Waiting For The Rapture

While I was sitting on the crowded subway train

Reading the corporate spoon-fed false propaganda news

While commuting from my suburban townhouse

Watching the lies masquerading as so-called truth news.

I became consumed 

With dread, fear, and grief,

The ever-growing fear that the terrorists 

Have won the war against terrorism.

We’ve given our freedom away 

Dissent is un-American, anti-Christian,

 and unpatriotic.

“Shut your face, you whiny leftist girlie man 

Communist, fascist, Marxist hoodlum punk

Radical left-wing vermin, garbage person,

Un-American terrorist supporting, Tersymps, 

Trans gendered, LGBTQ supporting, 

 wimpy assed piece of crap”

You are poisoning the pure blood 

of our great land

Show us your papers, prepare to be deported,”

Growls the voice of the One True American party

The party that controls our life, rules our very existence

And I want to escape these dark nightmarish times

All around me, but there is nowhere to run

Nowhere to hide anymore, no one cares 

What I think anyway.

The terrorists lurk behind every door

Who are the terrorists?

They are not me

I am a god-fearing white Christian man

The terrorist does not go to my church

He does not even believe in my God..

He is a heretic, a Muslim fanatic

A non-believer in Jesus, not like me

They must be killed, exterminated 

All according to God’s plan

This has been revealed 

to our Prophet in chief

King Donald Trump 

, the invincible

Must learn how to believe again

I must reprogram myself

God is watching us, or is it big Brother

As the world descends into chaos

And the Orange alerts 

grows brightly day by day

I lay down to pray for the bombs to fall

For the rapture to take me away

Waiting for the end of existence

Cleanse the world of its sins

Bring on the rapture, sweat nuclear flames 

With these dismal thoughts

I pick up my newspaper

 and look for something

I will never find there.

Truth is nothing but lies

Lies promoted by the spinmeisters

The true masters of the Universe.

Integrity is nothing but a lie

Nothing but a game.

Slime oozes out 

of every corner of the media

And so I remain consumed

 by dread, fear, and hatred.

Waiting in vain for the rapture

The dropping of the big one

Waiting for the

 end of this period of chaos.

It is all going according to plan

The end of the era 

according to the ancient Mayan

Revelations and the Koran.

Bring on the rapture

Let me meet my god

If he exists.

If not the hell ahead

Is surely better than this hell

We live in.

Love Anchor

The voice of heart is the voice of love

The language of heart is the language of love.

The beat of heart is the beat of love

Love lives in hearts and hearts live in love

The language of love is one.

The feelings of hearts are same

The language of hearts is same.

Love has no special language 

It has no special religion

It has no border 

It is an unconditional belief 

It is true and eternal

It has no specific existence 

But it exists in everywhere 

Every true heart is the religious worship of love

Every religious worship is the source of love

A heart without love is a castle 

A castle is dark and ugly

Love doesn’t stay in darkness and ugliness 

It has no colour 

But it is colourful 

It is light

It is a good feeling

Or a sad feeling of heart.

It is a voice of heart

It is a language of heart

It is an obedience on God

Actually, it is the way to go to God

To love someone is to love God.

In an Affair, the Brush Barely Touches the Canvas

At dawn,

before breakfast,

before the indulgence, the words, and the aftermath

I needed the truth.

That slippery serpent that chokes and discards.

You smiled thinly,

“Perceive what you will,” you said, “I need to shower.”

He was wealthy, and I was a pair of dark glasses you wore occasionally.

He purchased, and I shopped.

A light burns, and a light’s shadow blends.

Color, texture, and shape describe a work of art.

In a relationship,

the foreground is devoured, and the background is lyrical.

In an affair,

the brush barely touches the canvas, and other narratives become possibilities.

Naked and obedient,

you are borrowed like fine art exhibited from gallery to gallery.

Gran Sasso, Italy, became a fist to the chest

as the clouds turned dark,

the heavy rains started, while your scent lingered

on the sheets and in my thoughts.

Fine glass

is never used to secure.

It is to be admired, handled, and then put away.

If dropped, by chance or purpose,

a momentary visual experience

is created

before the chards are swept into a heap

and then discarded.

You were cold and self-absorbed

when you hurried out the door.

I leaned back on the bedroom chair

tapped the tips of my fingers together

and eventually closed my eyes.

Excuses were a credit I believed I deserved.

Yet I understood

how optimism

usually morphs into a sad smile.

You are an illusionist

and your carefully crafted illusion

makes the truth

an uncertainty that chimes

silently and deadly.

Your note

had no inhibitions.

It stood there propped against an empty wine glass.

Your handwriting was graceful, stylish, and to the point.

“Forever was never on my mind.”

Philip received his Master of Arts in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published five poetry books, three novels and two plays. He has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.

October Hurricane 

watching hurricane news
how I long to hear your updates 
from the valley of death

patiently waiting 
I check my inbox
a black void
 
I am reminded
you are without assistance
without food, without water
let alone internet services

in utter horror
your authorities leave you to die
blocking civilian intervention
threaten arrests 
to those trying to help

unnamed helicopters
hovering aid sites
causing fear and disruption
destroying supplies

watching news from the distance
I am wondering
why 

deep gratitude 
to fellow humans
groups of great brave people
continue to reach out
hearing your cries
they continue bringing supplies 

another day's end 
the sun will keep on rising 
silent prayers and thoughts of you
from the dark abyss
sparks of hope

The Fog                                                                                             

The fog came furtively in the night and slumped heavily upon the fields. At dawn I wondered, though this mantle is beautiful in its transformation of landscape, will it truly depart, relenting with the sun or will it remain this time, blinding us permanently to our vistas – so that we see only our own hands and nothing else before us? Its impenetrability deafens us, a pall muting the sounds of my small world, stifling dear familiar voices. I am inclined to whisper as there is uncertainty in what I might be missing. I surmise it is for this eventuality that pianists memorize an entire concerto, why actors rehearse lengthy monologues, why we weep over an aria.

            I was not acquainted with Aunt Aurelia’s voice as she died, a young woman, of appendicitis, twenty years before me. All that is left of her is a receipt for a dress for $2.35 bought in Akron, Ohio, her grave in Saint Luke’s Cemetery, and a few photographs. From her image I’d like to believe I may have enjoyed a memory of her voice. There’s now no one left to remember her conversations around the kitchen table with her mother and sisters.

            (True, gratefully, I’ve nearly gotten my mother’s shrill voice out of my head – a finality to her mania. But this preference is the exception.) I have a cassette recording of my therapist’s voice, my surrogate big sister, reading The Velveteen Rabbit. When I was a lost young man, it was a simple and effective (though somewhat embarrassing) tool in soothing long empty evenings in empty rooms – saving me from my own desolation. She died of cancer this year. This remnant, this flimsy ribbon cannot be all that’s left of her voice.

            It is my terror that a fog will surreptitiously descend upon my memory – that I’ve nearly forgotten my father’s voice – that I may somehow misplace my beloved’s. If I cannot recall the subtle wit and intimacy in her tone, how may I hope to navigate my days? I comprehend the inevitability of my annihilation. I embrace the certainty. However, I am plagued by the horror that my wife and children will forget my timbre, my tenor, my laughter – that my voice will fade over time, unintentionally becoming too wearisome for anyone to recollect. There is no other aspect of my mortality that frightens me.

David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.

Chuck Taylor, Fever.  Slough Press: Austin, Texas, 2024.  195 pages. $24.95. ISBN#9798866760268.

Reviewed by Janet McCann

A poetry book that you can’t put down is hard to find, but Fever qualifies. This collection shows how it felt to grow up as a boy in the mid-20^th century, and then to live in the drastically revised world of the 21^st century and encounter all the new definitions and expectations. 

The title poem pulls the reader in with its couplet form that provides long expository loops and close-up scenes. The book is like a river, running on and on and over rocks and around obstacles. The inner and outer landscapes are fresh and appealing.  The reader is carried along, and now and then there is a bright stone, or perhaps a glimpse of something frightening under the flow, and always there are startling insights.

Chuck Taylor is a veteran poet, prose writer, and photographer who taught Creative Writing at Texas A&M University for many years and has published dozens of books. This is an especially attractive volume, with Munch’s nude couple embracing on the cover and brush drawings throughout by the poet himself.

More than half the book is the first section called “Fever”, which describes the growing up of Vance, who has a somewhat rocky upbringing in the mid-20th century with a neglectful but demanding mother and a quixotic father. From there, Vance enters the adult world and has adventures which will form him and push him somewhat off the grid forever.  Sexual discovery and identity evoke smiles and winces. Young Vance reads Augustine of Hippo, who found sex “the original sin”:

         …sex is the fall

         from grace, from the garden where once the lion

         and the lamb lay down together, into the

         toil of soil, the thorn of roses and

         the blood and pain of baby birthing; sex

         passed from Eve and Adam, worm slithering

dumb into our operating systems

         at around twelve or so, starts maddening

         dreams, hijacks souls and bodies, and makes us

do what God in nature wants—populate

         the Earth to choking; forget ideal dreams…

           …Yearn instead for naked

         skin, for bare ass; the virus has grabbed our souls…(20)

“Fever” is written in a kind of flexible blank verse, ideas strung together, thoughts leaping over the rhythms.

Other sections include “Taking Off,” “Takeoffs,” and “Lizard King.” “Taking off” narrates stories of the young man completely escaped from this constrictive home, and what he learns through his first individual experiences. The last section is “Lizard King,” which is dedicated to John Morrison, and it is an unusual poem that has only one word per line. The poet pleads with us to slow down in the reading, but this is hard to do.

“Taking Off” gives glimpses of many kinds of prisons, including age. The “Lady of the Pink Slippers” wants Jack, visiting his resident mother, to open the glass door of her care home and release her.  But he can’t—the door is so constructed as to prevent its opening. He muses on prisons in his own life, then ponders the

lady of pink slippers who we

         muse, we dream, must surely

         be given, most definitely, the

         right lucky chance, given

         a great maverick moment—

         though tired, though busted,

         though beatific, though beat—

         to wing with us on through

         doors across fields into the

         long various grasses of freedom.   (99)

These poems attempt to define the relationship between men and women, physically, socially, and emotionally. The main characters growing up this during the period of rapid change in values in the understanding of sexual and gender roles, gives a unique perspective on these changes . I often wondered how the young men I knew fifty years ago managed to accommodate the difference in expectations.  Reading the poems, I can feel what a young man felt, and know what he learned as he aged.

The concluding section, “Lizard King,” the poem of one word per line, is not amenable to quotation. But the third section, “Takeoffs,” is most entertaining. “Takeoffs” gives meditations, ideas, and images based on other literature, sometimes in the form of imitation. They may be serious or laugh-out-loud funny. He kindly gives us the William Ernest Henry  “Invictus” so that we can fully understand Taylor’s version “Inlustus,” which follows it. “Inlustus” concludes:

Beyond this place of peace and grace

looms a filling Mexican dinner plate,

and the candlelit pleasure of your face

in the afterglow of our randy state.

It matters not how cold the side dish soup,

how greasy hot the plop of refried beans,

you are the dizzy center of my loop,

I am the gleeful nibbler of your greens.  (141)

Fever demonstrates the need for freedom and the various traps and prisons we find instead: sexuality, other confining elements of the male role, societal demands often based on sexual expectations.  And it shows us a side of male experience not so often explored.  This is a collection to glide though and then return to.