Roadrunner v. Coyotes

He parted the blinds.
It was still a desert out there.
The sign he’d put up, INTERCOURSE WITH A STRANGER- FREE COFFEE…had gone unanswered.

The room he had was the best in the house as it was located kitty-corner from the motel office which was connected to the gas station which in itself contained a fair amount of food, plenty gas (obviously) and was pretty well stocked with what he would need for years, especially if he had another one of those episodes again.
However, living among this bounty of microwavable cheeseburgers along with gallons of subpar coffee and a wide variety of cigarettes to accelerate his way towards death, he would starkly wonder how long had this kingdom been abandoned?

The only times he encountered other humans was when he patrolled the border. 
No vehicles had ever stopped by in all his months of living here.
He smashed all the mirrors in the rooms, one day when the violent heat of the moment unleashed something stomach churning yet thunderous from his mortal belly. 
After what he did even though it was with good cause, he could no longer face himself in a reflective surface, incapable of fully accepting the beast who masqueraded as the man…the man on the road.

Those were the times he was happiest.
Out on the blacktop into the desert where the real road was.
Along with the coyotes hunted.
Tricksters running the numbers game. A nonzero logic resulting in exploitation and death with minimal profit afforded to these animals scratching out a meager existence.
A fury of dust in the distance caught his attention. 
It would be instant coffee today and a few hits of peanut butter off the knife to start the day in higher gear than usual. He looked at the hammer stuck in the wall, now well over a week. He pulled it effortlessly from the cheap drywall and flung it on the floor, seeing that bits of bone, hair and meat were still the residents of the spattered collective.

He lit a cigarette as he drank his instant coffee nude. 
Nothing better than a smoke and naked coffee drinking, even if it tasted like boiled chalk.  
He felt that in a former life, some woman or even non-binary companion would compliment how the orange plastic mug accentuated his olive tone getting darker for desert days.
He never used to kill coyotes.
Nor had he taken any joy from it.
Until the hammer incident.

It already had been an upsetting scorcher of a day, but he could never fully justify the use of the hammer nor the shrill howling that ensued from the beast’s mouth akin to maniacal laughter.
The coyote’s particular name had been King Cock. Cock or rooster was a common name among coyotes. This one had slain the rest of the “roosters” for the most part in a display of unnatural dominance in which the only beak and set talons ravaging the henhouse would King Cock’s fangs and claws.
	“Beep, beep!”

Were the words, he seemingly heard as he delivered the deathblow to the coyote which caused him to question reality, pondering how much of this was actually real and imagining a time he used to pray and what it meant and how, even if he truly believed in anything none of it would have made a difference.
Coyotes like King Cock would still exist. 
Men left abandoned and dying of thirst would still be cooking from the inside, making love to cacti as their lovers and daughters would be ravaged and dismembered before reaching the promised land. 

Bodies left headless and nude. 
Limp. Like many a hen.
KING COCK “You know, Roadrunner…this reminds me of a joke.
Roadrunner had raised the hammer over the bound figure up against the office wall.
KING COCK “Actually, everything has been reminding me of a joke…children with cancer, decapitated teenage hotties, poor chumps boiling inside from the sun on the hot sand-“
THWACK!

King Cock, undeterred. Spat blood. Grinned.
KING COCK “So what did the hooker say when her head got-“
THWACK!
Eye socket cracked. A few loose teeth. Manic gaze. Unhindered.
KING COCK “…blown off?”
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! 

Until there was just a jaw and shoulders were dislocated.
Roadrunner sat in silence.
Covered in blood, guts and skeleton fragments. 
He wondered what color his hair color used to be, and would it still look the same once the gore and excess grime had been shampooed from it.
He sat like that until sundown.
Sunrise and sundown again.

So what did the hooker say after she got her head blown off?
The world was falling.
People still crossed the border from some kind of hell in the stillborn belief that angels protected America. 
He vowed never to take dreams away from the people living nightmares.
Any dream worth dreaming was a dream worth fighting for.
Did he say that?
Was it his grandfather or something from a movie?

The 1970 Plymouth Roadrunner drove like flowing water, the 940-horsepower engine sounded like hell breathing fire. A sun faded black with speckles of exposed primer much like the bird’s feathers it was named after. Oversized tires with lethal rims for flattening tires or people along with a protruding battering ram in place of a bumper akin to a warlike beak improving speed through aerodynamics. 
He was called Roadrunner, but this was the real Roadrunner.
The driver’s side was insulated from the rest of the car, in a queer booth that was once referred to as being “death proof” as long as you were driving…the passengers or anyone else in the trunk…not so good.

DRIVER “We are on the road Roadrunner! We’re running!”
ROADRUNNER “No need to shout Billy-Jack, I am everywhere.”
The hastily constructed mock AI replied to the driver who had an affinity for the lost years of television and cinema.
Billy-Jack/Roadrunner, he never thought of himself as either of those. 
Just a man in a leather jacket and jeans with a simple sawed-off shotgun and chainsaw. 

Today it was sans jacket and a woven poncho instead like an oil burning Sergio Leone anti-hero. He drove toward the glint he saw moments ago to find nothing but desolation until something or rather plural something rose from the sand…humanoid shapes tied together in masks, hands behind their backs with heads down. 
He slammed the brakes.
Too late.
The car hit someone. 

Meat cracked, organs crushed, and wet snapping noises invades his ears before the explosions occurred.
The car flew in the air and landed on the passenger’s side. 
Luckily for him, the “death proof” booth was actually death proof. There would be bruises.
He surveyed what he could.
The hit were already dead. Corpses as landmines. Entrapment.

More things less than noble and more wicked headed his way. Head to toe denim, gasmasks and welding masks, brandishing cutting torches, tire-irons, some sort of industrial saw and small power generator held by two others. One crazy figure stood over him, a rotting hallowed out pig head as a mask, clad in denim longhair with bullets tied in them. He pumped his gun.
Ears ringing. Sparks flying. 
The coyotes would have vengeance.
Pulled out, he tried to remain limp. 
A barrel shoved against his rectum proved he wasn’t unconscious.

Something, with pointed ears and a snout was placed in front of him or rather it rode in front of him. Flanked by more masked individuals in fire-retardant suits holding transparent shields around it. A corpulent figure in a motorized wheelchair, army fatigues and an oversized paper mâché Coyote head.
They called him KING COYOTE. 

There were a lot of kings in this land of insane kings.
A mad king was something to be afraid of but a mad king with a vendetta with command over the nomadic criminals with a sinister sense of order was like hell erupting through the earth and not stopping. It wasn’t just about halting human trafficking, the king who had put in his motorized throne by the Roadrunner which had decimated his original throne months ago. 

KING COYOTE “Roadrunner, it is now time to die, yes?”
He gestured to the men holding the generator who grabbed Billy-Jack and held him with his arms outstretched like a martyr. 
Pig-head placed the barrel of his weapon underneath his victim’s chin, while a welder who used the torch to help open the driver’s side door placed in the white-hot flame near his sternum.
KING COYOTE “A hero’s death intrigues. A hero’s death offers us power. Head or heart? What shall we reap of first, hero?”
He wasn’t hero. He didn’t know what he was only that he was going to die, and no one would remember him and then the Earth began to shake…
The ground gave way as if hallow.

The Roadrunner, both man and car were swallowed into darkness along with those on the opposite side of the shields.
There was screaming and tearing sounds. Gunshots. Teeth sinking into something and someone speaking in tongues and hissing.
He couldn’t move, too broken and disoriented but he had landed on something soft. A sensual naked thigh from under a green dress glided over his chest. He looked up at the loveliest yellow eyes he had ever seen, and raven hair on the copper skinned woman who flicked out a serpentine tongue.

“Coyote Trickers pay homage to the reptiles of the desert. I am the Venom-Queen, you are my consort. My prize. My property.”
Being dead would wait another day.

Junkyard lyrics

i
The memories jerked up, 
so the butterflies flies intact
out of the raging fire

into your innocent catch

pours over your fears,

it's a moment of doubt
encased desires mount further

drying in the sunlight 
of your quiet innocence

wanting more of their less,
another history phased

& each history recognizes
more of only what it destroyed,

the old pleasure
repeated measures

Of unexplained things.

Hypnotized lyrics
of synchronized chaos.

The chaos’s embraces

Like hitting a thousand times
by a rocketing ice.

ii
The first Alago word I lost
was 'elayaba'.
The word for there's more, I think.
Silent more. The more in a smile. 
The more in the tears I gave to my Allah
The day he took my mother.

Little more for my prayers than mouth, 
more doubt fleeing my eyes again
more remembrance of memories.

iii

In the moonless anthology
of African contemporary poetry

flowers with the body of stone
talks
have blood
& it pours like champagne gases

It's a synchronized chaos.

The government have ears in poetry.

Eight four soldiers battling terrorist
that stripped off their uniforms
throw away guns
& any military resemblance
& flee 

Celebrates surviving a masked war
after being dismissed.

In a war, right, they say,
lives near wounds, scars & grave.

In this type of synchronized chaos

Pulling what was lost
out of the death is impossible.




Deration

God's anguish derails down further
through the faults in his perfect system.

The Angel would come in flesh like a man
& the vultures would ask to be eaten.

Our tired tomorrows are taking a risk,
Ghosts too are taking a risk of coming back.

The mechanical beasts of the West strikes.
Things are quickening towards the grave.

The sun goes down quiet with hundreds
The memories rises as non-glitter sun

Yesterday, with a room for all chained us, 
Its mystery slices us under its charms.

Heaven glitters in the alphabet of Devil's name
& God became the cracked holes into the hell.

All are welcome to attend the Hayward Lit Hop, a multi-venue literary reading at 3pm Saturday April 30th, coinciding with and continuing after Hayward’s first youth poet laureate award ceremony. Several Synchronized Chaos contributors will read from their work.

Welcome, readers, to Synchronized Chaos’ second April issue, To Know We’re Alive. This issue explores ‘signs of life’ of many kinds, creative and emotional and intellectual as well as physical.

Michael Robinson relates his faith journey and in honor of this weekend’s Easter celebration of resurrection and new life. John Culp asserts his spiritual wellness and his choice to stand with what’s good. Stephen Jarrell Williams shares gentle odes to love, writing, and the next

John Thomas Allen leads us through a semi-urban nocturnal trek amid the cicadas and beer cans and metallic moonlight. Dan Raphael ponders existence and observation from a distance in a variety of domestic and ordinary settings.

Mahbub discusses lively characters: birds in flight, soccer player Diego Maradona, people of the world embracing in peace. He pleads for people to come together in harmony and also to show special care for those in need, such as the frail and lonely elderly.

Denis Emorine celebrates the rich heritage of Russian culture and urges us not to equate all of it with Putin’s contemporary aggression. Chimezie Ihekuna celebrates the dedication and honor of a soldier who has chosen to put service to their country above their own desires.

J.J. Campbell brings us our monthly theme, mentioning how pain is often a medical clue that a person is still with us. His work explores heartbreak, disillusionment, and the vague unease of watching news of a distant war.

Howie Good sends up vignettes of trauma observed from a distance, of how the passage of time, space, and culture renders inhumanity mundane. Brian Fugett renders trauma half a world away into a symphonic metaphor, pondering what it means to bee the audience to events that kill children.

Gabriel T. Saah paints a pastel photo of a gentle village beachside love, along with the drama of driving in the rain. Santiago Burdon also depicts love, at nighttime, in a hypnotic sentence replete with moonlight, street lamps, and scented magnolia blossoms.

Yusuf Salisu Muhammad celebrates his love for his mother in a piece full of visceral images: food, the home, and his body. Gerald Onyebuchi renders love through Biblical psalm imagery, adding a historical, cultural, and spiritual dimension to his romantic yearnings.

Please enjoy and find comfort and inspiration in this month’s issue.

Broken Poets

Alone in a locked room
window bars rusted
unmade bed against the wall
dripping faucet in the dimly lit bathroom

someone slamming a door down the hall
a thumping from the ceiling
forgetting yesterday with the outside wind
nighttime shadows already closing in

sitting in the corner on the only chair
beside a tiny desk handmade wood
an open notebook filled with words
lines of poetry endless in thoughts

they laughed at you when you were a kid
wrinkles on your forehead and closed mouth
only a few poets are known by name
but you are blessed and will never change.



Never Forgetting

In this quiet
night

soft on your back
remembering

the past
horizons
caressing
sighs

oceans away
but waves coming near
rhythmic
with her beside you

sand and salt
smooth beach
laughter and tears
never forgetting

the touch
of her
tender hand

with you
all those years.



Her Last Words

Heaven so near
to us,
we can touch it.

Diego Maradona, A Wonder of the World

Diego Maradona, a name of charisma, the famous football player of the world
Today and tomorrow will ever flow on - to you, to me and for all
Whenever the ball touches his feet, the rhythmic passing can't but charm 
Though the striker all the time circled round by four or five opposite players
Ran so swift with the ball to the goal post in an instant leaving behind all 
And the whole stadium fascinated with the sound 'Goal' ---- in the blink of an eye
Technique of passing with the ball always made the audience spell-bound
Even his throwing by the hand to the goal once judged as 'The God's hand'
What a striker! What a magician!
In the field of The World Cup Football
What a magic playing! How charismatic in dealing with the ball!
Though went away very soon from his earth
Can we say he is no more in the field of The World Cup Football?

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
05/01//2021

The Tough Loving Cup
 
The heat caused deaths by corona
More violent than the heat causing deaths by gratuitous violence
From this different guise of destruction
People hang on the fate for mutual submission
Of course, we can't blame our predecessors for this
The skin disease of white and black
For what is happening today or happened in the past
In this garrulous world suffocated by the smoky, enigmatic form of work
Like the car in a dizzying speed or guarding the buildings like a Dobermann
Where is the loving cup?
Can we sip in the Holy Grail?
Though the curling smoke mounts high in the morning, evening or midnight cup
The woods are burning; the land submerged by   
Everyday every moment in the light, shade or dark. 

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
05/01//2021


The Flapping Bird

The bird is flapping standing still over head
Like the plane before landing on the ground
Jerking the body and the people inside
This is the sky the bird flies free 
Take rest on its feather and fly again
Is it watching my black-haired head or something other for a particular thing?
Different species of birds possesses different ways of flying
Compared to body, strength or taste
According to God's will
But all fly free to the own
That acts on the human brain and search for the new
In this evening when the sun is just going to set with its round red charm
Reflecting on the mind in bond of love
The bird snatched me away to the wonder of the nature's diversity
I fly over where the bird can't.
 
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
07/01//2021


The Sign of Love

Let the sky be open
From the hazy and crazy mood of the universe
Let the passion be for beauty
From the morning to the evening
Let the moon kiss on
From all sorts of pain and suffering
Let love be for each other free from any danger
From one corner of the earth to the other
The sun shines on flowers
Blooming the smile of all faces
Let tyranny and oppression be stopped
Singing all in harmony the sweet note of birds
Let peace cuddle on everybody irrespective of cast, color or creed
Removing the snake tamed in the palace causing so many deaths
Let shake hands to each other and embrace to die for each other
Can you see the sign of love hung on the wall? - The heart!

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
07/01//2021

The Old Home

Life cries on the bend of the river
The flow of the river halts, when life falters
A great relationship we find in between life and river 
Streaming from an unknown power
Rivers dry up- sand and sand -the bottom and the surface 
Life walks -life burns, life dives in quicksand
The sandy river turns into a hot spot
The green leafy trees fade away
 Life from on to the other
Life appears to be a skull, a living dead on the flowing blood
Why do the sons and daughters leave the parents?
Why is the blood cut off from its blood's stream?
Why power and pelf lead the rational being to the path of blindness
Forgetting the nourishment and the caress in childhood?
The old in no way walk to The Old Home
A woman lying on bed paralyzed and senseless
Roaring in pain for bed sore in the back
The old coming here were unknown to each other before 
So close now and very near and dear to each other
From the long journey of life, all seem to be a love bird singing altogether
Or like the weathered green glittering in the sun after the rain 
Rolling water into my eyes
Life is like the flying rain with its different means and ways disappears very soon
How diversified to take a single breath cultivating the land in different field! 

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
10/01//2021

Rebirth of a Soul 

Life had been empty when my faith was lacking. 
Years of seeking something that was empty within. 
Faith came to me earlier this season of Jesus’s death.

Daily praying to be saved from a world which held nothing. 
Listening to the gospels there was no recognition of death. 
Yet, death had me in a vice on me daily without ceasing. 

My emptiness repeated each year and tears continued to flow. 
Kneeling at the altar alone and crying alone praying for a life.
Finding that empty place within me without salvation coming.

Meaning meant life was a vacuum of suffering and pain. 
Jesus hanging with nails in his hands had meaning for me. 
It was a day in which a quietness blanketed me the first time. 

Walking with a wooden cross on his shoulders alone. 
It had meaning to walk to his death to suffer with meaning
Sitting there in an empty church alone changed that day.

Instead, it was an understanding of what death meant,
There was no flashing of lights or angels singing. 
It was a recognition that my life meant something. 

My life was given to me by God’s love for me to live. 
Somehow it all meant something to me that he died. 
Not for my sins but rather to save me from emptiness. 
God had given me my life and my life had meaning.