Issue 1

Image (Copyright © 2008 Christopher Woods)

Steve Dalachinsky

Gerald Schwartz

Christophe Casamassima

Sarah Sarai

Luke Schlueter

Pramila Venkateswaran

Kimberley L. Becker

James Lineberger

Tasha Klein

Francis Raven

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Raewyn Alexander

Duane Locke

Anna Rugis

George Wallace

Steve Dalachinsky

Pray For Me

Pray for me
For I have been ambushed

Pray for me
the way he played for the head bobbin kid in the first row

Pray for me
Because the older I get, the less tomorrows there are

Pray for me
for I am what I was before the world came into existence

Pray as if the prayer you are praying was
the quirkiest blues ever intoned

Pray for me, in jagged voice and broken tongue, in
soft lament, complaining moan and joyful agonizing
shriek, pray for me, jagged stone that I am until I am
withered and gone and even after that, pray for me

Pray for the zig-zag lines of my life
for as long as they remain a patttern on your less than shiney skull
& when they’re gone pray for me anyway

Pray for me, pray as if my life depended on it, as if
your life depended on it.

The mirror is a shore surging and receding, your voice
can be a part of the breaking.
Pray for me lift me out of the bedrock with my wedlock with the dark
Pray for me, embattled jackel that I am.
fruitless searcher rooted in a swamp of self-denial & complete disquiet

Pray for me
as I am forced to strip & made to walk down the naked highway

Pray for me on those cold nights and summers too.

Pray for me. The way ecstatic peace-seekers raise
their voices in jubilation. the way a group of not so
holy lovers of death have prayed together for centuries.

Pray for me as I vanish from the plains of geometry
preparing to regroup and rehearse.

Pray for me when I am struggling like a peach blossom
for satori

Pray for me as I ingest a drug whose side effects are suicidal thoughts,
suicidal attempts & suicide

Pray for me, my private affairs of the heart impaled
and imploding within the body of a thief.

Pray for the ruthless way I thrust the homeless from
my door.

Pray for me for it was my prayers that killed my brother
& god exists only to judge us.

Pray for this inhibited near rabid stereo-type
the engine that starts the fire

Pray for me. I like to take, I don’t like to give.
Pray for me for that reason alone, if for no other.

I realize the insignificance of your prayer but
Pray for me, pray for me just the same.

Pray for me for little I do is ever understood

Pray for me for iam a creature of this island & shall never get off

Pray that my foul thoughts might some day be made amicable,
my foul mouth washed clean
Pray that I never become a consultant

Pray for me as my place of dwelling becomes more domesticated
speak blood bone & soul the poverty of words
Pray for your once & only uncolonized son

Pray as if your prayer may be overheard, take shape
and rise like a spirit on an upward path. Pray, pray
that the lights will never be extinguished.

Pray for the false threat that i am
for the toothache to go away
for the smile to return to their faces
for the clear bottom boats that allow us to see
for my generosity toward those on death row

Pray for me for I have abused substance
Pray for my partner, for the sutures in my heart, for
the narrows to widen,
for the fuzziness of ownership & cheap sentimentality that my
departure will cause & the genuineness, the
genuineness.

pray for me
oh
pray me

 

 

steve dalachinsky was born in 1946, Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared extensively in journals on & off line including; Big Bridge, Milk, Unlikely Stories, Xpressed, Ratapallax, Evergreen Review, Long Shot, Alpha Beat Soup, Xtant, Blue Beat Jacket, N.Y. Arts Magazine, 88 and Lost and Found Times. He is included in such anthologies as Beat Indeed, The Haiku Moment and the esteemed Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has written liner notes for the CDs of many artists including Anthony Braxton, Charles Gayle, James “Blood” Ulmer, Rashied Ali, Roy Campbell, Matthew Shipp and Roscoe Mitchell. His 1999 CD, Incomplete Direction (Knitting Factory Records), a collection of his poetry read in collaboration with various musicians, such as William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Thurston Moore (SonicYouth), Vernon Reid (Living Colour) has garnered much praise. His most recent chapbooks include Musicology (Editions Pioche, Paris 2005), Trial and Error in Paris (Loudmouth Collective 2003), Lautreamont’s Laments (Furniture Press 2005), In Glorious Black and White (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), St. Lucie (King of Mice Press 2005), Are We Not MEN & Fake Book (2 books of collage – 8 Page Press 2005). Dream Book (Avantcular Press 2005). His books include A Superintendent’s Eyes (Hozomeen Press 2000) and his PEN Award winning book The Final Nite (complete notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook, Ugly Duckling Presse 2006).

His latest CD is Phenomena of Interference, a collaboration with pianist Matthew Shipp (Hopscotch Records 2005).

He has read throughout the N.Y. area, the U.S., Japan and Europe, including France and Germany.

Gerald Schwartz

Through Winter

Glorious, rigorous, sun-drenched, snow-iced morning,
scoured by 40 m.p.h. west winds, marble-hard to today’s
human designs, I dare not defy you but still my defiance
is summoned up. I am most creaturely, resolute. I’ll
go my this day’s way, plunge into, become party to
the frieze of this iron and brilliant, uncompromising
artwork, this new shook foil.

Christophe Casamassima

12/25/2007

5

a comma?

an em dash?

an exclamation point
six foot tall?

why, in God’s name,
put anything at all?

6 [for Angela Fortezza]

my grandmother cannot
will even
her own death

-so be it

the flowers
she fell upon
can only bloom again

7 [requiem for Gustaf Sobin]

in his poems
the ellipse foretells death-
or does it forego?

a wealth of commas
make the poem slow
and the guard
one keeps on the word-

that is a misery all its own.

the ownership of language?
we say, “so unsexy!” perverse,
just perverse.

the guard-one crept up
to the word, and the word
turned its back, and its mystery-
that is, Sobin, wandering
in and out
of his own misery, and language
following him off
that cliff, and this
world…

Christophe Casamassima is the proprietor and editor of Furniture Press in Baltimore, and the editor of Ambit : Journal of Poetry & Poetics. He has recently published poems in American Letters & Commentary, Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry, the Denver Review, and 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry. He also has chapbooks available from [limited editions] (qui/etude and Mythography), above/ground press (Septology), and King of MicePress (The Sarah Quatrains). He is currently a board member of the Towson Arts Collective and received his Masters at Towson University.

Sarah Sarai

This Flesh Divine

Let any place paw on flesh divine, monkey bread
female nudged and godly, this thing like pears dewed
and burst peaches, heaped splashy in containers
brightly strange weird as first voyage, one of two.

Please don’t trade looks like baseball cards, each
with its value private and boasts. Remember
our years wilderness encaved, snake in one life-flash,
pumping hard her wings, angel next, then again friend
serpent twisting, digesting life slow-like as he mute
wriggles without grip of the plan’s nod to anarchic
inclusion of the random, which-if we’d accepted
before a wilderness of frozen constellations, not like
charts but mobiles in a nursery when the switch is off
and parents peek at blessed babes like us nodding out
to stenciled reality-we would disallow Teddy’s
nonallergenic love a safer source than each other.
All sweetie words ring rare true as soloist sopranos.

It’s not the heard mattering. Expecting little, receive,
grateful someone, where, there, hating not, killing not.
Every day is sacred blessed, is your day is this day.

Sarah Sarai’s poems are in The Threepenny Review, The Minnesota Review, Pank, Main Street Rag, Helix Magazine and others. Her fiction is also in various journals. Visit her at www.myspace.com/sarahsarai.

Luke Schlueter

Dust to Dust

The millions of cells dying in your body
even as you read this poem know better
than to wait it out. But what of
“the dark work / of the deepest cells”
like hooded hermits clasped in prayer
and the splendor you come to
in the roaming fixations of the blood?

And what of the concrete floor
of the storeroom where the chorus
of apples in baskets mixes its breath
with clods of earth, where
the worm passes over and into
new lives like a saint or prophet?

And what if when you step outside
the shale of your intentional self
you find a parade of thought
spilling out before you in the refuse
of late-autumn light, and you
feel suddenly the music of the poets
enticing you back into your dream?

Because between birth and death
there are only so many things that
keep on listening. Only so many
moments that won’t be contained,
that live to break their barriers,
like apples left behind in the field,
like worms crumbling into dust,
like the dust you breathe that is you.

Luke Schlueter: I received a Ph.D. in literature at Kent State University in 2000 after writing a dissertation on the work of poets Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. I divide my time between working as Creative Director for the Institute of Reading Development and engaging in academic and creative work. I’ve recently had work published in Slant, Asphodel, Blueline, and Arsenic Lobster.

Pramila Venkateswaran

February Meditation

New born, no thoughts, sheer absence—
A blue paleness behind closed eyelids,

Breath wings in and out of me—a steady
Motion of a bird in mid-ocean

Two shores equally apart and after a while
The possibility of a line in every limitless

Mile vanishes—Against breath’s metronome
The heart learns its quiet tread.

I relearn again and again to bar the wild
Tsunami of thoughts poised to drag me

Into its belly. I am reminded of my mortality.
I resist and find a haven.

A series of unhappy endings—surrender
And fight—light, then weakening.

An undercurrent I had not noticed, surfaces,
Cradles me. I am lulled in this new-found

Power lifting me to the tallest pine.
I am in the presence of absence,

Sheer blueness empties me:

I am as light as nothing

Light

Nothing

Pramila Venkateswaran, author of Thirtha, published by Yuganta Press, has poems in Paterson Literary Review, Ariel, Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Kavya Bharati, and Calyx, as well as poems in anthologies, including A Chorus for Peace and En(Compass). She has performed her poems nationally, most recently at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She is currently engaged in doing multimedia performances that include dance, poetry and music. She teaches English and women’s studies at Nassau Community College, New York.

Kimberley L. Becker

Pieta with Three Angels

is unfinished, with blurred faces.
Maybe great grief
causes erasure of features
even in the angelic and messianic.

Maybe Messina knew
the expressions would be too inscrutable
for human view, beyond paint, and passing
our abstract understanding.

Kimberly L. Becker is a Southerner of European and Cherokee descent, whose poetry appears in journals such as 2River, Borderlands, Eclectica, and Yellow Medicine Review, as well as in the anthology Letters to the World (Red Hen Press). She lives in the D.C. area, but her family and spiritual home is in the mountains of NC.

James Lineberger

arrayed like these

last weekend
she says
he rowed her across the lake
in his john boat
and she had never been out there before
except when he had
his outboard which somehow made
it seem safer but with
just the oars
and the water flicking up in big drops against
the sunset she felt so afraid
only she didn't want
to let on because this man walter had arrived
in her life at a time when she had
given up the hope altogether
of ever having another love especially a walter
who was the exact opposite of
benny in every way she could think of
one of those people that can fix a car just about any kind of car there
 is
or put a new roof
on somebody's house or the time her washer broke
and water ran all over the kitchen and when
she called him he just laughed
and came right over and took the thing apart and put a new
transmission in it quicker than she could do
a wash and oh god
did he love to go camping so here they were again
another weekend out in the wilds
which is another story
she says like how i have to squat right there like
a indian and pee on the leaves
and off in the distance you can hear the alligators flopping in
the water and calling out to one another
but i got used to it
just gritted my teeth and decided be damn
if i would let him know
how trembly it was and if when we got in the tent at night
if i held him extra close does it matter
whether i'm shivering from the excitement or
just scared half to death it comes out
to the same thing don't it so out there in the john boat when
he looked at me i would just grin
and say oh lordy it is so beautiful here and when i was a little girl
who would have dreamed i would end up
so far from where i was born with hoot owls and things growling
in the dark and the most gorgeous
sunsets god ever put together anywhere
except i'm hoping all the while he
can't see the whites of my knuckles as i'm holding on
to the gunnels he calls them
but when we finally
reached the island and he dropped anchor and i was just starting to
 relax
there all of a sudden was
this big glowing white feather that floated right up next to us
only i was too frightened to reach out
and try and grab it so i watched it as it bounced up against
the boat a couple of times
and then just floated away and when things like that
happen i can't help but think benny is still here with me
and we go on
after death in some mysterious way living another life in the spirit
and i believe that i do like
when you
and me used to be together and you would get
me up there and make me ride
the horsey
and spank you on your ass saying giddy up
you fucker git it git me all the way
deep and i never told you then but afterwards i would wake up sometimes
and look over at your
face with your eyes closed
and it was like it was benny smiling at me
like a angel in his sleep
but when i met walter all of a sudden
benny just
went away and until i saw the feather on the water
i was afraid he had give up
on me altogether
and maybe he didn't even like walter not that we were in a hurry
either one of us i mean
it was a whole month
we were together before i could get walter to even kiss me
and part of it was because of the way
his former wife used to sweet talk him all
the time and then took
him for every dime he had so he didn't trust nobody he said
but there was something else too
and that first night
we kissed before our lips even met he told me
the last thing she had done
to him was give him herpes and he was taking valtrex for it
but  there was no guarantee i  wouldn't
catch it too
and if i didn't want to see him anymore he would understand and he just
stood there staring at his shoes
those old cracked leather work shoes of his
lord you would think
that all he does for other people around here he could
at least think about his self once
in a while
but that is walter and there he was so ashamed and he couldn't
look at me and the poor man i just took his face
in my hands and kissed him right then because what
is love anyway
but sharing everything that is
and look at me here i am
fifty-five years old and who else  do i ever want to be with
but walter
and there comes a time in this life
you have to decide
who you are and how you want things to be and i told him that
told him i loved him
and i never wanted to be with anyone else ever
again and i knew
he didn't have any truck with marriage and i said me neither
mister walter barringer!
so that was our first night together
and whew that man flat wore me out i tell you and as you might guess
we didn't either one of us sleep a wink
but the strangest thing is i never contracted the herpes
and even the doctor shook his head
over that because it is so easy it is like like
you don't hardly have to touch
yourselves together down there and overnight you can already tell
you been afflicted with it
but no not ever not even one little
bit of itching
and after i started on the valtrex myself  maybe that had something to
 do
with it but nothing is sure in this world
like the doctor says
and it it wants you it'll find you one way or another
so we just couldn't figure it out
until the day the feather lighted down on the water from out
of nowhere it seemed
and that night in the tent i told walter
how i thought it was benny well you would have to know  walter
to understand this but he didn't laugh
or snort or make fun of it
he just laid there
looking up into my eyes in the lantern light
and he said i be dog
 and see you see
that is my walter he might not
look it but he is a thinking man and he
thinks and he thinks
and he laid his head against my little titties
and he said well whatever it is i just pray me and him
gets a chance one day to talk
things over so i can explain how i used
to hate god but now
i don't know any more i just don't know it is all
a mystery to me
how one minute you think you got things added up and the next
you can't remember any of it
like it never happened like you weren't even
here at all
and you know what he hadn't any sooner got the words
out of his mouth than
the strangest thing happened like it felt like
my whole insides
were itching all over like i was on fire and it was revealed to me for
 the first time how
everything in the world is
hooked up to everything else from herpes to
the white feathers on the water
to the flames of hell if it has to be
and was it hawthorne's book where the woman had the scarlet
letter because i wished i knew
how to reach
walter's former wife and thank her for the great gift she had made us
but we could take it
from there and when i reached over to walter he had
rose up hard all over again
and never mind the discomfort
i did what all i could for him
until we finally fell asleep but  the last thing
i saw before my dreams took over
was benny hovering low
with his box of ashes from the mantelpiece scattering them
out over the water
and wherever the dust settled it was feathers everywhere just like
jesus said
like it was all of us the lilies of his field

James Lineberger is a retired screenwriter, sometime playwright, and full-time poet. He has published seven volumes of poetry and a full-length play available at http://www.lulu.com/james_lineberger

Tasha Klein

When I Die

I hope it feels like floating:
a soft light
tickling my cheek.

the last poem
written sideways

the only music,
that of the ocean.

Francis Raven

Empathetic Strangeness

        Artistic embarrassment is implicit in every mutual seeing

From standing to lying down
and back from sidewalk to sign:
    What are the ethics of sight?
    Of seeing someone's private moments in public?
    Are you obliged to turn away?
Whatever the visual morality of an instant
you'll move along to the next, if you can.

            "I'm going to get better at networking.  I'm going to look
            more people in the eye.  I'm not going to
            flinch about art."

    Did she give the poem
about the homeless woman
to the homeless woman?
        Yes, she carried it around.
        It's her story
        in case she can't speak
        between the legs of approaching embarrassed.

The motivation for connecting action
might be a strange Chinese instrument
you cannot pronounce
but merely reminds you of difference's whelm.

            If you write a poem
            about a homeless woman
            who everybody in your town sees every morning
            in the vestibule of the same bookstore
            are you still writing about a person
            or has she been transformed into a place?

        A person moves.
        I spend half my half
        saying that I'm spending.

    Some Rules:
1)    You cannot announce events to yourself.
2)    What is already the case cannot be announced.

In a voice that's ready to twist autumn leaves
around each other and see what causes decay,
what stream they move down,
but sometimes you realize
you're the one making him uncomfortable.

        And yes, he smelled of old body-odor,
        offered me candy in the middle of the service
        and I, embarrassed,
        declined humanism,
        until he showed me
        the poem you had written
        about his accident.
        And because he had an accident
        I felt bad about my purpose.

    Did he understand the present of a poem?
    Some words to ponder when formulating rules for giving gifts:
        Mutualism.
        Value.
        Comprehension.

I had completely evaded the message of the sermon,
but did not want to repay,
only to feel that I had.

            Because her sign read EMERGENCY everyday
            I presumed it was fake;
            Because there's an accident everyday
            I forget the difference of guilt.

        Quiet shudder of needing church
        and not being able to shake hands after the sermon
        because of that need.



Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple
University.  His first novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil,
2005), and book of poems, Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005),
were recently published. Poems of his have been published in Mudlark,
Conundrum, Chain, Big Bridge, Bird Dog, Caffeine Destiny, and
Spindrift among others. His critical work can be found in Jacket,
Logos, Clamor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The
Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The Morning News, The
Brooklyn Rail, Media and Culture, In These Times, The Fulcrum Annual,
Rain Taxi, and Flak. 

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

from The Spinning Bud

See –
the leaf asks nothing of Spring –
yet presses into mem’ry, easily –
asking –
love to let go — I return — of my own

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino has a degree in philosophy from Fordham University. His poetry appears online at Onedit#7. His interview with the English author Colin Wilson is online at The Argotist Online. He lives in New York City where he edits eratio and works as a private docent.

Wilson interview:

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Wilson%20interview.htm

eratio:

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com

Raewyn Alexander

this could happen in a bright room

where a band plays and people laugh
anywhere a boat could drop anchor
or directly beside you so close
I could kiss your cheek
but my love I don’t hide my love there

my love is hidden in rain and the dirt
it flits about the way email messages do
nothing so easy you can push it
this love’s the way people dance
and sing when they forget anyone could laugh

my love asks for nothing
and opens
the universe unfolds too
a gigantic cup peeling back on itself
I imagine a question for that answer

years built caution into a fence
I leap around inside myself
the love itself is a cat with another home
and it visits and watches
in the heat where silence saves me

Raewyn Alexander works as an editor and Communication consultant, she has nine books published in NZ and some work in Australia and the USA. She recently travelled twice to the Overload Poetry Festival in Melbourne, when they asked her over the ditch. More here http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/alexanderraewyn.html

Duane Locke

Yang Chu’s Poems 148

Living in a stump land, longing for the voices
Of forests and its symbols, its twigs that talk
A silent, tactile language of truth, not the lies
Spoken in the language of popular opinion,
The language that is the people’s opium,
Living in this land when and where
The advice of the older is venom,
The advice of the young conjures violence,
The advice of the middle aged is “I-They” slavery,
Living in this location, I seek another language,
A language of non-dual perception, a language
That fuses the binary opposites into a new force,
A language that abolishes the separation
Of subject and object, of the ordinary and the mystic.

Duane Locke lives in rural Lakeland, Florida a few feet from osprey nest. Has Ph. D. (Metaphysical Poetry).

As of January 2008, has had 5,935 poems published in print magazines and e zines (Not one poem self-published or paid for to be published. Also, I do not subscribe to magazines that publishes my poems). Have had 17 print and e books published. Have many poems, over twenty books, that I have not prepared in manuscript for publication.

Also a painter and photographer. Paintings have appeared in many exhibitions, winning a number of awards and are in permanent collections of museums. A discussion of my paintings appears in Gary Monroe’s Extraordinary Interpretations (U of FL press.)

Have had 209 photos published in e zines and magazines. Some have been used for book and magazine covers. My photos have been close-up of trash, what people have tossed away, but now mainly on what might be called “abstractions” or visual music and nature photographs, birds, and close-up of small insects. Once, I was ranked by the PSA as one of the top twenty nature photographers in the United States.

Occupation: The study of philosophy. My favorite philosophers are Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger. I believed that the Western mind had been misdirected by its inheritance of the Platonic-Cartesian tradition, and thus practically everybody believes lies to be the truth and speak a language of lies. The purpose of a poet is to start with the language of lies spoken by people and strive to convert the language of lies into a language of truth (Whatever truth is).

Also, I believe that most opinions expressed about poetry are nonsense. Most of our poetry axiologists are self-deluded.

For more information, interviews, publications, awards click on the search engines of Google. I am listed in the Marquis Who’s Who in America.

Anna Rugis

Partition – for AZ

fly now
to the house of your grandfather

you’ve stayed too long
in that blazing building
trying to defend
the indefensible

though your legs are black
and your wings singed
it’s not too late

the world is spiked with ruins
of moghul palaces
haunts of djinns in stolen clothes
in overtime
even the shadowless find protection

which is why we wander
these virtual cities in tatters
pulling stragglers
from the path of stray bullets

take refuge on this forgotten roof
in the sheen of slate
the whistle and lift
of countless jubilant voices

Anna Rugis – singer/songwriter/poet. Former backup singer for Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, The Kinks, Cliff Richard, the Peddlars. She has just released her third CD of original songs entitled Traffic in Gold. Her poems have been included in Poetry Aotearoa, JAAM, brief, Takahe, Poetry NZ, Catalyst, foam:e, and on-line LYNX magazine (USA).

George Wallace

Spring

what god says to the microbe the mealy worm says to the ant
what the wingbat prays to the moon is belched out by stars in april
these are the sounds of spring when the dead acorn of january awakens
and parasailing through the meadow a paper bag of dandelion seeds
what i like about spring is peach petals unfolding
a pebble pushed aside by the green peckerhead of dawn
and a brace of purple hyacinth nosing their way into life
spring is a blind persistent puppy spring is new kali of the leaf flesh
spring is a deity whose worship is assured in codework of dew
great lattice of stone! latheringsoap of generations!
what brimmings! what miraculous stripping off of clothes!
a man is naked as a mountain cat, a fox leaps easily through tulip trees
and spring i wander through your labyrinth of blue gentians
i feel the throbbing root of your fur in my thighs
my lips are a humming bee in your harmonica
i smell daylight playing through my notebook paper
the taste of my marrow is antler bone and makes jaws crack open
here are my seawings here my toe and tongue
here my kidneys riveted with a thicket of fool’s gold
here are my nipples round as the roundest paragraphs
i am marbles plummeting down a waterfall
i am hint of aluminum in lightning
many-colored thread of chemistry inhabit my sky
this is my buddha wakefulness
this my all day grape vine
thickening in a moist honey of mist
here is my deadstalk wind
here the yellowing out of willow branches
marsh mud drink up my hawk and raise my neckhair
i am a preacher in the pulpit of meadowgrass again!
like a kentucky colonel lost in wild raspberries
i part the bushes and daylight falls out
i enter into you with the unaccountable joy of sex
weeping in the rain water comes trickling out of my nose
i am a prize fighter who won’t throw in the towel
i am no stranger to the sweet intercourse of appleblossoms but
why am i telling you all this, spring, when it is you, yes
you! spring, you can tell the such and such of it
the little spontaneous mayflies dancing in your eyes
the marigolds leaping out of your shoes
the anticipation of summer
pants flung wide in a schoolhouse door
the doom of february telescoped down to nothing
the snail is in his membrane the tyranny of government is a dull memory
and i look at you and i know that yes! i shall not want
you shall lead me through the flocks and i will say
spring i am! the grandchild in every old man limping
i am! the secret muscle in every embrace
i am! the ploughboy grinning in wicked soil
i am! the callous and the dragonfly
the slut the freshwater boot
ornamental wizard!
potash tippler!
new bacchanale along the wooded trail!
o spring! i have to hand it to you
open mouthed snoring or legless
under your glass-eyed gaze of sun
i am easy sleeping again
i am an infant in your crib of the world

A Morning Without Eyes

a morning without eyes is perfectly all right with me,
bright rain free and clear as daylight in a tea-cup –
and o! the sweet widowhood of its hair!
one cannot be too careful about stating certain things.
a morning without eyes is a black & white kind of time,
somewhat slow, like the motion of the sun’s hands
across a man’s face. like the great hands of a panda bear
as it walks through bamboo with a fat shadow trailing behind him.
i am not one of those who cuts his finger on the edge of experience
and forgets his lesson quick. a man pays attention in this world.
he learns. he learns. even learns that there is something
to love in a morning without eyes. so perfect! so blind!
so full of opportunity to learn how to see again, how to love
this world more. and a life without the possibility of love in it
is a blinder thing than a morning without eyes.
it doesn’t matter what you try to tell me. i know what i know –
and i do love a morning without eyes. there’s just
something about it that is dearer to me than
a bucketful of unhappy religions.

New York-based George Wallace is author of sixteen chapbooks of poetry in the US, UK and Italy, including Swimming Through Water (La Finestra, It), Burn My Heart in Wet Sand (Troubadour, UK) and SUmmer of Love Sumer of Love (Shivastan, US). Editor of Poetrybay (www.poetrybay.com), Polarity, Long Island Quarterly and other fine periodicals, he tours the US and UK widely to perform his poetry and offer writing workshops. Visit www.myspace.com/ggwallace for further information.