First of all, Synchronized Chaos stands with all those affected by the recent earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria. We encourage all who are able to contribute to the relief efforts, which you may do through the Red Crescent or other worthy organizations.
This online fundraiser with contemporary international authors and translators aims to raise funds to aid relief efforts and demonstrate solidarity with the Syrian, Turkish, and Kurdish people affected by the disaster.
Organized by Words Without Borders and hosted by author Merve Emre (writer and scholar, Turkey/USA), the fundraiser will feature Laila Lalami (novelist and essayist, Morocco/USA), Orhan Pamuk (novelist and essayist, Turkey), Maureen Freely (translator from Turkish, USA), Sema Kaygusuz (novelist and playwright, Turkey), Nick Glastonbury (translator from Turkish and Kurdish, USA), Elif Shafak (novelist and essayist, Turkey/UK), Bachtyar Ali (novelist, Iraq), Kareem Abdulrahman (translator from Kurdish, UK), and others to be confirmed.
Please join us online (Zoom) on Thursday, March 9th, at 1 pm/New York, 6 pm/London, 8 pm/Gaziantep & Aleppo.
Also, please come out to Synchronized Chaos Magazine’s in-person event, held during the Association of Writing Programs’ conference, Thursday March 9th at 6pm at Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle.
Ada’s Technical Books and Gifts
During the pandemic many of us came to miss browsing in bookstores and libraries. The experience of scanning and flipping through books that we wouldn’t ordinarily order for ourselves, but which catch our eye and we find ourselves fingering, flipping, reading, and then checking out and buying.
This reading creates an ‘audible browsing’ experience by presenting readers who are published authors in a variety of genres. This includes mystery, romance, poetry, memoir, drama, literary and international fiction.
Also, our friend and collaborator Rui Carvalho reminds us about our Nature Writing Contest for 2022.
In this issue we see pieces where people grapple with their self-concepts. Some people search their souls for deeper understanding, others focus entirely outside themselves, and still others process their thoughts and emotions through interacting with the outside world.
Chimezie Ihekuna kicks us off with song lyrics about claiming one’s selfhood and confidence.
In Brian Michael Barbeito’s lush, detailed poems, narrators lose themselves within elemental wildness. He also contributes immersive photographs that aim to capture the spirit and feel of locales, focusing on the observed and hiding the observer.
Bill Tope’s prose poem also takes readers up and out of themselves and out into a richly imagined nostalgic fishing trip with his grandmother.
Channie Greenberg’s artistic renderings of flowers capture their exuberance, in work that takes a turn towards abstract expression. Claudio Parentela highlights the details of slightly comedic scenes through color and black and white renditions.
Mesfakus Salahin evokes a love that pulls the speaker out of his own life into union with nature and his beloved.
Sandro Piedrahita’s story explores how one might atone for a heinous crime, through shifting one’s focus away from selfishness towards humble service to others for its own sake.
Sayani Mukherjee’s poem describes an intense spiritual quest and how her faith survives her search and questioning.
Z.I. Mahmud’s essay highlights the role of philosophers who were both spiritual mystics and humanists in shaping Indian culture. They were able to both address and transcend the human condition.
Gail Thomas highlights how various iconic songs have helped her to process her grief, explaining how music can be at once personal and universal. J.J. Campbell, a writer and caregiver, speaks to many universal human griefs and emotions: loneliness, lost love, aging, and tradition.
Doug Hawley handles common human experiences – surviving the natural elements, braving the dating world, aging and illness – through humor. Noah Berlatsky spoofs self-help culture through an elaborately constructed re-envisioning of Jordan Peterson’s advice to men.
L. Wayne Russell speaks of pursuing and finding art and inspiration above all else, whatever his human circumstances.
Daniel De Culla sends up a fanciful poem about shapeshifting: a poet with a hat that changes into a whimsical pumpkin.
Mark Young cleverly amuses us with “mail deliveries” that involve linguistic wordplay while Grant Guy breaks poetry down into its essential elements to explore what those elements are.
Vernon Frazer connects a lot of words and ideas together to experiment with meaning and thought. J.D. Nelson invites us to experience words and punctuation in fragments and ponder their possible meanings.
J.K. Durick evokes how life’s experiences can play with our senses of time and space.
John Grey creates humorous character sketches of people and relationships with generosity of spirit.
John Culp conveys the joy of reaching full intellectual and emotional understanding with another person, being fully and mutually seen and heard without either person having to lose themselves in the relationship.
Itzel Perez-Alarcon points out how the childish games that people play with each other can recall memories that undermine our sense of self.
Bilatu Abdullahi renders the loneliness, rage and grief of a spurned lover, who could be a person, a country, or the earth itself. Maurizio Brancaleoni speculates on whether humanity will be able to do enough to ameliorate the destruction of endangered species and disempowered humans.
Mahbub laments the natural and human tragedies of our current world, but then points to our heritage of honoring love between people to suggest that we may yet make it forward.
Christopher Bernard remembers his partner of many years through an elegant meditation on an empty table setting. Emina Delilovic-Kevric speaks to family love that perseveres after wartime, even in the face of losses.
In his thoughtful poem, Faroq Faisal quickly reminds us that we are mortal.
Some contributors take the focus off of themselves by writing about a highly researched topic.
Terry Trowbridge stares intently at a single jalapeno, discovering the mysteries of the universe in a pepper. Corey Cook highlights one intense image, of a tiny bird or a candle flame, and calls us to leave our own psyches and meditate on that.
Russell Streur explores the intimate relationship between poetry and pottery in Japan a few centuries in the past.
Masharipova Bakhor Ixtiyor provides an overview of the bakery products of Uzbekistan, while Kojamuratova Aygul urges Uzbekistan’s criminal justice system to distinguish between one-time and repeat offenders for public safety.
Taylor Dibbert’s poetic speaker steps beyond his own psyche in a simpler way: love and gratitude for his faithful dog.
We hope you enjoy this issue’s depth, joy, grief, thought, and nuance.
PANTS ON FIRE
I'm not really this upset
but despair reads better on the page.
And no one dips into poetry
so they'll know how good I have it.
They're searching
for the anguished cry of someone
worse off than them.
So lying on a beach,
I give them dark and dismal.
High up on a mountain,
I spread the verse with depths.
In love and loved becomes,
with a click or two of the keyboard,
unwanted and alone.
Poetry is the great lie.
There, you heard it from me.
So it must be untrue.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
Now I prize
the reformed alcoholics-
all throats are dry,
all keep this to themselves.
Instead
of ripping at their own skin,
they sit in chairs
too tight for trembling
and let the process work.
A month, says one.
Almost a year, says another.
Over two years, says a third.
Together in one room,
they are a calendar
of willpower and abstinence.
I drink to them
by crushing the glass.
in my hand.
HE PART ONE
He drinks.
He embraces me like an old friend.
He finds his life works best
when people have never seen the like before.
He has developed a number
outside the realm of 0 through 9.
He has the inside track
He hasn’t seen his ex in years.
He can make things out of stone and wood.
He leaves it to others to light his cigarettes.
He nibbles on whatever’s within reach.
He tosses trash at the feet
of the guy sweeping the sidewalk.
He returns nothing he borrows..
He says he wants her exclusively for himself
He survives off a settlement for a car accident.
He transmits pleas skyward.
CARL SMOKES
Ten chimneys worth of vapor
had climbed his nose, his cheeks,
drawn by the amber of his eyes.
His is the satisfaction of expression.
And the relief that it works so well.
For he is an illustration
from out of poetry’s flaming words of poetry
Though just the scaffolding
for he has yet to write anything down.
He’s staving off the pressure with a cigarette,
while he craves the presence of a sperm whale
that writes, with its fluke dipped in ink,
in some elemental alphabet with giant letters.
Yet he’s really clipped wings on a bird.
The Ring Cycle minus the ring.
A dropout from modesty and self-advisement.
A prisoner behind a tall wire fence.
The last breath of a trout in a net.
No one is hypnotized by the yellow of his sun.
No one reads anything into an empty page.
RUSSET CONES
I ask morning, as someone who is never really here,
just how secure is this room, these floorboards,
the walls, my body…and my life.
The light says something like,
“That’s my little secret.
In the meantime, why don’t I just shine in your face.”
I wonder in whose novel I have awoken.
And why the fierce dog below is staring up at me.
His concentration and my lack of gusto are appalling me.
But I agree with the beast that maybe we could rassle later.
I spend twenty minutes talking to the mirror
with my diffident face on.
But glass doesn’t recognize humility.
It only speaks in emojis anyhow.
My downward mouth cannot be held back.
The woman at the kitchen table looks up at me
from her incorrigible remoteness.
How many years has it been since we first thought
we could anchor each other.
Now, she takes me for the back cover of a book –
one that she puts back down,
says, no I won’t be reading you today.
She could, at least, skim through the damn thing!
I try to not to say things that are merely anger.
That’s what pen and paper are for.
The lady of my life has perfected the silence, the obdurance, of the hill.
I look out the window.
Day is out there having followed me from upstairs.
It’s quite colorful, to be honest.
And not so distant that I can’t step out into it.
“Good question,” it says, when I haven’t even asked it anything.
“If you’re looking for the russet cones of red spruce,
focus on the top of the tree.”
I had not intended to. And yet, maybe I just will.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.
12 Rules for Manly Knowledge
Seek out some false fair woman and plague her.
—SwinburneRule 1
Stand up straight like the archetypal death of Christ hyped on Communism.
The thought may gall you, Reverend Jung, but you cannot deny the wisdom
of furtive street-vending marijuana providers. The female
graciously widened her hips. Animals can’t manage that. You know this is the kind of lobster
spiced with the latest edition of The Economist. The excruciating glowglobes are drooping
with semi-divine emotional reactions, a warm snuggling of intolerable Being
narcissistically tripling mutual awareness.
There are so many women without lobsters, so many nervous systems blossoming with chaos,
so many shoulders writhing sinuously in the deep desert—can the hyper-dominant
ever be truly emergent? Let the penetrating question suborn your terrifyingly witty SEALs,
opening time like a non-refundable flower of malevolence. Maybe it’s time to grow up
and get effortlessly bloated with camaraderie. Maybe you are the gratifying myth.
Rule 2
Treat yourself to the wise degenerate-sustainability threshold of myth
and astronomical sexual climax. Yes, drunk people get in trouble with Communism.
Yes, a superintelligence should have a box of dreams on its CV. But hyper-dominant
whole brain emulation will grow up
like non-anthropocentric avatars of ourselves, augmenting my damn ideology with lobster
infrastructure profusion, an affliction of early-stage hierarchy maneuvers. Anti-awareness!
That’s the perverse hatred of masculine activity, the frenzy of reverse vampire snorting evolutionary wisdom.
One difference between humans and horses is that one is obsessed with honor, the other with chaos.
Can it subtly control world events like a perverse Darwinian? Like a female?
Enhancing the cognition of excessively agreeable biology? Your husband, your child, sealed
in a bouillon cube of discrete human-like intellect, melting into the algorithm of Being.
The true AI is plentifully flowing serotonin. Do not let your neural pathways droop.
Rule 3
Make friends with people who are waiting for a personal trainer. Like Godot, who droops
but is not scared of the parasitic mind mask. What’s up, Godot? That’s the myth
of the living waters marching in Skokie, because they believe that Being.
is not Marxist enough. And it is Critical Theory when you see the lobster
by the pen of light, and say, “It’s time for very strong sleep narcotics, it’s time for awareness.”
I know your internal critic is fixed, but Communism
is what makes airplanes work. “No way,” you think. But it’s, “Yes way.” That’s wisdom
to see that these are the good law-abiding ones, and those are the sociopathic bad females,
and to unleash the neurologically expensive B-movie aliens, the dogmatic SEALs
who fight for the small business owners with the reasonableness of hyper-dominance.
Otherwise, you’re nothing but infected evolution without the charm or cellular tissue. Grow up,
laboratory-enhanced, like Plato without fuck pants, and you’ll jujitsu the ethics of chaos.
Rule 4
Compare yourself to a face waiting to be splattered with blood. There’s a thin trickle of axiomatic chaos,
lips parted, as inside you an intrinsically intolerable volcano blazes droopingly.
Take a deep drag on your easy rationalizations and consign the Vice Squad to awareness
of what it means to be sheathed in a tight-fitting blue-silk dominance hierarchy. Being
is completely uncivil to the ancient reflexive responses of the lobster.
And so our bodies ready themselves for all kinds of nymphomania, like myths
that threaten to break a guy’s arm to make him into Sweden. Don’t be a sissified Navy SEAL,
with twin bosoms of brain-cancer and equity-mindedness, draped in the negligee of entrepreneurial wisdom,
squirming like an overgrown thigh. Say, “I’m only human, you provocative invertebrate female,
and the chip on my Charles Atlas will never grow up
into an Oedipal Mother. To hell with Osiris. How could I be so damn Communist?
Sweetheart, it was easy. And hyper-dominant.”
Rule 5
Do not let your children kill their interior warriors. The hyper-dominant
Zeus-energy dramatically crystallizes when you’re not of much interest to womanly chaos.
That is the magnetic field of the deep masculine where John Wayne gets a life. And Being?
This isn’t a debate. The data crouch down in the soul houses, like seals
playing softball on the ocean floor with the Wild Man of Communism.
Something in the adolescent male wants bureaucratic functionaries with heavy eyebrows and great wisdom
to smoke the yin/yang right from the Golden Hair of clinical psychology, until awareness
penetrates like a sword plunged into the tender, fearful, damp grooviness of the lobster.
The wound in our psyche is left-wing social-justice, bleeding like females
from their hairy intuition. Economically speaking, you can eat dust like myth
salted with internet porn. The fossilized confusion of memes droop,
as midwestern prairie types herd naked apes across basic brain areas. Only thus can we grow up.
Rule 6
Set your house in perfect order like a real woman who is not your mother. Only thus can we grow up
with muscles popping out of our Nietzsche. Mind-blowing sex, that was Ursula’s nefarious hyper-dominance.
But men have got to feel like they’re the king of shriveled and warped semi-beings.
All he really wanted was to hear her say was, “Baby, you’re my Navy SEAL.”
All he really wanted was pineapple juice on his pulsing lobster!
But instead she twirled around so he could get a better look at her juicy wisdom
and he immediately started calculating with an unspeakably primordial calculator. Awareness
is a high-quality suitor, but you pursue the salty fries and the foul grease of Communism.
As for me, I became the mayonnaise and vodka of myth
because that is what she needed. “If a man doesn’t have chaos
in his scuba tank, am I going to put a ring on his Tao?” Dirty laundry droops.
Hold onto your cookie like Sigmund Freud holds a high-performing and high-earning female.
Rule 7
Pursue the golden calf that once grazed on elegant parties of females
rather than longing for Benjamin Franklin’s meticulously rigid gout. When you grow up,
breakfast will be coffee, the denatured motor cortex of the French forces, and an awareness
of the lustful violent natural cowboys encamped in the chaos
of our American lasses. A perfectly functioning hegemony deploys its musketry and myth
like cannon shot rooting in the highest levels of meaningfulness. Such intestinal Communism
travels flat on its supine bliss into the square-shaped fortifications of wisdom.
Consider that ancestral soft buckwheat cakes were carved to look like Navy SEALs.
Consider that the modern practice of bathing in Fruit Loops came from Orwell, whose drooping
liberty clanged in the copper mustaches of the tyrant. There is no Being
without the thrust of the bayonet, no Hessians without hyper-dominance.
The Founders surge in the abyss. Follow George Washington, therefore, and embrace the body odor of the lobster.
Rule 8
Tell the truth, or at least do not delight in the torture of lobsters.
I had a client who by sheer willpower stilled the fidgeting of good-looking females
inside his kimono. What do you say to a severely intoxicated hyper-dominant
silk napkin? Someone living a life-lie in a tight-fitting sheath of black satin? Being
a wounded caterpillar crawling up the prideful rational mind is no excuse for drooping.
Slowly, lovingly, lift the gun and shoot the honest human spirit into a paradise of Navy SEALs.
A big racial stereotype fell from the sex-organs of the Japanese globe-fish while Communists
ravished British sailors with white girls for comparison. Of course, you are already aware
of the genetic predisposition of mad doctors, Mr. Myth.
At least you’re on the side of the Logos, which is to say, of the policemen, the Queen, and the grown ups
who hunt down all the insincere trousers. But if you’re raised by a wonderful Nanny, half-Chinese, half-chaos—
you will quiver with blood and meta-goals. And that is wisdom.
Rule 9
Assume that the larvae whose perfect divorce law you are tramping is a bully business. His wisdom
will make your beaver behave, but only if you first wet the thick tips of the susceptible lobster.
Choose a dry, level Stalinist, put the point of your self-conscious vulnerability on the drooping
knife-blade of habitable order, and feel your way to a Communist
merit badge. Even to a symphony of merit badges. Then the Chief Female,
studded with metal like a pit bull’s collar, optimizes her smile across the street of chaos
and into the Roman legions or the Wigan Pier coal miners. You can tell the difference by the length of their awareness,
and by whether they are chivalrous when they gut Navy SEALs
with a psychological scalpel. Training makes a small boy the equal or superior of a hyper-dominant
nihilism. The mystery grew upon him as he became boring like the grown up
whose dream collapsed beneath the Honest Mao of myth.
It is not alone in the mighty hunter-gatherers, but in the meek Noble Savage too, that we truly upbuild Being.
Rule 10
Be precise in the dammed-up pressure of your mammal carcass, thou red Being,
and let the choice cut of wisdom
from Christ’s horrid black hole be visited upon the social worker in all her hyper-dominance.
“The dickered tongue of the unemployable has a bitter smell,” says the female
in her Ted Talk. Like some computational intelligence at the tail of a bovine, chaos
enters the chat with the antics of a creepy puppet, while naked men sit on Communism’s
fern-scented He-Goat. The target is a more communicative America, flourishing with the dark grape of awareness
at the life-blissful soda-fountain. You are Captain Hook, your orgasms drooping
with wrinkled secrets and compact drops of posture, which you must seal
in the honey-triumph of lost human upvotes. Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself, the lobster
conducts market research on the fecundating herd, aka the British Parliament. Grow up
washed in the data of gender. I am the man. I am the sanitary Frankfurt School of myth.
Rule 11
Do not bother Warren Beaty while he prodigiously frigs the myth
of his forefathers. Such sins, limited by the proliferation of your Bishop, are being
idealized every fortnight. Whisper dreadful blasphemies to the fundament of chaos
and the 1960s shall dramatically liberalize divorce laws. What is the end of this journey into darkness? A lobster?
A turd? An ideological shibboleth? It matters not what emerges from the female
technical insufficiency, as long as you rejoice at the effect of your laxative. Obsolete laptops droop
upon the libertine of time—that is a bizarre ceremony, and even if your buttocks malfunction, hyper-dominance
will still awaken my lubricious cabbage, even as voluptuous Navy SEALs
fart upon symbolic associations with Western cynicism. My prick positively jumps when I do wisdom,
and yet women on dating sites reject 85% of Communism.
This enrages Magneto, who unbuttons his breeches and grows up
to manifest his destiny. No wonder she donned a hardhat and entered a convent for the rest of her awareness.
Rule 12
Pet your out-of-control political correctness with love and high-caliber awareness.
The Old Testament God should set off your Spidey-Sense. Likewise the myth
of consensus Type-A bottoms. My suggestion is to screw up your Being
with the minimum effective dose of female
until you utterly hyper-dominate
competitive podcasting. Marine force recon guys with one foot in obscure psychedelics and the other in toilet humor are growing up
into a Heraclitean tenured position. Husbands, don’t let your healthy seat in the musical chair competition droop
like old luggage where your mind is grooved in defensive and rent-seeking types of chaos.
Commit to one push-up before infidelity. Yes, just one. Only massively transformational purpose can make a Holocaust survivor into a lobster
with really good encryption. You are the unstoppable Terminator of your own wisdom.
You are the brain tumor in the heart of your essential amino acids. And you are the Navy SEAL
with one set of speakers in the bathroom, building the Boulder Dam (now known as the Hoover Dam) out of the raw material of testosterone. Glazed, of course, with Communism.
Coda
You would have predicted a good future in cruising down main street into marijuana and myth. But in truth it’s a downward path sealing
you into the Messiah who is yourself. Chaos is Swiss, but economics is a non-refundable hyper-dominance
that smuggles Vedic texts into your quotidian awareness. In every left-leaning Eden there is a lobster
with 350 million years of experience in tempting females with the innate blood-sugar spike of Being.
The body, with its various YouTube channels, maps wisdom onto big ideas such as men who are not part of the patriarchy. Meanwhile Communism
springs forth like a tampon from powerful biological sex. Grow up, young man, and unclutter your Twin Towers until they are no longer drooping.
___
The epigraph is from Swinburne’s double sestina, “Complaint of Lisa.”The entire poem uses words and phrases from:
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, forward by Norman Doidge, Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018.
Additional material used as follows
Rule One: Frank Herbert, Dune, New York: Ace, 1965.
Rule Two: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford UP, 2014.
Rule Three: Joe Rogan Experience transcripts at “The Joe Rogan Experience”, The Happy Scribe, accessed January 2023, https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-joe-rogan-experience
Rule Four: Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1947.
Rule Five: Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men, Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1990.
Rule Six: Steve Harvey, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment, New York: Amistad Press, 2009.
Rule Seven: Bill O’Reilly and Margin Dugard, Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017.
Rule Eight: Ian Fleming, Dr. No, London: Pan Books, 1964.
Rule Nine: Boy Scouts Handbook (1st ed.)., 1911.
Rule Ten: D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beast, and Flowers, London: Martin Secker (Ltd.), 1923.
Rule Eleven: Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, New York: Random House, 1989.
Rule Twelve: Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of World-Class Performers, New York: Harper Business, 2016.
Poem
my word
your word
my word
your word
the same different
the cat’s got our:your tongue
Poem
teat
teat
rush hour
TOOT
romance between 3:30 & 5:30 pm
Poem
?
for all/no
occasions
Poem
It hurt my mother
It made me laugh
Make the bed
Father broke wind
Poem
A horse a horse
my …….
Is that porridge i see before me
After about 5/6 years absence I have returned to writing. Before the five years I had many poems and short stories published online and as hard copy. I have had four books published: On The Bright Side Of Down (a collection of stories, prose poems and poems, Bus Stop Bus Stop (a collection of stories based on my experience of transcontinental bus travel), Blues For A Mustang (A collection of poems) and The Life And Lies Of Calamity Jane (a novella).
The poems submitted here do not reflect the previous work. The poems here a very reductive. They reflect more of the short (very) minimal theatre pieces I began during the time of COVID.You can view them on my Facebook page. In those works the object or the gesture was the event. In these poems the words are the event. Each word and/or line can be connected as pieces of shards by the reader or each line and/or word can be seen and interpreted as is.
Recently had 5 poems accepted for a Spring issue of a poetry journal. The editor wrote I had a unique perspective. I do not know about that. Recently I dicovered Vsevolod Nekrasov has a similar perspective. But the poems are the current me.
