enjoy typing away with his two index fingers.  “He writes in short one or two-word phrases,” said one of the scientists, “jerky, unconnected, but deeply perceptive.”  Researchers tied together coherent strings of typing and compared Spunky’s results to the “fleeing, momentary, image of beauty” of haiku:

I am horrified
Could we die? Go
Deaf to joy.
Cry on . . . fighting.

Bess Hines Harkins of Oxnard, California, published three of her early haiku in the local newspaper on February 19, 1959, and was interviewed the next day on television. Ethel Herman of Fort Pierce, Florida, became known “the haiku woman” in the local press for her devotion to the form. 
 
As far back as 1958, the California Federation of Chapparal Poets conducted a contest for the writing of haiku.  In 1960, the club added tanka to the category of Japanese poetry.

Later that year, the San Francisco Examiner would even quote two haiku from the crosstown Star:
 
Unexpected guests!
Close off our unmade bed!
There! But!
Dust under chair.
--“F. P. H.”
 
Circular prison
Street lamp has captured three
Busy moths
‘til dawn.
--Julie Harden                                  
 
“Haiku,” the Examiner added, “are literary salted peanuts.  Start nibbling and you find it difficult to stop.” 
 
Another commentator sarcastically labeled haiku as “the greatest thing since the sack dress” and then doubled down by attesting the sack dress had been the greatest thing since haiku.

A California writer tried without great success to place the debate within the fictional context of a haiku tournament between Japanese poets and American balladeers.  In a series of seven matches, the players eventually find common ground between Tokyo Bay and the Potomac in the timeworn and unsatisfying vision of a brotherhood of man based on the bonds of beauty, truth and good. 
 
In an April 1960 interview with the Hartford Courant, Ambassador to the United States Koichiro Asakai called haiku one of Japan’s greatest inventions and then issued a note of caution.  “It is hard to see,” said the envoy, “how haiku can be written in any language but Japanese, since the harmony between the Japanese language and the haiku form is so amazingly high.”
 
Kenneth Rexroth tended to agree with the ambassador.  “American imitators of Japanese haiku . . . almost never come off,” said the designated spokesman of San Francisco’s anarchists and avant-garde artists, on whom Time Magazine bestowed the unwanted title of Godfather of the Beat poets.  “[They] miss the deep foundation of the culture.” 
 
But by the spring of 1961, Americans reached for pen and paper when the cherry blossoms began to bloom. 

Halo Equated


I promised all my sevens
to the pattern

now I’m caught in its prism
blink twice for fusion

spin in the grasp of spent coding

untangling live wires
in the storm

You told me every dog
still has its teeth
from the hunt

now I’m warm in the forest
fur wrapped with worn blankets

coil through the night of rebellion

enticing compressed visions
from crystal


 
What Roars Below


brewing

not quite a boil … yet

churning underneath
a sure explosion
biding its time

constructing a blueprint
to rise without aggression

violet flames
liquid consciousness

a compulsion toward creation
unbridled human expansion

the artistic urge

self-actualization/individuation
finding cohesion with the collective

sacred space of duality
breather of light discovered in shadow

cynicism turned on its head
affirmation

the great yes to it all
flow/flux

gestation turnkey
an opening of eyes



 
Aborted Escapism


I wasn’t in a rush to be born

&

I took my sweet ass time
to garner any wisdom after

but God knows I ran
straight toward the grave
for so damn long

and each time
you refused me
and sent me back
with deeper patience
and buried scars

but if I disappointed you
I will make it up to them

because if there’s one thing
I’ve ever been sold on
it’s promises

Scott Thomas Outlar is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. He now lives and writes in Frederick, Maryland. His work has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He guest-edited the Hope Anthology of Poetry from CultureCult Press as well as the 2019-2023 Western Voices editions of Setu Mag. He is the author of seven books, including Songs of a Dissident (2015), Abstract Visions of Light (2018), Of Sand and Sugar (2019), and Evermore (2021 – written with co-author Mihaela Melnic). Selections of his poetry have been translated and published in 14 languages. He has been a weekly contributor at Dissident Voice for the past eight and a half years. More about Outlar’s work can be found at 17Numa.com.