DAYBREAK, MONTSERRAT Morning splinters into shoal reefs. We waken to graves, A tide of weather and early hair, A window of volcanoes, Purple blue mist, A seal cackling near driftwood. CRAWDADS --This year we vacationed from home and traveled a couple of dozen miles away (2020) Sunlight rises into fire, early dawn, yellowing itself into flame, a blossoming as beautiful as yesterday morning, my wife and I, my son, his wife and new born daughter not on a Florida beach, along the Gulf of Mexico, but in Mid-Missouri, Barnard Bruns Conservation Area, Getting our feet wet for crawdads, the forest a grand wall beyond the river, the sky sky blue, a whisper of cloud cotton candied. Nothing can feel as beautiful as this, not the sun rising in the east, not the birds of the beaches, not the bent cedar on the cliff ledges. Beauty is my family in a river, the end of summer nearing, and both my son’s wife and my own against a backdrop of forest and river, of sky with strings of sugar digging through rock and stone for crawdads. .My family on its banks, a bright breeze and cool shadows, and even though we catch nothing, we have found the milky silk of love.
Essay from Doug Hawley
Birthday
A few weeks ago I bought The Association album Birthday. Prices for used albums are $1.00 a piece, or three for $2.00 where I volunteer at Booktique, a charitable used bookstore three blocks from me in Lake Oswego. I have a huge music collection of 120,000 songs, and normally this album wouldn’t be to my taste.
The reason I wanted it was that The Association started with Brian Cole on bass. In 1965 or 1966, Brian was hanging out with my best high school and college buddy Gary and I at Gary’s place. Brian had been a year ahead of us in high school, where I had been vaguely aware of his existence. I inferred that he was in the in crowd, but other than that knew little about him. Both Gary and Brian were involved with music and art whereas I was a math and science guy.
Brian had moved to Los Angeles and gotten into the music scene. He was hanging out on the Sunset Strip and catching popular acts of the time, like Johnny Rivers. He was a part of a group called The Men, as he explained it, to separate them from mixed gender groups like The Mamas and Pappas. Later I found out that the group had changed personnel and name to become The Association. After that, I never saw Brian again in person, although I saw them on the Smothers Brothers show in 1967 and 1968. One of them was quite silly with the group wearing deliberately bad wigs. Clips are available on YouTube.
The Association was one of the first folk-rock bands. Their first big hit, Along Came Mary was considered a reference to marijuana, which was not unusual for rock music at that time. Their other big hits were Cherish, Windy and Never My Love, all of which were fairly sappy love songs.
After a very few popular albums and songs, The Association sank back into obscurity, although their big hits are remembered and played today. Our local community band, The Lake Oswego Millennium Band, in which my wife and editor (same person) plays bass clarinet, has played Cherish.
August 2, 1972 Brian Cole was found dead of a heroin overdose. Because he wasn’t Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, I didn’t find out until many years after, even though we lived in Los Angeles at the time. From reading biographies of Keith Richards and Ginger Baker, I know that heroin was hugely popular in rock circles on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Association continues in some form with one of Brian’s sons in the band.
Birthday was a big disappointment for me. Gary died a few years ago.
Because there have been so many true horror stories in rock’s history, as a reaction I wrote the cheerier fictional “Eagle” which was serialized in the defunct AWS and will appear in Scarlet Leaf.
Appeared in Written Tales
Poetry from Christopher Bernard
The Socialist’s Garden of Verses By Christopher Bernard is not of poems made alone. In man and woman are hearts of earth and water where roots of roses tangle with carrot, yam, potato, the veins of peach and apple and the red sweet plump tomato, the fruits of earth from which all humanity is made: faith and hope and charity, and love of truth and kindness, belief in good and beauty: these are the pleasing verses from which is made the garden of hope you will engender after you have closed this book and put it away. The dragonfly awaits you, the beetle, ant, and butterfly, the sun is high over the garden, the fragrant grasses call to you. Our work is just beginning, the earth and sky are waiting. Take my singing with you out into the day. _____ Christopher Bernard is founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org). “The Socialist’s Garden of Verses” comes from the collection of the same name, which will be published in December 2020 through Regent Press.
Synchronized Chaos November 2020: Zoomed Out
This month’s title is a double entendre – many of us are literally ‘zoomed out’ after too many online Zoom meetings.
However, ‘zooming out’ is also a metaphor for an important psychological practice, putting ourselves in perspective by stepping back and thinking of the larger picture.
Norman J. Olson reflects on his past work in a factory making phone books in a piece illustrated with a set of evocative paintings.
While Olson reflects positively on industry and creative ingenuity, others trace less pleasant patterns in history.
Michael Robinson links today’s Black Lives Matter movement with past decades of racism in a poignant set of pieces ending with meditations on death.
Nigerian author Chimezie Ihekuna also addresses death, and his loss of fear of it.
Patricia Doyne takes a larger-scale view of our mortality, criticizing President Trump’s management of the coronavirus crisis. Jeff Rasley does the same in his excerpt from his upcoming political novel Anarchist, Republican, Assassin, a book steeped in the tensions of today.
Doyne also mentions finding solace in nature, in walking around a nearby lake.
Other contributors turn to, or connect with, nature and our fellow species. Norman Olson sends us paintings he’s done of trees, while Joan Beebe celebrates nature, friendship and freedom through her collection of poetry.
Ross Bryant’s work evokes mental wandering during long country drives, while Spanish poet Daniel De Culla muses on the transmutation of a man to a frog and back again.
In her monthly Book Periscope column, Elizabeth Hughes reviews Marcie Brooks’ novel Four Dogs And Their Tales, a piece from the point of view of four rescue dogs who compete in agility competitions.
Not all considerations of nature are lovely or escapist: Abdelsalam Ibrahim describes illness caused by parasites in a poetic, poignant, almost supernatural way, while Coco Kiju writes pityingly of an abandoned street dog.
Bangladeshi poet Mahbub’s pieces mention human misdeeds towards each other but set them against a background of a much larger universe that includes gentle romances, flora, fauna and the stars. This juxtaposition makes human cruelty seem absurd, that whatever people fight over is small in light of the rest of the world.
Other writers link nature, or the non-human physical universe, to philosophy or human psychology.
Emilie Mayer describes her synesthetic experience of tasting, smelling and feeling poetry, linking her creative act to the growth within her environment. Hazel Clementine also references synesthesia in her surreal work involving her grandmother, dancing, punctuation and preparing oatmeal with cinnamon. Words become something basic, comforting, nutritive, yet challenging and sticky.
J.J. Campbell describes through sparse lines the lostness and pain of being out of place in the small town where he lives.
Chinese poet Hongri Yuan’s poetic speakers step back and take in the natural cosmos and a mystical, galactic, ordered universe. (translated by Yuanbing Zhang).
Some contributors look outward to other people as a means of expanding their focus.
Italian actor Federico Wardal offers a tribute to the generous and graceful spirit of singer and actress Juliette Greco. And another to Rudolph Valentino in the form of a dramatic script, where he imagines himself about to perform, under pressure to revise his show away from his personal vision, when Valentino emerges and speaks with him before he goes on stage.
Syrian writer Moustafa Dandoush conveys the intensity and sincerity of first love, while Santiago Burdon uses dark humor to illustrate the potential consequences of insensitivity in a relationship.
Ghanaian author and radio broadcaster Ike Boat writes of his participation in a group effort to bring food to elderly people in need and also offers an overview of his work in media, nutrition and community development.
Eva Petropolou expresses her love and gratitude for her mother as well as the disembodiment and emptiness of heartbreak, losing part of oneself as well as another person.
Christopher Bernard also writes of the absence of a relationship, that of his children, as he decided not to be a parent. Yet, absence can be another kind of presence, when the lack of someone inspires thought.
Literary writer Denise David reviews Carol Smallwood’s new poetry collection Thread, Form and Other Enclosures, highlighting how the poems reflect and uncover the importance of women’s contributions to our world.
Two contributors focus in on the attitudes we need to maintain a healthy perspective. John Culp urges us towards the courage to try new adventures and of the joy we can find in the world, while Ahmad Al-Khatat illustrates the negative effects of staying stuck in pride and letting oneself stagnate rather than asking for help when needed, and the contrast of that attitude with true, mutual love.
Mark Young’s artwork is bold, thoughtful and expressive, with nets of intertwined lines and splashes of contrasting color.
And, finally, Charles J. March’s art piece, with the timeless words of the 23rd Psalm cut apart and scattered over a notebook, reminds us of our searches for wisdom within faith and tradition.
Poetry from Moustafa Dandoush
“Wo ai ni!”
Teach me how you dealt
with our relationship after what happened.
Teach me how I can talk to you
Without expressing my love feelings to you.
Tell me who is the reason
You, me or our fate?
Now, if I don’t have a heart,
That because you were my heart.
Then We were torn apart
No doubting, you and your thoughts beat me.
Teach me please how else I can say;
I will love you till the day I die.
“Spontaneous girl”
Doing things spontaneously
Makes me fall in love with her spontaneously.
Thinking in a spontaneous way
Makes me love her more in a spontaneous way.
Changing her eye-colours spontaneously
Makes me note the changing time spontaneously.
Expressing her spontaneous feelings
Makes me give her all my spontaneous feelings.
Spontaneously, I’m into this spontaneous girl.
“So don’t!”
I loved you in a way
That it might hurt myself
I loved you until
I’ve seen your flaw became privileges
I’ve told them
That you’re special
So, Don’t humiliate me
I love you
And, I don’t know!
What are my love limitations?
I never want to lose you
But, I will love you forever.
Visual art from Mark Young
Poetry from Ross Bryant
STATIC ATLANTIC
Here the windows open onto sky’s grazing,
Tumbling through the landscapes with ultraviolet features
And upturned eyeballs.
Brushing the chipped shoulders of 7-day lotharios,
Barking at houses and uniting in a chorus of frayed knots.
The rosy squeals of the pig pen were never far away,
Chin deep in soapy water and mimicking the superstars of daytime television.
Showers screaming.
Can we seek the relief of 2:00am blackouts?
The wilderness in two miles of personalised number plates?
I left my head treading cathedral yards,
Pondering the value of Exe.
I never liked how broad those shoulders could be.
Another flock torn into motorway stations.
Waxing gibbous and the occasional telegraph pole
Bristling with prickled declarations,
‘Untangle all the lanes and burn the views’
NOEXIT.NOEXIT.NOBALLGAMES & salvation.
Until then we’ll peruse the wristwatches and altered states of appearance,
Asking only questions, but were we ever still alive?
20/09/2020 Exeter, Devon
SEMPER EADAM
.who in the stops of 12-19 Fore St.
Shrugged off the silvery inevitable
And the bitterness
Of the glitter box granite.
Pressed with a deadpan disdain for modern life
And JAN&KEITH4EVA.
Is this the greatest thing you’ve (n)ever scene?
(Pylon to B4) A tension within the gambit,
Shaving a min. or two from the GRN root
Until ‘The End’
Preserved itself a little differently.
Over phished clouds pass like cattle,
Brewing car stock for shovel headed storeys
And increasing the chances of reign fall.
OR in constant use.
Please advise.
BAD HOMBURG ADJACENT
(…) blend ‘Blue no.5’ with screwdrivers,
It will crawl through the yards, the postcards, and heels.
Plugging holes in the carpets with its broken jawed azure,
Pondering cord progressions,
The cut ’n’ paste never (may contain salt).
From its amber lit pockets were the kwik tongues of hermits
Stitched to the din of its hot tin lining. ON SALE@public addresses.
‘Was it time to feel electric?’ – whoeveryouare
It processed the rhythms of future folklore,
Screwed another ribbon into the barking purple.
Seldomly bobbing over radio waves
And for Displaying Purposes Only.
Beyond were the fruits of circa ‘43
Ripening in the synonym: streets,
Temporarily built to last
With bottled capped receptions at the
PAYE.SLOT.CASH. Trespassers will be prosecuted.
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W/duvets in the whistle stoop,
Showers in the bistros,
Tyre tracks up the backs of lonely harts,
The wrong side of a set of showroom curtains.
Trespassers will be prosecuted
So stockpile you’re remaining darlings
//bad homburgs remain adjacent
Dazzlingly nettle skinned and wandering.
Were you just as scared as I was?