song & self-compassion
a weight on my chest and a still in my limbs,
a spill from my heart of a will within,
I wait on my best and just instill my grin
to wash up the mess of self-listening
Category Archives: CHAOS
Poetry from Christopher Bernard
Two Poems
by Christopher Bernard
Urbi et orbi
Myself, I prefer a city with no one in it,
or, if not exactly no one, only a few.
It’s like being in an enormous sculpture garden,
immense minimalist slabs
of glass and concrete throwing shadows
dark as poetry across streets grown modest
with stillness and opening trustingly as a child’s hand.
The few people there look less grotesque
when teased out of the crowd –
the way a solitary farmer turning his field,
a pair of friends or lovers, a daydreaming
hiker, seen in a summer countryscape
between bays of woods and folds
of pastureland and field, under
an ingenuously immense sky
make the dignity of humankind,
its vulnerable nobility,
palpable, and not the poorly spun joke
it seems so often
in a city hysterical, delirious, and crammed.
No: our monuments, our things,
the traces of care in the woodwork,
the shadow of a mind molded from a sun –
tools and toys and trinkets, engines and edifices,
the shape of a hand on a prehistoric cave wall,
a flute played shyly on a Sunday morning –
make me less ashamed of being human.
I wander the empty city like a hunter
in a wilderness, except that I have found
the object of my hunt, and hold it close
inside my coat, where I can feel its heart
beating, and its warmth, and its wings.
*****
The Coyotes of North Beach
Sunset, spring: a strange wailing
rises from the gorge under our house
cautiously balanced on a cliff edge
as on a knife
above a valley where coyotes are gathering.
Strange indeed for a city
(our neighborhood, part declivity, part escarpment,
is strange enough for any city).
But maybe not strange for a city
largely emptied from a malady
emptying much of the world –
and giving meaning to the "pan"
in panache, panama, pancake, panjandrum,
Panglossion, Pandragon, pandemic –
and so giving way to wilderness
seeping back into the streets,
crows appraising the roof tops,
mountain sheep strolling about in Wales,
curious spiders measuring bus shelters
with their delicate silks,
coyotes gathering at cross streets
and dancing in the glimmering streetlights
as they flicker on in the dusk
and making their coyote-like noisings,
as sweet as they are uncanny,
in the city's deepening twilight.
Why are they wailing so?
Is it from fear, or loneliness, or need for love?
How did the coyotes know
that they are speaking for us?
*
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
Poetry from Ike Boat, Ghanaian spoken word artist
Poetry from Mahbub
Rohingya Repatriation
It was left no stone unturned
Doctors, nurses, relatives all engaged
How to restore to life
Having them all behind the spirit flies away silently
This carefulness we serve for the humanity
Humanity cries for humanity
But what can we see on the other part of it?
Thousands and millions of people left to experience death and suffering
Rohingyas living in Rakhine with a severe torture on their body flew away
Took shelter in Chattogram of Bangladesh
A pathetic Asian history
Passing their days in the sun suffering from starvation and rain
Under the open sky in unsafe and shaky habitations
Every day the earth blooms pale and grim
Like the old brown leaves in the tree, we see
Every day they would like to go back to their home
But ignored as the citizens or any ethnic group
People flee from the forests in fear of the tigers and the lions
Along the edge of a sea to not to get lost on the vast waters
What a sigh to be deprived of the right!
Not to be able to say
It’s my own land, my own country
The rulers serve people, delivering much of love
Ironically say again and again the same
Deceive them; kill them, a scene of massacre
From this clutch who can save themselves anyway
Try to take the breath fleeing to the other place
Sorry to say its second time failure the attempt-repatriation
Of the Rakhine people living in Bangladesh.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
29/08/2019
Lots of Rain but No Clouds
The sky turns into black from the blue
All seem to be dark and glue
What a restless time!
Though so many fans are running
In this unbearable hot
What feels the mind and body?
The scent of rain through the nostrils
Change the thought to envisage
We see the sky but from black to white
In the meantime the sun shines
We hoped a lot but there is no drop of rain
The world always gains some moments
Our hearts rejoice, beside the heavy rain drops
There floods the rivers causing deaths and sufferings
Where I stand here I see the sky with much of hope
But this overhead is always covered with drought and fog.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
06/09/2019
O My Love
When you love me in true sense
The waves of the river flow in tune
I see and see the full moon in the sky
A sign of love in the rainbow
What a rising after the rain, a new glow
Grasp me all my body and soul
A dream in reality
A promise to reach my destiny
O my love; please hold me in tongue
A wriggle never to be lost
O my heart, my love.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
06/09/2019
Backlash Fear
He turns his face like a ghost
The victim standing before him forgets all
She mumbles and recollects the lashing and dashing to her
A rosy beauty
The cop with his gang stings
The rose full of fragrance and attraction
Torn into —– on the soil
Soft and blooming
The burning eyes encircling her
The mischievous roles a iron rod
The helpless victim reclines silent
The broken heart fumbles on the board
Mr. Judgment is hung on the wall.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
09/09/2019
The Love Shrine
There is no shrine except you
I lie and fondle in the jungle
This mound is only for you and me
Shakes my hands and heart
In this shrine there will be no goddess or god
At the ultimate point of joy
You are my soul mate, my all
Our blood is running too fast
Leaning over I see you on my hands
A full bloomed rose, a full moon starry sky
We wander and enjoy
In this heavenly lagoon
What is more than this idyllic beauty?
Where you and I
In this coral island the blue water sparks into your eyes
The water color eyes, fix into
I find no other heaven in this world
Wherever I see, I see this coral island
You are my atolls
Only you and I this entity century after century
Round over body and soul
After the burial of hundreds or thousands of years
The archeologists may find out
Engraving on the gate ‘The Love Shrine’.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
29/08/2019
Artwork from Ken Rutkowski
I have been living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for the past six years. We, everyone here, calls it Saigon. I have traveled extensively around Asia, but I am most familiar and indebted to Vietnam. It is a misunderstood, small, but lively country.
The city is very colorful and bustling, flowers and plants everywhere, outdoor markets, packed alleys and daily services often forgotten about or disregarded in Western cultures. It is a collective mind in this country, life is good, not always easy, but they try to live well, by standards that have seemed to fit my own sensibility.
I call these pieces “picture poems”, a Kenneth Patchen reference/ vernacular, but travel memoirs/ photo essays/ instances in themselves that reflect how I see the world in Vietnam, immersed, and always through learning and contribution.
I am most comfortable with words, but images are usually how the words take form, through the physicality of thought.
Some of the pieces were created in the 3 months our lives have been on hold…three months for us…we have been set free, “man is condemned to be free”, I have seen great acts of determination and hospitality, trade and love, but also dire circumstances that have made me break down. Still, throughout this experience, “we” have remained calm and accepted this as survival first.
Creative nonfiction from Norman J. Olson
art, art history and painting the nude – talking about art
By: Norman J. Olson
people often ask me the names of artists that I like or, when they look at my art, people tell me the names of contemporary artists who they think I will like… when I later look up those artists, I seldom find them interesting… in fact, as I have said many times, except for a few of the new surrealist/realist painters such as Dino Valles and the late HR Giger, contemporary artists are of little interest to me…
what do I like?? well, the answer to that is my topic here… first off, I am a student of art history… I love European art almost from the beginning until the big aesthetic shift in the early 20th Century… I also love and have been much influenced by the matriarchal artistic tradition of the Ndebele women of South Africa…
I learned to use black and pattern in my work from the women of the Ndebele and I hope to someday make a pilgrimage to their village near Pretoria, to see some of their amazing art in the original… from the prehistoric figures of Europe, I learned about abstracting the figure and moving beyond the classical in appreciation of human bodies… from the great masters of European art, I learned to love the illusion of three dimensional space made with paint, ink, etc. on a surface of painted canvas or paper… from the academic and pre-Raphaelite painters, I learned to work carefully and to love drawings of people, especially naked people… from James Ensor, I learned to trust my intuition and from Picasso, I learned that it was okay to fragment the figure in my drawings and paintings… I have learned from many many others as well…
many of my paintings include depictions of the nude… I am not really sure why I like to make images of naked people… perhaps that is something that a psychoanalyst could uncover… but ultimately, I guess that the reason of it is not important… be that as it may, pictures of naked people with landscape elements, which is what many of my art works are, are common enough in the history of European art that, well, that is my tradition and where my roots and my love, art-wise, lies…
through most of European art history, these depictions of the nude seem to me to have been made for no other reason than that the artists, like me, enjoyed looking at and making images of naked people… I believe that an artist like Michelangelo made his art because he loved depicting, studying, looking at, drawing and sculpting images of naked men… the church was the big patron in those days (early 16th century) and Michelangelo needed to be a professional and earn money from his obsession and since the time was right with the rebirth of humanism in the 16th century, Michelangelo found a way to make the naked men fit into bible stories and so earned enough money to support himself and his parasitic family while still doing what he obsessively needed to do which was make pictures of naked men… and the same is true of most of these artists… I think that religion or portraiture or public commissions from fat cats are mostly, through the history of European art, an excuse for the artist to do something different, personal and only tangentially related to the purported purpose of the art… even though the artist may have been unaware altogether of that fact…
I am not suggesting that this art is insincere, or fake but rather that it is more interesting to look at as a piece of art that exists without limiting the response to the art to that of a historian… for example, I especially love Victorian and particularly Pre-Raphaelite art… I think that I understand the motivations of those artists, in the sense that making drawings and paintings of figures with landscape elements also moves me… and the nude figure was very important in the work of many of them, which I can certainly relate to… on a technical level, I love the way these artists from the 1800s drew the figure as well as the landscape elements… a few years ago, I traveled to Brooklyn New York to see a show of Victorian Nudes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art… while many of these paintings are flawed and look kind of stupid to the modern eye, the use of oil paint or drawing media to represent is just so amazingly facile… and these artists all had long experience drawing nude figures from models and were very very good at it… I loved looking at those paintings… when I tell people that my work devolved directly from that Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite tradition, they say “oh, it looks more like Picasso to me…” well, there is some Picasso in my work as Picasso was jammed down my throat all through art school and a bit of that stuck… but Picasso was classically trained by his father, a classical 19th century painter, so came straight out of that 19th century tradition that I love and that may be why our work has points of tangency… but my art works are drawings and paintings of faces, nude or clothed figures and landscape elements… which also describes the work of GF Watts or any number of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painters… but where Watts had to convince himself and everybody else that his drawings of naked people served some higher moral purpose, I say that I feel like making pictures of nudes and landscape elements so I go ahead and do it… in fact, I feel like many of Watts’s paintings would have been significantly stronger if he had ditched the sermon and just went ahead and painted the skinny naked girl on the rocks… or whatever… and not cared if the critics of the time thought he was a hopeless pervert for painting naked people without trying to make some moralistic statement…
I don’t have to care what critics say because, I am a noncommercial artist in that I do not do art for money and the way the contemporary art world is set up, only artists who are on the commercial stage are subject to criticism… plus, my little drawings and paintings of naked people and landscape elements are of no interest to the commercial MOMA art work in the first place… so, being free of all that, I am able to go to the well of my intuition and let the art work happen however it seems to want to happen… which is generally with more or less distorted representations of faces, figures and landscape elements…
Michelangelo was a deeply religious person but I think that his religion was more personal than Catholic… from looking at his art, I reconstruct the god of Michelangelo as a humanistic, pagan deity relating to Christ in the ecce homo sense and intrinsic to the act of being alive… his worship was modeling the images that he loved… and god was in the flesh… I recently saw an article that pointed out that the representation of god the father in the central panel of the Sistine Chapel, where he is an old guy with a grey beard reaching a finger out to the reclining Adam, is in a swirl of drapery that is exactly a representation of the human brain… and as soon as it was pointed out and I looked at the image, I saw that too… this hiding of shapes and symbols in art was common enough in Renaissance art, (for example, see the howling figure in the background hills of Hugo Van Der Goes Portinari Altarpiece)… and Michelangelo certainly had dissected enough cadavers to know exactly what the human brain looked like… so, I am positive that he used this painting to explain to those who could see that his religion came like Adam’s spark of life from the deep and mysterious depths of the human brain… well, I love that… what a wonderful religion… the religion of the brain… the true, deep and only humanism…
so, while I have lost the Lutheran religion I was raised with, I am endlessly fascinated by the human brain and body and by the planet upon which I, with my brain and body live… is my art some kind of pagan religious observation?? no, of course not… I don’t really even understand what it is at all… maybe someday, I will do something besides figures and landscape elements… who knows?? but, for now, it seems like enough to trust my intuition… wrap my loving arms around the shoulders of the giants from South Africa, Venice and foggy London town who have given me so much and paint and draw whatever comes into my head… it is an amazing and wonderful life…
Poetry from Ian Copestick
So Young
A drunken night, remembering the times
both good and bad. When we were young,
and excitement came so easily.
The nights
we spent sleeping together in fields, with
only our passion to keep us warm. I’d
give anything to have those times
again. But, no, like youth they have
gone. The times when you felt sure that
you were about to explode, just through
the power of your emotions. The times
when despite inarticulacy, you somehow
blurted out everything you needed to say.
The times when you were young.
Those times when you were o so young.
Diminishing Returns
The hands of
my body clock
creak as they
turn. I seem
to be getting
older before
my time. The
day before
yesterday I
did some
gardening for
my father, he is
unfortunately
receiving chemo
therapy, and this
makes it far too
difficult for him
to keep his
usually beautiful
garden up to the
standard it normally
holds. So I strapped
on a strimmer to
do his front lawn,
then hedge clippers
to thin out his
conifers.
I woke yesterday
in utter agony,
my arms felt
as if I’d been
attacked with a
baseball bat.
It’s hard for me
to believe that
I’m still the same
guy who held down
all of those factory
and warehouse
jobs, working up
to 12 hours each
night, carrying and
throwing all of
those heavy boxes around.
I suppose this must
be how it happens.
You don’t realise
just how much you
are diminished
until you are totally
finished
Of course, by then
it’s already
far
too late.
Traps
Life can be so tough
we all fall into different
traps, but the pain is
always going to
be the same.
Be careful as you
scamper along the
pathways of life.
There are dangerous
traps lying in wait.
Some simple holes
dug in the dirt, with
sticks, grass and weeds
feebly covering them.
Others vicious steel
beasts with razor sharp
teeth. Some traps are
nastier than others,
but we all eventually
get caught.
The ones who thought
they had escaped are
the ones that get hurt
the most
Nobody ever escapes
all of the traps.
That’s the only victory
that death can achieve.
Ian Lewis Copestick is a 47 year old writer from Stoke On Trent, England.He started writing poetry in the early 2000’s, but due to a lack of confidence, and the lack of a clue of where to send them, he first sent his work out for publication in 2018.Since then he has had over 250 poems published in various ezines.His first collection of poetry, ” Detritus Of The Drunken Night”, was published by Cajun Mutt Press in 2019.He has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.