Featured Writer: Doug Draime Day 1

Someday I Will Write A Poem That Will Flood The World


And I will own all the
arks, boats, ships,
rafts, and canoes,
and tug boats, ferries,
all forms of water transportation.

People will have to come
to me for their means
of survival.

The stubborn and destitute ones
will drown in my poem
sinking to the bottom,
screeching like anchors on
rusty
chains.

The rest of humanity will plead
for cut-rate discounts. But fuck them,
I’ll make them pay out
the ass. No rainbows
this time.
________________________________________

4 a.m. Reflection

If I say it was
torrid, what of love?
As my mind tosses
in memory like a
violent sea,
settling for the
pretentious
compromise of
poetry;
touching the stars
climbing the ladder
of lust. Meaning?
Love? What aches
in the heart?
Familiar images of
erotic passion
and the comfort of
someone being there. Knowing
the emptiness
and sting of
ambivalence. Why do we betray
the intimacy?
Why do we betray
the giving?


Doug Draime emerged as part of the underground literary movement in Los Angeles in the late 1960's. Most recent books: "Bones" (Kendra Steiner Editions) and "Los Angeles Terminal" (Covert Press). Forthcoming, "Transmissions From The Underground" (d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t/ press) and "Farrago Soup" (Coatlism Press). He moved Oregon in 1981, where he stills resides.

Order Doug's book and support small press: d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t press

What I Saw by D.C. Porder

when it first happened
dad wasn’t really that blind.
what he saw were (in his words)
“black columns” on both sides
of his vision. each day
they encroached further
towards the center
of his blue eyes like curtains
across stained-glass.

the day he lost his sight completely
we ate chocolate cake.
dad thought it would
be funny. then long strings
of tears rushed down
his cheeks. dad

cried through the night.
his eyes were worthless
except for that.

D.C. Porder studies writing at The New School. Read more at www.dcporder.blogspot.com.

Two Pieces by George Anderson

On the Seine

it's raining in the
French Quarter as
we eat delicious

skewers of prawns
& mussels smash our
greasy white plates in

the fireplace later
sit under umbrellas
sipping Veure Clicquot

Yellow Label from plastic
champaigne glasses & in
the dark follow the brightly

lit tourists' boats trying to
forget Gaza where militants
fire make-shift rockets &

where schools & hospitals
at this very minute are being
bombed by the Israeli Air Force

the general election only three
weeks away our bottle dangerously
nearing the end of its usefulness.
_____________________________________

Claire

She was born
on that late Friday evening
without lips
without a nose

her left foot attached
to her knee

six toes on her right foot

her heart & lungs
sweetly pumping

the neon grey noon
collapsing
a slowly understood beauty
the handwriting describing this
barely legible

god's attempts at perfection reconfigured,
her colostomy bag one day attuned
to life's tragic appendage?

George Anderson lives in North Wollongong, Australia. Erbacce-press in July 2008 published a chapbook of his poems 'Dancing
On Thin Ice'. Check out his new blog:
http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com

Two Pieces by D. Garcia-Wahl

The Blind Girl

She has blessed
all that has vanished into her evernight
and made forgiveness of eyes that have creased into surrender
gifting her, however,
with scraps of light and shadow.
By the cane of an arm, she stirs
and transfers patience.
By the dry weep
she gathers
the veils that make up her memory.
It is the release
of a beauty she’ll never know by mirror.
How exquisite, the gallery of shadows
museum’d in her head.
_______________________________________________

Filmatic

-for Jerry Tomlinson

“Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm
happy to state, I finally won out over it.”
-Elwood P. Dowd
“Harvey”


Life,
an archipelago of breaths
Reels –
movement
or years
purposed and propelled by memory.
The theatric boast of life the eyes parade,
a silent camera, ever behind, focusing.
In patchwork scenes: childhood, middle years, old age,
death – then birth
edited
played out
critiqued.

Nothing known at the fade in
will be felt in the fade out.

Leaving nothing to predictability,
except pardon,
the film is christened and ages
in sensitivity and texture.
The stir of the heart
scripts the direction of purity,
cleaving to what we cast off,
never playing tomorrow as the strains
of another day.


What of the actor?
His lines are his to forget
-his audience to recall.


D. Garcia-Wahl is the author of ALL THAT DOES COME OF MADDEN’D DAYS and ASHES OF MID AUTUMN. His new collection of poetry, BECOMING is due out shortly. He is putting the finishing touches on three more novels, another collection of poetry, and a collection of short stories. He was recently interviewed for a new HBO documentary. He divides his time between America and Paris.

Six Month Check-Up by Constance Stadler

Flashing enameled perfection

in response to my whine

crisply

she lowers the light.



I hear them
honing their Lilliputian weaponry

the sterile cabal

plans a frontal assault --

I soil myself.



The coleus on the window sill

is on its last legs --


I take it personally.


Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the 'prehistoric' epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was formerly an editor for South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in such 'zines as ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. Her chapbook, 'Tinted Steam', will be published in 2009. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.

Inside the Snowglobe by Paula Ray

You shake me up to watch
my mind fall in flakes,
your amusement.
No longer content to be
the drowned figurine,

feet glued to winter scene
never changing season.
You always churn my world
into a blizzard of thought,
unless I cry my dammed tears

all over this shelf I have allowed myself
to be placed. Among your other souvenirs.
I wait for you to toss me aside, unwanted.

The impact of the fall
will bust me
free.

Specks of glitter
will no longer be my bad luck,
my shattered reflection,
but your mess to clean.

Before I'm released, gaze at me
one last time and watch this
pretty little fantasy land piss
all over your open palm,
like your future's sprung a leak.

Paula is a musician and emerging writer from North Carolina where she teaches band, gigs about town on her saxophone, composes, and feeds her literary addiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as: Word Riot, Mad Swirl, Oak Bend Review, The Orange Room Review, and A cappella Zoo. For a more extensive list of her publications with links, check out her blog: musicalpencil.blogspot.com.

I Believe in Public Transportation by Ben Nardolilli

I Believe in Public Transportation


@#$%...@#$&…&$%@!

I can’t listen to the music,
The sweet flowing music
Because of the trains,
The goddamn trains
Which shake and rattle and stroll
Right through my room
And never stop for me.
The goddamn trains
Which are always moving,
Always shaking
Coming like earthquakes
Magnitude 6 I believe, and green,
But not friendly to my environment.
Shaking me up and down,
Throwing everything off
A millimeter every day,
So that every month
I am losing inches.
And sanity,
Because of the goddamn trains,
The metal beasts below me
That wind up and down the stairs
Pass through the tub when I bathe,
Making waves,
Passing through my head when I sleep,
Making ripples in my mind.
Coming into my dreams, the goddamn trains,
I want to kiss the girl but her lips tremble and I cannot,
Goddamn trains,
I want to hold her
At least a little while longer before having to wake,
But I can’t,
Goddamned trains
They wake me up and shake me up,
They toss me like dice in my sleep, in my seat.
I believe in public transportation,
It’s a good thing to reduce the dependency on burning black gold,
For if we dig precious things from the earth,
We invite disaster upon ourselves,
(I heard a Hopi say,
I wonder what he would think of the goddamned trains,
if they ran through his pueblo.)
And it brings us together,
Gives us the touch of others,
The occasional acrobats on steel bars,
Children who sell candy,
Which is better than them eating it,
What with,
The epidemic going around.
The trains,
Yes the trains are a good thing,
Yes, even the goddamned trains.
In general.

@#$%...@#$&…&$%@!

The goddamn trains never stop,
They only pass through.


I am a twenty three year old writer currently living in New York City. My work has appeared in Houston Literary Review, Perigee Magazine, Canopic Jar, and Lachryma: Modern Songs of Lament, Baker’s Dozen, Thieves Jargon, Farmhouse Magazine, Elimae, Poems Niederngasse, The Delmarva Review, Clockwise Cat, Heroin Love Songs, Literary Fever, and Perspectives Magazine. In addition I was the poetry editor for West 10th Magazine at NYU and maintain a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.

My Father's Advice by Howie Good

MY FATHER’S ADVICE

Wear hunter’s camouflage.
You don’t want to be
one of those people,
do you, whose goal in life
is simply to stand there
and look good?
Your grandmother was,
and the soldiers tore
a crying baby from her arms
and flung it on the fire.
Therefore, every day,
practice invisibility.
Plunge through intersections –
the busier, the better –
just as the light turns red.
Move often and without regret,
and leave no obvious trail,
no broken twigs and such, to follow.
The devil is upstairs humping
a pillow, pretending that it’s you.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University
of New York at New Paltz, is the author of six poetry
chapbooks, including most recently Tomorrowland (2008)
from Achilles Chapbooks. He has been nominated three times
for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net
anthology.

Two Pieces by Wanda Campbell

Illinois Traveler

When I see Kentucky sunrise,
when fog rises over hills or
rain falls on the knobs,

when I see an out-of-state license plate,
when the moon is full and clear
or the wind blows from the north,

I long to hear your voice,
soft like prairie breezes and
I wish to hold your hand,

weathered by years of
farm boy days. I think
maybe, we could drink
a simple cup of coffee,

but even then I fear the world
would end.

_________________________________________

The Jungle is no Place for a Fairy

I knew a word weaver
who wandered away

from her woodland home
in search of shiny tokens.

Lost and disheveled,
foolish and floundering,

she walked alien beaches
and bleak city streets, begging

for foreign bread crumbs
and strangers’ appraisals,

Barbarians stole her wings
while cannibals ripped her dress.

Vampires lurked in shadows,
waiting to taste her blood.

She fled beneath a rock
where she dreamed of home.

In dawn’s light she scattered
tainted tokens in the dust

and left only her footprints
for the vampires to drink.


Wanda D. Campbell, alias Nochipa Pablio, is an elementary school teacher, award winning poet, novelist and freelance artist who makes her home in the Appalachian foothills. Her work has appeared in various publications such as StorySouth, New Madrid, Mid-South Review, Pegasus, Other Voices International, Coal: An Anthology of Poetry by Blair Mountain Press, Instructor Magazine and many others. Preserving a heritage for future generations is to Wanda, therefore, proceeds from any sales made on her poetry go to help fight mountain top removal and to enrich the lives of the peoples of Southern Appalachia.

Two Pieces by Ray Succre

The Talk


The Talk arrived late, six months in,

and the question I dreaded rode in on fairly pure wings.

"How many?" she asked in a squint of chaste suspicion,

whereafter I was expected to profess a certain something

near virginity, my own chaste integrity with the past.


I had moved about in some horrid shade, however.

Woods of shade-makers. No denying it.

So I stated.

She winced.

"I had no idea you were like that." she said.

"I wasn't. They were."

"It's disgusting."


A freeborn man knows once is once again,

shade outstretched to roll in his flames,

until he considers but one, holding this tightly,

the great one after all the once-more ones, a finality.


The official proposal came later, and to great tolerability,

marriage, and all throughout it, other sorts of talk.

_____________________________________________________________


Eventually I Stopped Believing in Myself



Naps aren't my thing, but I had one. When I woke in the afternoon,

there was fruit rotting in the mesh basket in my kitchen,

the air was horrid hot and reeked of pits in the earth,

and I found an eel twisting about in my bathtub—

you know, horrific imagery to welcome my new self.

Perhaps most upsetting was that my clothes no longer fit,

for my legs were covered in goat hair and my feet had transformed

into hooves.


"Oh hell. People will think I'm sinister, now. There'll be no more

trust to be had, no parties, no coffee shops, no cheer. I'll seem evil

because of this, and up to no good."


My wife returned home and shrieked.

"You're the Beast!" she shouted, leaving me.

"I didn't mean it." I muttered, alone in my apartment, the new Hell.


I decided to be a social beast, then.

Devil or not, alone or not, I still wanted to hang out in town.

Perhaps I might be able to change the general view of me.


They ran all directions, terrified.

This made me a terrorist, one who caused terror,

and some brimstone piddled down.

I didn't feel as if I'd done this, invoking brimstone,

but supposed I must have. Who else?


The first person to try and follow me was an entertainer.

He told me he was a poet, would serve me with wicked rhymes.

I kicked his khaki sack high onto a roof.


Had the world made me a great foe,

or had it ignored me so much I had grown to work against it?

My hooves clopped the streets, my breath rotted the air.

History had built my form from pagan gods,

to convert people religiously, and the name of my home

was stolen from the Norse.


I didn't do any of that; they did. I chose to abandon evil, then.

Becoming human again, and thought good, turned out to be

simple enough:


I just started believing there was a devil for me, as well.




Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son, as a stay-at-home dad. He has been published in Aesthetica, Gloom Cupboard, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay Publishing) was recently released in print and is available most places. He tries hard.

For inquiry, publication history, and information, visit me online: http://raysuccre.blogspot.com

The Wrath of Provincialism by Colin James

The Wrath of Provincialism

Take two pens
and hold them in your left hand.
Let the ink lines
move lightly over the page.
Pretend you are in a village
in the north of England,
and pray that fat gentleman you created
buggering anything that moves,
is accepted here
as one of the locals.


Colin James has had poems published recently in the following magazines, Ditch, Waterlogged August, The and Snow Monkey. He works in Energy Conservation in Massachusetts having migrated from the north of England which he revisits whenever the Scottish landscape painter, John Mackenzie, has an exhibition of paintings.

Two Pieces by Harry Calhoun

Fireplace


The first few fires upon the hearth

beneath our belt in our warm winter

comfort-food belly


the coffee ready in the morning-timed

pot ready to please us again

the warmth we know is arising


planned, set or just ready

for some warmth, fire in the evening

coffee in the morning


we need this and want this

a planet cannot go around without

somebody chopping, working,


setting fire to something

maybe something we hadn’t seen before

and noticing what warmth


arises
____________________________________

Sing

or, what keeps me writing



the only security is in security

is in keeping yourself sane and happy

with your security blanket poems


keep bangin’ ‘em out

again and again and if

it’s the same thing over and over


well isn’t life like that anyway

except if you don’t

speak up you have no voice


and that’s how it is

when you die, they tell me

and I can’t remember but I’ll bet


it was that way before I was born

Harry Calhoun’s articles, literary essays, book reviews and poems have been published in magazines including Writer’s Digest and The National Enquirer. He has had recent publications in Abbey, Chiron Review, Still Crazy, SNReview, Abandoned Towers, Dante’s Heart, Yippee! and Word Catalyst, for whom he writes a monthly column. He also has poetry forthcoming in LiteraryMary, The Dead Mule, Nefarious Ballerina, &c, A Common Thread, Buk Scene, Neonbeam and others. Harry writes an online wine column about quality affordable wines called Ten Dollar Tastings.

Two Pieces by Puma Perl

t shirts

I knew his clothes were still there
It had been almost a year since
I bought him the packs of white t shirts
It was right after I did his laundry and
Threw a navy blue sweater in with the whites
I lowered my head when I told him
So I wouldn't keep laughing
Figured he'd never ask again
But then I felt a little bad, not much
So I bought soft velvety white towels
And the t shirts, size medium
Then I called him and ended it
He never wore the shirts or
Felt how soft the towels were

In the closet there were
Two pair of black socks
Two sets of underwear
A thermal shirt that made me sad
A worn pair of levis that fit me exactly right
He would have hated that they fit
He didn't want me to lose weight
An attractive feature in a man
I held his socks and underwear
Wrapped them in an old blanket
Felt like I was about to drown kittens
The t shirts fit the man I'm waiting for
He'll be happy that the jeans fit me
He never questions
My endless supply of white t shirts
I always give him the soft white towels
At first he didn't want to use them
Said they were too nice
I told him they were just for him
_________________________________________


in the mayor’s house

I planned to leave the
golden man's house at
7:45 He lived
ten blocks and five dimensions
from gracie mansion
He didn't want me to go
He loved my tall walk
down his hallway
I left at 8:15

In the mayor's house
on world AIDS day
there is an open house
by invitation only
guests devour
sandwich triangles
bland, tasteless slivers
served on silver trays
tired red ribbons
wilt fresh pressed shirts
are you anybody?
narrowed eyes wonder
no, they decide
i'm nobody

everyone takes pictures
on the good side
I find new friends quickly
through the common language
of provocative subversion
the mirrors hang high on the walls
we bounce without reflection
irrelevant as promises

the line creeps listlessly
little mayor mike b poses
looking only into camera=2 0eyes
as he shakes my hand
hot gold morning cum
runs down my leg
staining my appropriate
black suit

Puma Perl lives and writes in NYC. Her work has been published in cause & effect, MadSwirl, Trespass, Red Fez, Gloom Cupboard, the Oak Bend Review, and other publications and anthologies. She has been a featured reader in various New York City area venues. Her first chapbook, Belinda and Her Friends, was recently published by Erbacce Press. She is a firm believer in the transformative power of the creative arts.

Three Pieces by Joseph Goosey

EVERYTHING SHAMEFUL

There are holes in the walls
of my mouth. I get nervous, well,
not nervous but frightened
of conversation sometimes
as though the other person
will immediately, without warning,
begin to list in chronological
order everything shameful
I have done or
will do and it is night and
cold and a good time
to observe cars passing
and old deteriorating women
stealing the companies' petunias
from the pots. The wind sounds
a bell and I might not be around
to bury my two cats,
Oscar and Katy.

__________________________

Bookstore Credit

It is 9:20AM
and I am scurrying along
the walls
of downtown.

There is a crate in my hand.
The crate is filled with hardbound books.
Some books were purchased
for one dollar, others for thirty.
Some books were found,
others stolen.

I am going to see
if maybe I can sell
any of them
back to a used
bookstore
from which I take
free beer
in exchange
for reading poems
monthly.

It is raining.
I don't think I have ever seen
so much fucking rain
on a Florida
street.
I am shielding the books
from the rain with the shirt
off of my back.
I might be crying but
I wouldn't know
one way or another
because
of the rain.

There passes a lawyer,
here a doctor,
a gallery owner,
a maker of sandwiches.
Some look in my direction,
others pretend
not to.

I walk into the bookstore.

A bell sounds
to signal
my arrival.

The man, the dry man,
puts most of the books back
into my crate.

He says
we have
these

titles.

He asks
cash or book-
store

credit?

I want the credit
so badly but
I need the cash.
Without it,
I may not make it
home and
my girl might go
feral.

He says
9 dollars
cash.

I say OK but
it really is not
OK at all.

My crate and I
venture back out
into the rain.

There is nothing, really,
that can be written
in response
to such
circumstances.

________________________________

No Family

Cars go streaming by
with Church
cut Christmas
trees
tied firmly
to their
roofs.

There is a hole
in my lip
from
holiday
nervousness.

I spit pink upon the bricks.

Hello.

Yes. You do the same.

No. No family coming in.

Yes. It will be
quiet.


Joseph Goosey recently discovered how little joy can be found in the
fruits of literary labors. Also, he has a chapbook available via
Poptritus Press.He thanks you for reading.

Might? by Felino Soriano

Might?

If the garden could tongue a
circle around the human, the
specific one who too often yanks
without conscience
roses for the cliché symbolic
photographic embrace,
might the vernacular be
a begging to conjure newly formed
gifts, a manmade devotional plan, a finding
elsewhere without scented thorn or without
burgeon meant to dangle loosely
within the wind's altering direction?

Felino Soriano (California) is a case manager working with developmentally and physically disabled adults. He is the author of two chapbooks "Exhibits Require Understanding Open Eyes" (Trainwreck Press, 2008) and "Feeling Through Mirages" (Shadow Archer Press, 2008), an e-book "Among the Interrogated" (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), and has a chapbook forthcoming "Abstract Appearance Reaching Toward the Absolute" (Trainwreck Press, 2008). The juxtaposition of his philosophical studies with his love of classic and avant-garde jazz explains his poetic motivation. Website: felinosoriano

Two Pieces by Michael Lee Johnson

Charlie Plays a Tune


Crippled with arthritis

and Alzheimer's,

in a dark rented room

Charley plays

melancholic melodies

on a dust filled

harmonica he

found abandoned

on a playground of sand

years ago by a handful of children

playing on monkey bars.

He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,

relieving himself takes forever; he feeds the cat when

he doesn't forget where the food is stashed at.

He hears bedlam when he buys fish at the local market

and the skeleton bones of the fish show through.

He lies on his back riddled with pain,

pine cones fill his pillows and mattress;

praying to Jesus and rubbing his rosary beads

Charley blows tunes out his

celestial instrument

notes float through the open window

touch the nose of summer clouds.

Charley overtakes himself with grief

and is ecstatically alone.

Charley plays a solo tune.


-2007
_________________________

Raindrop Baby


I'm a raindrop baby

silhouetted in the night,

single-ringed single person

minus the 24 carat gold.

A harvester of night life,

star crystal,

a gather of sluts in my imagination,

a wild driver of the

anal sinful products of sex.

I run the highways drunk

as a skunk with his anus high in the air

in search of what I wished

or dream wild factual fantasy about.

Offended I simply piss somewhere.

Where does the highway buckle up:

DUI, DUI?

Are these your initials lover

on my driver's license

or just a pained memory

the morning after my dream

turned to real piss?

-2008-

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer from Itasca, Illinois.

His brand new poetry chapbook with pictures, From Which Place the Morning Rises and his new photo version of The Lost American: From Exile to Freedom is now available at: lulu. He also has 2 previously published chapbooks available at: lulu. The original version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom, can be found at: iuniverse.



He has been published in USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Turkey, Fiji, Nigeria, Algeria, Africa, India, United Kingdom, Republic of Sierra Leone, Israel, Nepal, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Finland, and Poland internet radio. Michael Lee Johnson has been published in more than 280 different publications worldwide. Audio MP3 of poems are available on request.



He is also publisher and editor of four poetry flash fiction sites--all presently open for submission:

http://birdsbywindow.blogspot.com/
http://www.poetriclegacy.mysite.com/
A Tender Touch
Wizards of the Wind

Author website: poetryman

Author email: promomanusa@mail.com

4th of December she wore a beret by Dan Gee

4th of December she wore a beret

for just seven pounds!

a bargain apparently we are told;

in the credit crunch,

but then it seems a liberty to pay

only seven pounds;

Go and buy clothes made from people not old

Will they get some lunch?


So Mrs Brown why did you buy the hat?

Because it was “Cheap”?

100 packs of noodles for that price

even in these times,

The Daily Mail’s front page where you sat

With people who weep

Inside we see unaffordable rice

Even in these times.

That beret’s not cheap, it comes from somewhere

Accumulate loot

In today’s green mint weaving industry

In the credit crunch

So, about Mrs Brown’s hat do I care?

Do we give a hoot?

Will they taste your rich and glossy honey?

In the credit crunch







Most of the time I dwell in his room writing poetry and prose about nearly everything and anything, but occasionally, like all creative minds (and students), I’ll destroy my body with excessive amounts of alcohol. Poetry is a form that before this year I had hardly touched, but now I write poetry everyday, with the occasional splattering of flash fiction and play writing. Cheers!!!

Featured Writer: David Mclean Day 3

culpability and punishment

there is no crime but being born
said my body, no guilt
but existence,

and there is no wrong you do
but breathing; dreams
are innocent, always,

whatever you do in them.
and the only thing sinful
is being women and men

and living, every sin
beyond that is supererogatory
devilishness, though welcome,

not wrong in any sense.
for you, barely breathing,
breath is a crime that cries

to heaven. everything
you do beyond that
is just shit that happens -

there are no victims,
just other criminals
guilty of living

____________________________

trees and clouds

the trees would pin the clouds to ground
like pizzas condemned to live in cartons
instead of roaming their natural
habitat, the forests in which they swim

with their children, kebabs and cigarettes
and lampshades. the trees are like mothers
who blind and cripple children, so nothing bad
happens to them, so they see nothing

to frighten them, so they don't get into danger,
don't go anywhere, the trees worry
about the clouds and their madness
as they dance for the mad moon

and go wild with desire under her;
but the clouds don't seem to care
they are like feckless boys, these vapors,
they only listen to their dealers

and dealers never lied to me, at least,
they give me exactly what i need -
clouds and moons and beasts
above all the miserly motherly trees

Featured Writer: David Mclean Day 2

scream

the scream is in the carnivorous throat
and the death we put there mourns itself
which is rather wretched

the stones smell like memory
and mourning worn like a priestess
dressed in black robes

and the taste of salt on the tongue
cold as coke in the nose
black as stone

and hope screams in the meat
the throat stores screams it needs
to believe in

so that there is approximate
passion, and some body
feels something

it is exquisitely easy to see
this is life and it is living -
there's no such thing as victims,

every body deserves everything

______________________________


fingers and eyes

i found my fingers in the trees
and my eyes on the mountains
inside their resonant skull
rapped by the sun's knuckles;

though they were still lethargic,
like snakes who are the genitals
of gods unusually reluctant
to rape. i found my memories

in them. they were not married yet
and knew where the mustache grew
from the sold flesh that shrinks from it,
resilient flesh of night

clothed in time, and loath to go back
to fingers in the trees, groping for my eyes
on the unholy slopes, loath to go back to life
and be mine

Featured Writer: David Mclean Day 1

looking for

you were looking for me
and so was i
but all we saw
were memories and things¨
somebody else said,
probably lying, reflecting
themselves, and sort of expected
me to be,

so i wasn't, obviously.
but i found all these absences
inside me, if we shall talk,
metaphorically, of interiors
and interiority

when i am a surface,
a thin film over the world's
plenitude of emptiness -
stones and trees and all of history,
murder, crime, night and humanity,
and a few other things to which children
listen

a dead crow lost
at a long gone goddess's
breast forgotten, there i found me
that i did not leave or need
to be, reasons for existing
were absences and just
not listening, love was
ignorance and memory blood,

all the surfaces were enough

______________________________

winter drags

night's winter drags the body of an injured animal
behind it, calling it history, because social movements
and whatever happens there are the contortions of sexuality
and heaven is but a relieved bladder.

it is a wounded beast that crawls through us
and sweats its desperation on the page,
it is an open wound that never heals,
but bleeds and give us no pain

or forgiveness. it is being, because hearts
are leaky vessels in several senses,
it is a night and its injured animals
are people who are dead forever

already, but slow to understand
that the coffin coughs up
no truth for us, and real injured animals
are much more important than man

and all the nothings he understands


David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats, and a stupid puppy. He has two full length books out. One, pushing lemmings, at http://www.erbacce-press.com/davidmclean/4527659941 and another, Cadaver's dance, available at Alibris or Amazon.com. There is even a self-published book of poems at Lulu called eating your night - http://www.lulu.com/content/2756039. Details of other chapbooks and round 680 poems in or forthcoming at round 290 places online or print over the last eighteen months are at htpp://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. A new chapbook, La morte vivante, is available from Shadow Archer Press. Another chapbook is free online at http://www.whyvandalism.com/ebook_poems-against-enlightenment08.html. He also features in a special issue of Instant Pussy available as a free download at http://www.lulu.com/content/4389526. Two more chapbooks so far are coming in 2009 from Rain over Bouville and Poptritus Press, he has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.