Poetry from John Grochalski

Posted on 10/01/2017 by Synchronized Chaos

the brunch people

the brunch people

are lining saint marks place

on an early sunday afternoon

the brunch people women wear cute little dresses

and the men wear polo shirts with the collars up

they are named becca and staci

todd and blake and kyle

and they are as boring as a parade on the fourth of july

the brunch people play on cell phones

or talk about banal things like taylor swift music

and the national football league

their voices sound like honking cars in traffic

and they never worry about hunger or war

the brunch people giggle

because they are drinking mimosas with champagne

before one o’clock in the afternoon

a few of them will be asleep by four p.m.

at least one becca or staci

will vomit on the pavement or have to fight off

the advances of one of the kyles

the brunch people love bacon and eggs

and specialty coffees that taste like mint

they love starbucks and 7-11 and dunkin

and watching from their rooftop pool parties

as people who’ve lived here for years

get their asses thrown out on the street

the brunch people take the word gentrification as a complement

they’ve started phrases “i’m not racist but…”

they were put on this earth to eat french toast

and destroy us as quickly as they can

the brunch people have college degrees

but they don’t have college debt

most of them are heading toward thirty

and their parents still pay their rent

mommy had to call blake off from his job last friday

because he was hungover from

too much partying with todd

the brunch people laugh about the mundane

throw their trash on the ground

and never really pay the cost for anything in this country

if you stopped one and asked them if they were human

i’m willing to bet you twenty dollars

most of them wouldn’t know what

in the hell to say.

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Poetry from Mike Zone

Posted on 10/01/2017 by Synchronized Chaos

Fat man profile narration

“He’s been maimed-

beyond all recognition.”

said over his corpse

but not dead

may as well be

a Hitchcock sonata

of murder most foul

carnal anatomy

with a hint of vertigo deception

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Short story from Doug Hawley

Posted on 10/01/2017 by Synchronized Chaos

Kitten on the Keys

I suppose that I should introduce myself first. I’m the famous cat Jaws, the first reanimated non-human animal. The non-human distinction is important. The Hanley family, starting with patriarch Duke who reanimated a basketball player once and his wife twice, and his son David who reanimated his girlfriend Wendy twice, used the procedure with humans first, before striking gold with me.

I say striking gold, because he makes a lot of money bringing rich people’s deceased pets back to life. I don’t want to disparage my original person Wendy too much, because we always got along, but David’s munificent animal reanimation practice has brought her much closer to him.

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Christopher Bernard’s novel Amor I Kaos: Installment 3

Posted on 10/01/2017 by Synchronized Chaos

Christopher Bernard’s Amor i Kaos (part 3)

It was almost too demeaning, she thought. To be hampered in that way despite all the options at the time. The seeming options, anyway. Because once you’ve done something, it seems as though it had always been meant to be, and so maybe the options were illusory after all. Amor fati…

—If only!

—No, really. Plus the beauty of matter, in Joubert’s lovely phrase. Because he was right, that Frenchman with the shy ambition and the small, beautiful notebook. So beautiful in its humble bravado, its bold modesty. All that clean, beautiful white space surrounding the few lovely words. No overwrought romantic windbaggery for him. But I’m drifting from the subject. Though what indeed was the subject? She looked at him with her usual skepticism. Did she love him? Maybe she did, in her peculiar way.

—My life is my hell, he told her one day. Matter-of-factly. I wish I could say I love it. I wish I could say I love you.

—Me too.

Then they parted for three days. Three weeks. Three months. Years. Decades. But not forever. They were adults. You would have thought they had learned never to be entirely sincere, that was what got young people always into so much trouble, the infatuation with “honesty,” no relationship will last five minutes of complete that.

—Apparently not.

—And so they tormented one another with their precious truth. You are my hell. A Sartrean proverb! And no one can leave hell. You see the problem.

But that meant nothing. Never even turned a hair. Minimally extant as it was. The withers unwrung, the moist appeal in the gathered vats, the wayward affront. The absolute right to one’s own life—to one’s own will. The boy who lived on the hill came to that conclusion one afternoon in the fall, as he was walking through the tall, yellowed hay at the edge of the field that bordered his family’s property. It was startlingly true. Nobody, but nobody, had a right to deprive him of his will. Nobody had a right to force him to sacrifice his will to anyone else, to a group, country, class, religion. They might have the power, the legal right, but they had no moral right. In that discovery lay his strength. His right to his will was absolute; this would become his moral compass.

—It should have turned him into a monster, acknowledged the portly man.

But no: just as no one had the right to deprive him of his will, so he had no right to deprive any other person of theirs. In his will lay his meaning, his joy. That seemed logical, right. Furthermore, the joy of other people increased his joy as long as it did not clash with it, and as long as he was happy in his will; if he wasn’t, nothing was surer to enrage him. The biggest threat to his will was, in fact, other people’s suffering, their pain, and their envy (ditto, in reversion, above). And this, which struck him like a hammer blow: the greatest source of the will’s joy, even at the core of its often deep and savage pain, was the perpetually deferred desire that is love, and not only for one but for all. The will is launched in pursuit. Life begins as desire and continues as love.

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