Built well also. the two thirds rule is that the I-beams that support a balcony like that need to be,- two thirds into the cement wall and one third out. Seemed so. Lasted forever. Still lasts though I don’t go there. I sat there near the end of growing up and I think for some reason it was spring but different than the other springs…
It was the first house that saw the ravine, and I had then four rooms altogether. I had made a tuna fish sandwich and was that week listening to Led Zeppelin. But I turned off the music and brought the food outside and sat down. I could have easily brought a chair, but I think I sat on the wooden floor of the balcony above the paving stones and gates and old plum tree that bloomed always in September.
A guy used to walk by there and steal one or two plums and think nobody saw him. He’d pull a plum slowly but strongly so the branch went out the space in the iron fence and then suddenly, pluck-boon-boom,- a plum in his hand and the branches would fly back into place like they were part of the whole secret and would not then let on that anything had happened. A quick furtive glance around he took but he forgot to look up. I am like an eagle or hawk and see much, most of it true. But I didn’t say anything. Let him have a plum. Plus, I knew who he was. He wasn’t a bad guy. There were a lot worse people and things going on in the world.
That day though. What was wrong? I couldn’t figure it out at first. Overcast weather didn’t help. But it was more. I shrugged and sighed. Then I realized slowly. A lot of people had moved away. A lot had changed. Or maybe they weren’t really known to begin with. Sports and schools and cycles and seasons of time had ended. The fun bright worlds of bike riding and forts, comics and street hockey and so on, were basically over.
I finished my sandwich, stood up, and looked around a bit more. The trees had certainly grown. But things even in lieu of that seemed more grey than green. Bad. Untoward. There was trouble in the wind, but I couldn’t exactly figure out what. I glanced at the wooden planks. I never liked their colour anyhow. Some weird red so dark, some real base chakra choice. Yuk. Maybe the balcony was not enjoyable but just for show. Osho says most people didn’t have a golden childhood as he did, that it’s just that what came after for many was so bad that their childhood seemed golden in comparison…
Food for thought as the old saying went. And fish they claimed was good for the brain so maybe I would be able to figure it all out. I went in and hit play. Robert Plant was singing that it was time to ramble on.
(‘It’s the nearest thing to pretending you’re dead’)
Smoking is a distraction
The smouldering cigarette end
A last star beneath the foredawn
Outcast to outcast
Neither relishing the coming hours
His head is the maquette of a skull
Gaining depth within the sculptural
Antechamber of his hands
As twilight’s pale reverse
Blisters into day
(‘Oh god, not another one’)
What god lacked in variety
The restless mind feels in malaise
Hell is only the endless now
An impossibly diminishing sameness
(‘And on the seventh day god rested,
And the eighth day drifted free,
And every iteration thereafter’)
Nothing at the End of the Day
Walking beneath the black bandage of night
I can feel the memories
Seeping through
The wounds of the waking world
As the first light of day threatens
To cauterise in reverse
I look up at where the stars should be
And consider leaving them behind
Funny how easily eternity
Can be overcome
If you really try
It’s an Inferno Out There
We were quick to express our sorrow
When the city skyline burned
To show solidarity in the face of disaster
As we gathered to watch the flames
Eating away at the facades
Exposing ourselves to the cancerous dust
Which filled the air like regret
A violent pornography
We took home for later
‘I never thought something like this could happen here’
A fellow onlooker said
Admitting to a life spent looking the other way
To a community extending no further than sight
The violence has always been here
Behind every door and curtain
A rage in thermal runaway
Which can never be put out
With bruises worn like scorch marks
Licked by flames of wayward desire
Ghostland
The fluorescent tube light strobes the shadows
With the jagged pulse of a heart monitor patient after the assault
A safety measure against the imminent dark
Down this shambles of an alleyway
Its broken cadence indicative of our failure
To inhabit the alien worlds we created
The indecipherable morse-code of that light
Keeps me awake, reminding me
Of the old BBC idents
When each new programme seemed preceded by
The ghostly chiming resonance
Of an angel’s wings in flight
When I was too young to understand
The images which followed as anything other
Than reports from a realm I could not understand
During the day the light is an annoyance
Somewhere between a lightning strike and a migraine
Once the night settles it reveals itself entirely
As just another human idea
Losing the battle against the dark
A Certain Kind of Happiness
‘It’s not altogether darkness’
So Malcolm Lowry said
Dictating into the echo-chamber
Between the bottom of two bottles
It’s a sentiment I stand beside
True, we’ve crucified ourselves at every opportunity
Made martyrs to our own misery
But there’s a stoicism to that
A street-level setting of the face against the wind
Like the brief moment of joy the fetishist feels
Before he’s choked into oblivion
Taryn Allan scribbles things into notebooks. Occasionally, these scribblings coalesce and have been known to appear in such places as the Horror Writers Association’s Poetry Showcase, Horror Sleaze Trash, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Pixelated Shroud and Disturb the Universe Magazine, amongst others.
His friends from college told stories that made them laugh to convulsions about the moments, stoned or sober, when he pulled some classic stunt with an innocent face or could not remember and asked them to tell what he had done. When he lived in a distant city, they heard about the curious time police were called as he walked the edge of his high-rise apartment’s flat roof. He was there, he said, to catch the stars falling in August, as each one spoke a word he would set in a complex grid about the disasters timed to happen. We thought that drinking or doses of drugs had made him wild with wide eyes, calling us to babble at midnight and weeping until the first light. I saw him once on the ninth floor of a new facility opened nearby. The staff enjoyed him and listened to the music he played for hours on end. “I am the guitar of God,” he said. “The pills they feed me make me confess.” He told about walking one day naked in the park he reclaimed and made into Eden, where liquid colors dripped from the trees and the dead bees returned to life. He was the vessel of hid divinity, sent to heal the division of nations. The very last time I saw him, he stood as silent as death, against the wire dividing the milling inmates from guests. His hand, like fire, brushed mine and passed along the deathless virus. _________________________________________________
Figure Study
A catalog of used books described a half-price portfolio — photographs of figures — sepia compositions or shimmering monochromatic watercolors of natural beauty in bare rooms, and “softly edged outdoor portraits with the merest hint of color,” as if it described a dish of some culinary enterprise. Here are richly grained figures of saturated colors, capturing reflective moods, “simply the play of light caressing a body’s curves, charged with a landscape’s environmental meaning.” The figure is stripped bare of any transgressive dimension as a sign of enlightened love, a spare and geometric scaffold. If so, then the hell with it. These pieces are as innocuous as flocked wallpaper hanging in a hidden hallway. Here the camera’s alchemy has turned the body’s heft and weight into pure, non-perishing spirit. It turned totally Platonic, leaving the body husk behind. But the figure in clear light should remind us that beauty comes and goes, and flesh withers as soon as grass. We love what can not last. ________________________________________
NOTHING HAPPENED
Nothing happened. Nothing could. You slept, with sudden starts, as though to catch yourself from falling or pulling back from any close body stretched along your sprawling length, while you dreamed of dolphins in tumbling pods pushing against each other, pushing to shore and beached, as you broke the surface of sleep to gulp, vibrating with sound, breaths in sudden succession, the pumps of a starving heart. Inside this night, within your tussled bed, you looked — if anyone watched — collapsed on your back like Adam fallen from the ceiling, pushed by that digit extending from God, rigid and floating above this mortal world, on the backs of sensual angels, while he wore a night-shirt. Your skin — chalky like gesso, dried by desert exposure or shelterless days lived at sea straining to hear the “ping” of sonar echoes or the “click” of porpoise speech — contracted when drafts of night air raised like a ghost or a kiss the soft down at your hip, as your testicles shrank back in primordial fear inside the sack tingling within the bone vault of your thighs, unguarded as midnight passed. Nothing happened. Your sealed eyelids fluttered, as if they trapped a luna moth in a purse — and once opened the captive creature would fly with its wings fanned and reaching to feel freedom, but into a world of frost or predator birds. From my bed my lustral soul rose and followed, miles away, as I watched the shuffle of lights from occasional cars bend through panes of glass to reach and recede across the empty ceiling as I pictured you beside me, while nothing happened.
Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in a small village, near a nature conservancy, a green cemetery, and Amish farms.
“Multiply. Be fruitful.” And God gave man a tool. But Eve, she conceived and brought forth the slide rule. Before ever we knew what old Galle saw, we arranged us our love life by Bode’s own law. It really did pain us to get past Uranus and let Neptune discover us our flaw.
A sexy realtor from Nice quoted me her terms for a piece. When I found out her price I told her, “Au regretment, no dice.” (I wasn’t looking to buy, just lease.) I met a pedantic old whore from Bombay who quibbled over being labeled that way. She said, “While it’s true I get paid by the screw, I work in Mumbai not Bombay.” Dish washers from Amarillo had pubes the texture of Brillo. Though they made quite a scene, she got the plates really clean and gave the waiter a thrill. Oh! Smilingly, Sue said over minces, “The feeling of packing ten inches must be like squeezing your feet into a pair of cute shoes that don’t fit — so tight that it pinches!” Said I, “Oh, size tens! Rather a bore if compared to my wee four.” Sue smiled (no pleasure in it, till she learned I’m measuring it “from the tip” I told her “to the floor”). A prison scholar was subtly candid as his fellows he Homerically branded; one boomerang con he dubbed Rosy-fingered Don ’cause he was caught so often red-handed. A persistent narcissist from Tacoma would diddle himself into comas. Though warned he’d go blind, he had it in mind to stop when he got to glaucoma. One disgruntled lover of Venus rubbed down to a nubbin his penis. The goddess said, “Friend! We’ve come to the end of the source of the friction between us.”
KINGSTON
8 DAYS! 7 NIGHTS!
Son, dey
moan
day to day
when dey
thirsty.
Fried, dey
sat ern de sun.
Deh!
FISHERS AT HOME
you’re
the sinker,
and you’re
the bobber,
and I’m the other, the provider of the worm and the
Mykyta Ryzhykh’s new collection tombboy depicts what Margaret Atwood pointed out in her famous quote, “War is what happens when language fails.”
Through repeated phrases, inverted words, special characters, checklists and tables, and italicized product specifications, Ryzhykh breaks language and meaning. He creates a mood of absurdity and confusion where we feel lost, without landscapes or place names or titles or even recognizable syntax to orient us. Like ee cummings, Ryzhykh eschews capitalization, but rather than representing a bold individual artistic statement, the choice reinforces the low status of nameless humans in this barren world.
Death and loss recur as motifs in tombboy, through the title poem and several others that mention cemeteries, sandcastles disappearing at high tide, checkmate at the end of a chess game, a coffin embedded in a birthday cake, bees separated from their hives. One piece consists almost entirely of blacked out text, illustrating the loss of the poem’s meaning as well as its narrator, and another is merely a blank page. Another describes a bird purely in the negative, listing everything the animal lacks, and wondering aloud how it will fly.
Most of the poems focus just on conveying the feeling of dislocation and disorientation without speculating on its causes. However, near the beginning, a few pieces suggest that violence of various sorts has ruptured the world. One piece references “bombs tears grenades grenades of tears” and a destroyed house, and another poem mentions a suicide. The poetic subjects are universalized: the description in the line following the first reference to ‘tombboy’ suggests he/she could be male or female. People have lost much of their individual humanity here and become an anonymous, alienated mass.
The collection ends on what is perhaps a note of kindness, although as tenuous and fragile as the world of this book. Poem #46 serves as a kind of lullaby to a child not yet born, with a repeated chorus urging them to sleep. We see the first glimmer of tenderness and hope in this poem, as the unborn will have ‘the strength of the stones we once were” and the speaker begs them to “kill me with your love.”
Although the object of the poem is mortal: “posthumous ants will eat you” and will come into a tenuous world “where they may be crippled for life,” they “were once fish/we should become birds.” They, like us, belong here, and despite war, violence, and the breakdown in human language and connection, still have a place in our broken world’s long history.
