"How Long Till..."
How long do we hide
ourselves?
Do we ever come out
in the open?
Or are we just shades
in our own prison light?
I long for some truth in self,
don't you?
But with all my years learning
to be more than I am,
is there any way out?
Do I become
a boneless bore?
Can I stretch a few
rubber bands before they pop?
Gads,
this is ridiculous.
I think I'll quit for now.
See you tomorrow
when I run for president.
"The Dream Keeper"
Today I step out
to run the real race.
I hate weasels
with egos
Why can't people live
without telling lies?
I loved the first girl I ever kissed.
I know I was too young
to think of the future.
But are dreams really only dreams?
"It's Me Again"
One last song
under the full moon...
She was all I ever wanted.
More than I deserved.
But isn't that how it is?
At least in the beginning?
Only Time Will Tell
Time is nothing that can be touched
It can only measure how long love lasts
Love can not be measured by a watch on a chain
For it is timeless and is a feeling that lives or dies
My love for you was born in my heart like a child
Painful at times but grew into something beautiful
Your gentleness never fails under any circumstance
And only you understand what this heart needed
I will hold your hand through every turn in life
from this moment in time to the next
For as long as the watch on the chain keeps ticking
Like the beats of our hearts, only time will tell
how long you should wait for me…
Things Two Hearts Left Unread
We walk the same road every day
You walking one way and I another
We need rarely to ever speak when we pass
because we can read each other’s looks
What is never said speaks the loudest
We know what is there, and what is not
You poke at me and I play along
I get silent and make you wonder if I am mad
We play this wicked game but laugh under our breaths
But we do complement each other like the butterfly and flower
I have written these feelings down many times
Although, many times have I had to rewrite them
I need not brag to any friends but keep quiet
about things that two hearts left unread.
I Will Now Tell You
I always want to be the blooming flower of
the glittering touch within your dreams
Like an illuminating fairy that enters the forest of your thoughts
Do not be bothered by the poems that now vanish
because beautiful thoughts of hope have now replaced
your hopeless hopes of sadness which used to plague you
Your river of love now flows in rhythm with mine
as joyous waves become like a fierce storm of passion between us
The hue of my form is like the blood that pumps through my veins
which I now use to write our eternal story of love.
The secretive story of two lovers forever tied together by fate.
Kristy Raines was born in Oakland, CA, USA. She is a poet, writer, author and advocate. She has five books getting ready to publish soon, one with a prominent poet from India which will launch hopefully soon called, "I Cross my Heart from East to West", two fantasy books of her own called, "Rings, Things and Butterfly Wings" and "Princess and The Lion", an anthology of poems in English, "The Passion Within Me" and her autobiography called "My Very Anomalous Life." Kristy has received many literary awards for her unique style of writing.
“Things Unintelligible but Understood”:
lines from Wallace Stevens, a found poem
Consider the odd morphology of regret
Note the decline of music
The grapes are here and now
Starry voluptuary will be born
At least the number of people may there be fixed
There is no such thing as innocence in autumn
Machine within machine within machine
The cabinet of a man gone mad
No man shall see the end
Naturalized: Lines from Hala Alyan’s, The Moon Turns Back:
a found poem
He plays devil’s advocate.
May father plays soccer.
In dreams I am in Nevada.
Half-life in exile.
I’m not your side bitch.
Those fucking K-Mart towels when did we
give them away?
I loved them.
Pink as slaughter.
You can’t put a corpse back together again.
I type all the metaphors I can.
I can’t keep pretending to love.
Patti Smith Photo Album #1
Mundane objects imbued
with deep, personal meaning:
Bolano’s writing chair,
Hesse’s decrepit writing machine,
Virginia Woolf’s tarnished
walking stick,
Jim Carroll’s narrow, single bed,
Fred Smith’s recovered childhood toy;
all their owners gone. A woman
with a camera remembers.
736-
Spy of the First Person. Patti Smith
and her day book. Sam’s Old KY home
Adirondack chairs on the back lawn
facing the hills. Empty now.
737-
Patti Smith punk rock star or
stay at home mom. Surrealistic
pillow maker or Rimbaud re-
incarnated. As a woman
Collector of memories. Just Us
Kids or a museum of dead things.
On the M Train. Or off.
Babel or Coral Beach. I. She.
Contains multitudes.
Patti Smith Polaroid Sequence Nov/Dec
Pasolini Monument: two doves intertwined in stone
Genet’s A Man Contemplating Death on Mapplethorpe’s
Birthday: A Still Life
Editing Sam Shepard’s last manuscript
A white horse head in Wales
Dylan Thomas’s grave with plain wooden cross
Rimbaud’s elaborate headstone
Sharing coffee with ghosts of Camus, Sartre, and Simone
in the Gallimard garden
A solitary bird sings of the death of Proust
Jim Carroll’s well-thumbed Penguin paperback of Schulz’s
Street of Crocodiles
The bound twig broom used to sweep dying leaves from
Mishima’s grave
Sam Shepard’s Depression era Gibson
Puccini’s composition piano
Photo of Rosa Parks Dec 1, 1955
Joan Didion: pure writer
The guardian angel near the grave of Bertolt Brecht
Patti Smith at the interval contemplating Tosca:
“ I have lived for art, for love.”
A letter in the hand of Emily Dickinson
Dante’s headstone
Zappa’s ‘Hot Rats’ album cover
Ralph Fiennes on the set of Coriolanus
The ruins of Hadrian’s library
After Reading Burchfield: December Moonrise, #8
Flat saucer shaped clouds in gray
blue sky are pocked by puncture wounds
shining bright as fallen stars or creatures
like birds of another species. Irradiated
seeds sprout plants that only bloom at
night. Moonrise over distant hills make
the landscape more unreal than it already
seems to be.
Blistered cones of light
where the moon
should be
the humans come out
& so do a few loud crows
after the snowstorm
—
tail end of winter
pretty warm in the sunlight
too cold in the shade
—
green buds have appeared
on Mom’s lilac hedge out front
first full day of spring
—
two deer & then three
in someone’s yard on Iris
missed the bus again
—
slept all day & night
I wake up past eleven
disoriented
—
bio/graf
J. D. Nelson’s poems have appeared in many publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of eleven print chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including *purgatorio* (wlovolw, 2024). Nelson’s first full-length collection is *in ghostly onehead* (Post-Asemic Press, 2022). Visit his website, MadVerse.com, for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
and we all know whose fault it was
ask her if she fools around, if you
can get her number, and
she laughs, and you ask if she has any x,
if she has a friend who puts out and
get it where you can, right? and it sure as shit
wasn’t creeley who told me that,
wasn’t cirino or eliot, cuz all the fucking
poets ever did was lie
all that asshole tony ever did was
keep the acid for himself, and it was your father
who taught you how to pull the trigger,
sure,
but he would never let you
take the blindfold off
would never tell you who you’d hit
and he had that guitar autographed
by pettibon, had that girlfriend your mother
never found out about, and did you
cry when he died?
did you go through his pockets
of his sunday jeans
looking for cash or a credit card?
and i remember you kept telling me he
owed you something, but you were
always a pussy, always thought you were
missing out
always thought the future was
just around the corner
said you wanted to be ready for the
moment that would change everything,
but the moment had already
come and gone
no religion
my whole life spent waiting for
everything to go wrong, and i end in this
house, on this day, setting fire to the
past while the roof collapses
i end up too old to die young,
and with mixed emotions about it
i end up terrified of the fact
that i might not live forever
that i might end up nothing more
than the person i’ve become
defacer’s blues
and all the pretty girls dead of
accidental overdoses, and all the
parties you were supposed to
meet them at
the ones where you show up alone
already drunk and stoned,
where you fade into the darkest corner,
and it’s a gift, always being the
ugliest person in the room
it’s a thankless job traveling everywhere
with a shovel and a holy book,
with a can of gasoline and a book of matches,
but none of these corpses are
going to take care of themselves
none of your freedoms are going to
last forever, and it always feels strange
pretending to give a shit
about the state of the world because,
seriously,
what the fuck are you possibly
going to do to stop war,
to put an end to starvation
or genocide?
who are you going to kill to
assure the rest of us a
lifetime of peace?
seems like you should’ve
thought of something
by now
in the garden of dying stars
or junkie truth,
which is not the truth
a victim’s idea of power
grey sun in a grey sky
and this old man sleeping in his
hospital bed looks like me,
like my father,
like the spaces that grow between us,
and hope matters,
of course,
but let’s not fuck around here
the false king is a dead man
the poet without a gun
really has nothing to offer
and i remember telling you this on
the day before your lover’s suicide,
and i remember all of the reasons
you gave for hating me
i remember silence
young boy crying in the middle of
main street, and
then the scream of brakes
only a small loss,
right?
gotta look at the bigger picture
gotta build better bombs
the poor can take care of themselves,
and tough shit if they can’t
no one starves in
a nation of corpses
no one needs god
when a holy man can
fuck them just as good
understand this, and you might
just turn out okay
[we danced to save them all]
this boy with the knife in his throat thinks he
has something to say,
but he is beyond words
he is a prince and a king and a corpse,
and we are all trying to
forget his name here in the kingdom of nil
we are tell his sister
we love her
we are telling her she belongs in movies,
but she won’t take her clothes off for us
she won’t get in the back seat
and the blood is on our hands,
is in our smiles and our dreams, and
none of the bibles we’re given ever
have anything intelligent to say
none of the children
playing out in the streets
have parents
none of them have homes
and the soldiers laugh as they hand out candy,
and they laugh as they open fire because
no one can ever get revenge if
no one is left alive
no one sings as sweetly
as the hangman’s latest lover
no one’s life ever ends up
being worth very much at all
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in compassionate nihilism which, as luck would have it, has all the best bands. His published collections include NO ONE STARVES IN A NATION OF CORPSES (2020 Analog Submission Press) and THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY THIS IS GOING TO END (Cyberwit, 2023).
Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, Kingfisher, and Presence. His first full-length collections of poetry Bathtub Poems and Funny Pages were just released by Setu and Meat For Tea press, and a mixed media chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Yavanika.
Shane Coppage is an emerging writer with a fine arts degree. His words have been published in Humana Obscura, Cold Moon Journal, The Japan Society London, Shadow Pond Journal, and The Winged Moon Magazine. Connect with him on Instagram @shane_coppage.
Marjorie Pezzoli is a silk painter for 25+ years, visual artist, storyteller, and poet. Her writings deal with grief, hope, cosmic wonders, and stuff that catches her eye. Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies since 2019. Many of her writings are inspired by her photographic observations taken while walking Beau, the dog with Betty Davis eyes. Marjorie looks for words that are worth a thousand images. wwwPezzoliart.com
A hazy familiar abstraction....
Like a decoupage painting
Designed as a distraction
Like watching you dreaming...
Mesmerized by a wistful whiff of
Melancholy and underlying yearning
for the joy of a blossoming aliveness.
You, a relay of impressionist painter Claude Monet
All while in the deep end of steep sleep;
I was transfixed and transported in your succoring still,
Even if for a sparkly shine of a firefly
Nestled in the arms of the numbing night,
Like the brevity of life itself...beautifully rendered
Even if only in your dream state;
Until daylight swallows the night
And dreams come AWAKE!
Jacques Fleury
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc…He has been published in prestigious publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him here.
