Here people sit around Clay figure Here people are sitting inside Clay figure
(reprint by ZiN Daily)
*** We are like worms we are like worms We crawl underground * The weather forecast was for Tears instead of rain Nobody is resurrected Dahlias have blossomed In every petal a breath of air In every breath of air God was called by his patronymic They believed in God according to the national Calling a patch of unfortunate land a state a country Ripe apples in the garden Tomato juice through the veins in spring, The weather forecast deceived In spring, bones come down on the grass And nothing happens * Snow leopard in the snow Snow and wool glitter in the snow
The white bird turns into snow And jumps from a height Onto the black earth * The deaf write their songs in white night Because the deaf are sighted
In the black night they rise into the sky And recite loud lines to themselves To not scare Those who are happy (reprint by Quarterly Literary Review Singapore)
*** aluminum birds even they come back from warm countries (reprint by divot)
*** the rebellious spirit in my stomach gurgles and begs for alcohol dog catching snowflakes with tongue christmas all year round easter around the clock
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
*** This poem smells blue | | | The color of wrinkles in the sky ¶ Black shapes in clear water ∆ This verse will be picked up by crows in the morning And they will be thrown from heaven On icy concrete heart rocks ~ All in vain .
(reprint by Stone Poetry Journal)
***
The naturalization of hatred
Every day the giant boulders of the brain create little sons to atone for guilt
Are sons resurrected?
The magnolia outside the window blooms expressively quietly, as if guessing something
Anger-dictatorship
I pretend to be a god every morning over a cup of coffee
Stars-blindness
Castrated calm screams in the language of stones
Motherland of life
The taste of faith
Wrath service of the gun
Stone-ruin
Time to change clothes and pick up picks
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
***
What do you see
the inner kitten will bring the devils slippers in his teeth in the morning in exchange for
living space with Wi-Fi
what do you see being blind
the sexual joy of a mouse pressed to the floor by a cat’s paw
hate pornography with guts out
sun bunnies devoured by air wolves
What do you see
the deceased son comes every night in a dream in tears and asks to be resurrected
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
***
Kira Muratova
The film begins after the ending, when a balding virgin takes off her wig, like a fancy dress costume, and
shoves the wig into a face on the other side of the screen.
Hungry rats need to be fed body parts.
Last but not least, feed with the brain, never with the heart.
In the last turn of people today – it is necessary to make your way. No need to push your way into
people. It is better to try to become a butterfly.
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
*** Religion is a hobby club for those who have never died
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
*** The secret of the soul Secretion of guilt Who will kiss my neck and turn me into a vampire?
The dream of a soldier who will turn a gun into a sex shop toy
Who will kiss me? Nobody (reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
*** Mosquitoes fly to the scent of blood So are military pilots
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
*** There are as many explosions as there are stars in the sky Every night to underground storage and bunkers An alarm siren sounds
Life is wonderful as if it started from an egg and not from a dead chicken
(reprint by A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY)
*** Copper night knocks On the back of the head, asks: “What street is this?” And this is not a street, This is the whole life.
Here at the age Of 4 I drank sleeping pills, At 14 I lost my virginity, At 24 I lost my family, At 34 my father died (thank God, my father died).
Now I’m free like the cry of a newborn. I’m single, like when I was born. A lonely body without everything Meaningful, invented, composed. The body, by its movement forward, Has reached the very beginning. Ashes close to dust.
And suddenly the night opens its Lunar hood, and now death looks At me with its bony eyes.
“Come on, friend,” I said to death, “I hope you don’t turn me into a zombie.” The door of cast iron milk opened. And I started drinking. My teeth turned black and fell out. Birds pecked out my eyes. My body fell off me. Copper night, Pig-iron milk, golden memory. And suddenly: emptiness. (reprint by Crank)
*** We were stolen at birth and brought into this world. This world has robbed us. Cats will never again sing under the window about their nine lives in the nine circles of hell. We are no longer cats. We are no longer dogs. Only occasionally does one of us like to sit on a leash in puppy latex. We are heavy, sir. We are light, Lord, like fluff. We are airy, Lord, like chitin. We are homeless, Lord, like heaven. We are rich, Lord, like the poorest poor man. We are your angels, Lord. Wash our feet, Lord, we can’t stand you. We love you, Lord, like dogs do. We are on your leash, tied to you, Lord. We are the gods of death in your realm, Lord. Ash. The last candle for your rest in our hearts, Lord. (reprint by Crank)
*** I take a deep breath of spring air after paying for it * And when I left, There were still stars in the sky, But there was no more Earth. * the worm in my body pretends I’m not there
Starting Out
To begin, begin, beginning, beginnings
A nice word, a nice concept
Something we all have experienced
Something we all know.
We start out, we can even start again
Begin, begin again.
It’s the first step, the first mile
First move, first chapter
It’s sunrise, the beginning bell.
We step into it, things are fresh, new
Untested, untried
And yet
We know what comes next
Have lived it in so many forms.
There’s the middle where beginnings
Get to play out, drag on
Can go a number of ways, not just well
As the beginnings might have suggested
Maybe not badly.
Life has taught us that both can happen
And eventually
The sequence fills in, unravels.
There’s that beginning
Then the middle
And, of course, there is inevitably
Like right now
The end.
And Then Some
“Some” is an indefinite word
That is a pleasure to use. Say
I want some of that, and no one
Really knows how much, a sip,
A cup, a pint. They say, take
Some with you and run the risk
Of you taking more that they
Meant. “Some” also works well
In its compound forms. Say, I’ll
Be there sometime, and they will/
Might be waiting, sometime after
Five, sometime after that. It gives
Us such leeway. When I say, I left
It somewhere or someplace, they
Get to know how easily things get
Lost, the somewhere where things
Collect and remain caught in that
Indefinite world that our words can
Create. Somewhere over the rainbow,
The great somewhere, the greater
Somewhen where and when we will
Gather our indefinite, vague selves
And become something more than
The nebulous words we so often use
To cover the ambiguous lives we lead.
Forgettable
To forget, he forgets, I forget the forgotten.
It’s a matter of where it all goes.
The name of the star of that movie. It was
My favorite, but then it’s gone – a name
A whole frame of mind. My watch, my
Wallet – somewhere, distant, close up.
The forgotten are like that, away, gone to
Me. Now that you ask. You ask the author
The king, the kid who carried the story we
All loved, but I don’t remember who or even
When or where. The world we know now is
On its way into that other place, the land of
The forgotten, just slipped my mind. It’s a shuffle
Of the deck, a distraction, a slippery slope, a skip
A drop, a fumble on the five-yard line, a miss,
A mile, a search, an empty minute. Who was it?
Where did they go? When did I do that? What
Was that – the one that should have played out
So easily? Hell, they all/it is the infinitive of that
Guilty party – to forget. The he – who exactly –
Forgets, stumbles a bit, then asks. But, of course
I forget, I forgot. Then there they are, out there
Waiting there for us – all our forgotten.
new star forming
the lie he tells the masses --
slice of chorizo
Deagel's forecast
the plan they have for us
depopulation
exposing truth
alexa explains
what chemtrails are
open prison
the masses getting hooked on
SMART technologies
What do I look like to you? Don’t be shy. Do you find me attractive? Repulsive? Charming? Scary? How about determined?
Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brainard Bullion and I am a certifiable creativity coach, a conduit to the sacred hermaphroditical muse, CYN. I reside in a Long Beach, New York rental unit that offers a partial oceanfront view. My passions include somersaulting in the nude and doing unusual things with eggs. As a devoted disciple of CYN, I praxis and teach reasonable and sound enchanted thinking that invariably leads to the achievement of affirmative outcomes.
Let me offer you an example of the positive power of my sacred CYN praxis that occurred just last week. I was riding the F line subway train to Neptune Avenue when a foul smelling young man of great height boarded the train and pushed his way to the center of the car. He wore a white baseball cap with the words EAT THE RICH stitched in large lavender letters. As the young man cleared his throat, I expected him to either spit or begin an agonized plea for money.
He did neither.
Instead, he pulled out a pistol and ordered an attractive woman in Tanzanite heels to pull the emergency stop chord. After the train pummeled to a stop he began to rage how humans have become lactose intolerant because we stopped ingesting mother’s milk and replaced it with the cow milk that has made American women look like heifers and American men look like castrated bulls. “You fools! Your last glass of milk actually came from a bull,” he screamed.
When a trio of teenagers tried to rush him from behind, he shot the ringleader. He then punctuated each sentence of his memorized dairy manifesto by pointing his gun at a different rider and yelling, “Pow Cow!” While transit riders cowered and many wept, I remained calm and silently invoked the healing power of CYN. Much to my surprise, these words leapt from my throat:
“Coughing milk through your nose is one of the seven cleansing rituals of dairy yoga.” “Milkshakes are the gift from heaven that come in different flavors.”
“Life happens, honey. What are you going to do? Cry into a bowl of milk?”
Upon hearing this, the gunman shot himself.
They called me a hero, responsible for saving many lives on that train. But it wasn’t me. What saved us was CYN’s oral response to my silent desperate plea for guidance. My mouth was just used as Its vehicle of protection.
There are many creative consultants who live to milk the bank accounts of the anxious and insecure. Not me. I live to share this sacred praxis of CYN with you. I, Brainard Bullion of Long Beach, specialize in the reclamation of frustrated, disillusioned, humiliated and blocked artists suffering within all branches of the humanities. My post-graduate work in the fields of Scatology and Sanitation are the perfect precursors for my present avocation as a creative conduit to aesthetic satisfaction and artistic fulfillment.
My consultations are done exclusively through house calls because creativity must engender movement and momentum in order to succeed. Skeptics have accused me of using house calls to avoid office overhead while living off the pipedreams of others. I abhor pipedreams. I make a virtuous living as a pipefitter. I install, assemble, fabricate, maintain and repair artistic ambitions by helping artists secure airtight connections to their creative process and products. I work with an array of national and international non-profit/commercial art networks.
To begin with, I never submit an artist’s work. To submit means to be judged unfavorably as a possible non-equal. Submission is the acceptance of creative surrender. An artist must never submit to any authority except to that of CYN. I offer up a client’s work to prospective dealers, curators, producers and publishers in the same spirit one offers up a gift –as an enticement for pleasure, prosperity and affable enlightenment.
I first came to understand the unique powers of CYN’s gift of individualized creativity when I was a young child who still believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. A CYN inspired epiphany occurred one Christmas Eve while I was playing a Wise Man in our Church’s annual Christmas pageant. While in bearded costume bowing and presenting a gift to the baby Jesus in the manger, tears suddenly spilled down my face and I wept so loudly Pastor Weber had to pull me off stage. After the church service ended I was brought to the sacristy and given cookies and coco while the pastor, my parents and the Sunday School teachers who supervised the pageant tried to calm me and discover why I was so upset.
In between sobs I told them I could no longer believe a wise man could ever be joyous over Jesus’ birth and that anyone who says Merry Christmas, throws parties, decorates trees, strings lights and exchanges gifts all in celebration of this infant must be a cruel liar. Why is everyone so jubilant to see this baby born? Just three months later comes Easter and this baby is a grown man who is mocked, betrayed, tortured and murdered in a most excruciatingly sadistic manner that ends with his broken body tossed into a stranger’s grave. Ho! Ho! Ho!
Instead of acknowledging my precocious Yuletide insight into raw truth they became upset and told me it all had to do with sin. My sin. And then I was slapped into a decade of psychotherapy. But unbeknownst to my parents, one of my shrinks practiced Reiki therapy, which means “spiritually guided life force energy.” Reiki involves the passing of energy from a trained Reiki practitioner’s body to the client’s body as a method of healing. This Reiki practitioner used a series of established hand positions as a means for allowing energy to move freely between her body and mine. That’s when CYN first formally introduced themself to me and I learned how most people corrupted CYN’s name because of their fear of visionary thinking and so chose to misspell it and interpret it as sin in order to obliterate Its healing, mystical properties of unique contemplative thought always turns into affirmative action.
I’m currently working with a client who is a prolific and accomplished fine arts photographer. Not too many years ago she was a widely exhibited and published winner of multiple N.E.A. artist grants as well as a recipient of highly competitive residencies at both Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies. However, for more than a decade her work has been completely ignored and she’s become dangerously despondent. When we met she presented me with a shocking proposal.
My client is a purist who refuses to succumb to digital photography and give up the excitement of her darkroom discoveries. However, film and chemicals are just too expensive and spatially she can’t afford the extra room in which to develop her photographs. Her last two agents dropped her when they insisted she needed to create art videos based on her images in order to revive her photographic career. She abhors video art, claiming they are mostly repetitive, appropriated images and soundtracks sans the fingerprints of a personal humanity. Her proposition was for me to help her complete her first and final art video that will chronicle the soul crushing loss of her artistic voice. She engaged me to help her conceptualize and create the world’s first artistic suicide snuff film, a final ironic protest against the cruel indignity of her cultural neglect. She was determined to kill herself on camera in a most powerfully imaginative manner. Her expectation was that her video would be her swan song that would fly into international galleries and museums, thus avenging her neglected and rejected late period artist life.
Upon hearing her goal, some may call me crass as I always accept checks and credit cards, but I amended this policy and insisted she pay me cash up front. I thought her project cutting edge and I immediately came up with a conceptual title for her terminal performance video, Sentenced to Death by the Muse. She loved it, but a few days later my conscience got the better of me, as well as fear of the legal implications of assisting a suicide.
When I tried to talk her out of filming her suicide and change course for her first and final art video, she was defiantly adamant that the reason for her taking such a drastic, innovational lethal action was “the lost echo of my uniquely artistic voice.”
Hmmmm. The loss of her artistic voice? She claimed not being able to afford print photography supplies, a dark room and the total lack of art world attention to her work the loss of her Artistic Voice? That kind of thinking is irrational and is most certainly not to die for.
Thanks to the intervention of CYN, I was able to explain to her the scientific conceit developed by physicists that sound waves never disappear. Sound waves spread out and get weaker and weaker until they just about disappear and that’s when they transform into thermal energy units that are eternal. According to this highly respected theory, we are surrounded by the voices of every word that’s ever been spoken by both the living and the dead, but we can’t hear them because the ultimate sensitive listening device has yet to be invented. Thankfully, after much debate she finally accepted my proposition.
Using this concept, I sketched out a new video I called Babel On And Off White to be shot within Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery’s kinetic landscape of funereal monuments and sculptural ossuary patinas.
The goal of this new artwork is to have the viewer experience what I call a seduction from the graveyard dead who are excited and impatient to recruit mortals into their powerful and extremely vocal eternal community choir. This terminal seduction will be achieved by inducing a kind of video viewer trance rooted in an escalating aural and visual cemetery cacophony. This rising dissonance approximates an ethereal heart attack by allowing her viewers to pass over into the world of the dead when the jarring crescendo of flashing funereal sculptural images and the humming, hissing, screeching garble of overlapping voices abruptly ends when the screen is suddenly filled with a silent, blazing white. There are dead in this art video but in my updated version, thank CYN it isn’t the artist herself.
We were recently notified that Babel On And Off White has been short listed as a finalist for the prestigious and lucrative Alfred B. Sloan Foundation Grant, awarded to artists who seek to build bridges between the two cultures of science and the humanities in order to develop a common language to better understand and speak to one another.
So, how may I be of service to you?
Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the flash fiction collection, ‘Hunger Pains’ (Buttonhook Press).
Dario Saraceno originally hails from Ripacandia, Italy, and is a professional musician, actor, and author of the guitar method book, The Shape Remains the Same. His band, Dario and the Clear has opened for John Entwistle, Leslie West, The Alarm, Pat Travers, and Warren Zevon.
Pompidou
On a September afternoon in 1986, under a sunny Paris sky, my brother, Dorian, and I walked into a BNP bank to open a student account. We had arrived from New York that morning, jet lagged and weary.
I was in my senior year of college, taking a semester abroad. Dorian was 36 and had decided to come with me and stay for my first few days.
The mood in Paris was tense. There had been a string of bombings in crowded places, and the French police were armed, suspicious, and everywhere. They seemed just as threatening as the terrorists, with their machine guns slung over their chests and their fingers resting on the trigger.
I was glad Dorian was with me. But even though we just arrived, I couldn’t stop thinking that he was going to leave. This was the longest time I would be away from home. Queens College was a commuter school, and I lived with my parents. When I had suggested going away to college, my parents acted like there was something wrong with me. This semester abroad was supposed to be my chance at independence. Now it seemed like it might be very lonely.
We had come to Paris a month before my classes were to start because I had to take a French language proficiency exam in order to enroll in the university. French was my first language and the language Dorian and I used when I was a child. Our parents were from Lebanon and spoke French and Arabic and sometimes a mixture of the two. The exam was scheduled for the next day.
At the bank there was a long line. I told Dorian I wished he could stay in Paris with me. I told him I was worried because after he left, I was going to have a lot of time on my own, without any opportunity to meet other students. I pleaded with him, working myself into a panic.
The line at the bank was moving by small increments. I sat on the marble floor with all the other students from overseas, waiting my turn. Dorian said, “I’m going to take a walk.”
The line snaked endlessly, and when I was finally near the front, Dorian reappeared. “Les, come here for a second.” He wanted me to meet someone.
I was afraid I’d lose my place, so Dorian turned to the guy behind me and unfurled his French, which was better and smoother than mine. Rolling his rs, he asked him to hold my spot, and then he took my arm and led me back to the lobby.
There was Terence, the one he wanted me to meet. He was a student, like me. He went to Parsons School of Design. He was stylish in a Duran Duran kind of way. Dorian had met him the year before, taking Chinese classes at the New School.
After the introduction, I turned to leave.
“Wait,” Dorian commanded. “Exchange numbers.” I glared at him, and he said, “You’ve been bothering me all day about not having any friends.”
I blushed and got out a pen, my hair falling into my eyes. I told Terence I didn’t know anyone in Paris. He said he had traveled from New York with his classmates and arrived with his social life intact. This made me ache for my two best friends in Queens.
Terence and I were both renting rooms in someone’s apartment, so it was going to be tricky to get in touch with each other. We scribbled our phone numbers as fast as we talked, and I said, “Nice to meet you,” and ran back to the line, hoping I hadn’t missed my turn.
The next afternoon, I was seated in a room on a high floor of an old building, taking the language placement exam. More than halfway through the test, there was a loud explosion that shook the floor and our desks. The proctor was startled, but after a few long moments instructed us to continue with the exam. Minutes later, sirens blared. We weren’t let go until we’d completed the test.
All of us filed down the stairs. As I stepped out into the rainy night, I saw a commotion nearby. I saw people running. A five-and-dime store called Tati had been bombed. I learned from the people around me that five were dead, women and children, with dozens wounded. I dug my hands into my pockets and walked in the opposite direction, wishing I could speak to my parents, conjuring their voices in my head.
A few days later it was time for Dorian to leave. I begged him to stay just another day, then I went with him to the airport and watched him go. “You’d better write me,” I shouted. “I will,” he said.
When I got back to my apartment, the landlady snarled, “Quelqu’un a sonner pour toi,” and handed me a paper with her scrawled writing. It was a message from Terence. It said, “Party tonight,” with an address.
I put on my jeans with the flower applique on one thigh, my tan cowboy boots and my brown leather bomber jacket and took the Metro to my destination. Depeche Mode’s “Never Let
Me Down Again” could be heard a block before I got to the building. The sounds of New York accents ricocheting through the stairwell made me take the steps two at a time. There were many people my age, all potential new friends. They were more fashionable and sophisticated than my friends back home, drinking and swaying to the music. Cigarette smoke hovered above everyone’s heads.
I wandered around the crowded apartment looking for Terence.
Someone was writing on a large paper taped to the wall. As I stood next to him, he handed me the pen. I wrote, “Dear Terence, I couldn’t find you. Leslie.” I stayed a little longer, bopping my head to the music; I danced with a boy with spiked studs on his shoes and then went home.
Soon after, Terence left another message with my landlady for me to meet him at Place Saint Michel that night. He was already waiting when I arrived, wearing a long wool coat. We found a table in a tiny cave-like restaurant, and he told me that he had been in Tati when it was bombed. He had been buying a radio and cassette player when it happened. His hands were shaking as he described the scene, the dead, all the blood. How he got out. Then he said, “I just wanted to go back home. Part of me still does.” He was near tears when he said this last part.
After a long silence, I said, “Why did you take Chinese lessons?” He explained that although he was Chinese, he didn’t speak the language. He giggled, and it was infectious, and we both had a good laugh. We finished dinner and stepped out to the street. “Okay,” he said, “let’s meet next Tuesday in front of the Pompidou Center, say 6 o’clock?” He raised his eyebrows.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Beauty Is Where You Find It
We went to the art museum
But the art museum was closed.
My stomach hurts, and outside the clouds
Sit somewhere while I look at my phone.
That’s not art.
