Everything
Too many
people
pretending and accepting
what the world has become….
When will we open our eyes
and our hearts
and change everything?
Arrival
You speak
and I listen,
believing
with a flow of tears.
This world temporary,
but You
are forever
helping us
into the Arrival.
Morning Dew Drop
Morning dew drop
Stop,
Stay
Give me time
Let me see
You,
Your heart
Where I breath my love
Your eyes
Where I reflect myself
Your soul
Where I fly
Your dream
Where my image floats
Your trust
My pure love.
Time is limited
My love is unlimited
Nigeria My Jerusalem
And did God’s lips pronounce a curse
on Nigeria’s errant people?
Did not his blood our bills disburse,
having considered us feeble?
Did his presence elude us all
when terror and death took their toll?
And was hell to befall us all
when thieves and villains took control?
Give us men of Godly repute!
Bring women of chaste and virtue!
Take possession of every brute!
Let your spirit our land imbue!
I will not cease to intercede
nor shall my passion ever wane
till Nigeria ceases to bleed,
and Christ begins his sovereign reign.
Author’s Biography:
The poem ‘Nigeria my Jerusalem,’ was inspired by William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ poem and hymn, which is very widely sung in the church of England, or the Anglican church. From the Nigerian perspective, the poem bemoans the deplorable state of my country, with the hope of a Divine intervention in the foreseeable future.
Jerusalem is one of my favorite hymns as an Anglican adherent and evangelical.
Joseph C. Ogbonna is a widely published poet. Some of his works have been published in Synchronized Chaos online magazine, Spillwords Press, Micromance, North of Oxford, Written Tales magazine, Borderless online journal, Waxpoetry Magazine, Ihram and in over two dozen anthologies and magazines.
He is a graduate of Nigeria’s famous Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He has four post graduate qualifications from other Nigerian universities. He lives in Enugu, Nigeria.
he hit hard
even when
we were just playing
*
supporting his extraterrestrial theories
with quotes from Jackie Gleason’s ex-wife
*
the pace of the stone mason, the heat
*
Romeo’s Barber Shop:
one kind of haircut
and conversation
*
giving her political opinion at pump number 8
*
out among the smokers
the fragrance of the rainy night
*
‘First self, self again; then you, Margaret’
*
I put the cans out on Monday
and take them in on Tuesday
*
cockroach hind-legging it
across the white tablecloth
*
‘World builders’
always leaving out
the best parts
*
they’d never heard the phrase: ‘indoor voices…’
*
the origin of a word
or the memory of something I know
never could’ve happened to me
*
well, it was a relief to learn that time wasn’t a consideration
in his wanting to change places with a scarlet leafhopper
*
stifling, then someone decides
to drill a hole
*
webs in the breeze
flawless spectrums
*
if I could just get a little more nothingness into my last breath
a rumor in the wind
and this what happens
when utopia was always
a myth
love simply a rumor
in the wind
loneliness as common
as the common cold
longing until it goes
out of style
hard to find comfort
in a land of broken
chairs and high
anxiety
tap the arm twice
and find a good
vein
hopefully
this one is laced
with something
milder
lost soldiers in
a frozen retreat
time not weather
the end came
years ago
no one bothered
to notice
——————————————————————
unremarkable
a doctor after
one of my latest
scans said the
results were
unremarkable
i have a few
ex-girlfriends
that would
agree
———————————————————-
slow and deliberate
hard to watch the seconds
tick away when the clock
is always flashing twelve
do you pick from the
pile of dirty clothes
or the pile of not as
dirty
no one warned you life
gets incredibly harder
as you get older and
the money stops
coming in
it makes it harder to
not figure death is
not the easiest but
the most logical
solution to all of
this
no loved ones to
talk you out of
your common
sense
only a fool waits for
a romantic ending
life comes at you fast
why is death so fucking
slow and deliberate
—————————————————————
broken and lonely
temptation is a beautiful
woman without any baggage
coming along for the ride
reality is every scar that
some dumb fuck put on
her in the past you will
be accused of at some
point
i can’t imagine why
anyone wants to
be with me
not like i am some
angelic soul that has
no scars
broken and lonely
what a way to go
through a world
that couldn’t give
two shits that you
exist
it is an endless agony
hoping for a kiss
sometime before
you die
sure, get romantic
on the verge of
another world war
——————————————————-
at the end of the horizon
whispers lost in the wind
all dreams go to die at the
end of the horizon
fifty cents off two lemons
too cold for lemonade
she told me she wanted
to see other people
i asked if i could do the
same already knowing
that answer would be
what it always has been
crash landing in the
middle of hell
do they even write
home letters to loved
ones anymore
somewhere coltrane
is playing and one
lucky soul will hear
it for the first time
if they only knew
it will be all downhill
from here on
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is trapped in suburbia, plotting his escape. He’s been widely published over the last 30 years, most recently at The Rye Whiskey Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Yellow Mama, Night Owl Narrative and Mad Swirl. You can find his latest book, to live your dreams, on Amazon by going here: https://a.co/d/0aaEe8ph
This Is Not Art
: an assemblage
“The Americans call photography an art. They have
galleries, institutions, exhibitions. But what I’m doing
is not art.” Don McCullin
Cholera victim. Eyes rolled back into her head.
Cradled in arms of her husband as an offering to
Death.
Shabby woman of no particular age. Standing in
her, three-rungs-below-hell, dwelling. “Rats the
size of cats,” her son says. Whoring is a way of
life here. You have to eat. So do the boy with no-future
eyes.
An American soldier in Hue city. During the offensive.
Throwing a grenade amid the ruins toward an unseen
enemy. Seconds before his arm is blown off
by a sniper’s bullet. Before another soldier takes his
place. Throws a grenade. Is shot. Before another
man is ordered forward.
Three heavily armed, cocky young American soldiers
in South East Asia. Their captive forced to his
knees, arms trussed behind his back, rope around his
neck like a leash. Eyes blindfolded with a dirty once-
white rag. The village behind them about to burn.
Three blind black women fast walking in bare
feet past heavily armed guerrilla force on the last
days of the Smith regime in Rhodesia.
American army chaplain lifting an confused, dazed old
woman from bombing raid rubble.
A face only portrait of a starving boy in Biafra.
Oh, the Humanity!
Insanity: a poem with an epigraph and a closure by
The Poet Spiel
“It’s a good thing to die at least once in a lifetime.”
Life had become a place where
you could fall asleep in a world
that adhered to moral principles
and natural laws, and wake up in
another where all those rules had
been suspended. Even the environment
unrecognizable. All the buildings,
public spaces transformed into
creations by narcotects, city planners
on cocaine using blueprints crafted
from splatter art like those pock-
marked Bill Burroughs’ paint smeared
canvases randomly created by shotgun
spray patterns and arterial blood.
All the faceless men and women
stick figures fashioned from coat
hangers, high tension wire art made
bright with electrical charges that
illuminate the night. Nothing moves
but the poison gas clouds, the blood red
sickle of a waxing moon.
“What if, in fact, the world does not end
but just goes on and on and on….and….”
After Reading What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations,
by George Looney
Is this how the dead
assemble, by fire light,
on river’s edge near
where the spires give
themselves to the flame?
The night is charred by
all this burning, are smoking
screens that descend from
blackened clouds as secrets
contained by ash. No reason,
to direct water where
total conflagration reigns,
the passion of all this fire
must be spent, consumption
the end of this, of all things
mortal, of all things made
by man, even that, even those
who purport to rule the world.
One Life Is Not Enough
after artwork by Edward Boccia
for the allegorical voyages of all
these independent minded souls.
For the men rescued from a filthy house
of cards, pulled from the wreckage
of a breaking hall of mirrors
unfolded now as an accordion,
a shaped enclosure reduced to shards
of crystal lodged in the near perfect
eyes of a princess dreaming of her
mythic lover. For that half-man, half-beast-
thing, sent in exile to sea with a fleet
of confusion boats, consigned to
onerous duties, trials, and elemental
war. For, a lifetime of tasking before
the tempestuous days of false ecstasies.
For dancing on the heads of ship to shore
lynch pins, pulled from the tortured
flesh of soon-to-be-sacrificial virgins,
defilement inevitable as the monstrous
heart excavated from a sacred ruinous
place beyond understanding. For an
inexactness tiles fitting into a mosaic-
a map of love more lasting than all t
he misleading dreams that layered,
obstructive dead adhere to, blocking
the way inside; here, at land’s end,
the final choices are offered and
made. For the man with the lasting vision
is the one who come out whole on
the other side of night.
This war, that war, the next war, war everlasting:
with lines from Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon
“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly with Death;
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in one hand.”
Wilfred Owen, “The Next War”
Oh, brave new world of gravity rainbows,
long range death by guided missile, satellites,
drones;
all those Space X unscheduled midair disassembling,
air space disruptive, debris spewing on residential
homes and gardens;
all those air show explosions casting shrapnel
to the wind like Turner fireworks falling,
like Owen’s fleeting flares;
Oh, those happy days in the arms of death
like close combat in the green, all those mad minute
tracer rounds before the final fight,
before the shock and awe of carpet bombing
civilian targets, concussive assaults, in great
fireballs forged and deadly as Death From Above;
all those polluted by stealth bombers and super sonic
jet fighters, skirting toxic clouds and the acidic rain
that falls after;
Oh, the odd beauty of it all, the way the world
is ending with a blustery tweet, a nuclear winter
without Strangelove’s unearthly chorus singing,
“Until we meet again, I don’t know when…”
“War’s a joke for me and you
While we know such dreams are true”
Siegfreid Sassoon
Post Card to Thompson May 6, 20–: The Poet at Kurt Cobain
Landing wearing a rubber dog mask
and hand painted answers to
Kurt C questions, Private Keep Out
He wrote Anthems for the Doomed
Youth: not Wilfred Owen but Cobain.
He’d be a one name rock star if he
were living now. So famous he didn’t need
a first and a last one, just a brand name. For
personal appearances all he world have to do
is show, act cool, preen. Just being was enough.
Mega.
Man.
Went directly from his mansion to
rock and roll heaven with a shot gun in his mouth.
Fuck Go, fuck the two hundred dollars,
fuck Courtney Love.
He was already in Nirvana. What more
could he possibly need?
“I say shot gun, shoot em ‘fore he run now….”
Junior Walker