Daily Archives: June 20, 2010

44 posts

“My Peace” by Patricia Kirsch

From the wisps
of danger
I pluck my courage.
The branch of the olive tree
bundles my joy.
In the shade,
squeezing my toes,
flexing my feet,
I am alive
here in this mood.
If nowhere is around
the corner
I'll go left
but now I'll
just rest.

“Kneeling” by Patricia Kirsch

When I look at you there
kneeling on the floor, your body
surrounded by forks and spoons
your sweater pink like the tender
flesh of your chest, I want to
scream No! Not again! I've
already died with you, you should
be an angel now. But he chopped
your wings, crushed your core like
a little boy squishes a rotten
peach in his fist, the orange and
reddish guts fying everywhere,
attracting the famished black birds. They
descend on the treasure and I wish
I could give you just one piece of gold,
touch your body and not feel scars,
look in your brown eyes and see life. I
pray to god to toss a scrap your
way. The birds peck madly
at the carcass of the peach and I
understand how you must feel, sunken
on the cold floor, a broken shell, and I
couldn't--just couldn't--compel my hands to
paste the pieces together--one
last time.

“Impressions” by Patricia Kirsch

Subtract 20 years
I hear the howl
see your shiny smile
your fingers flex with
talent and experience.
"Don't shed one
be a big girl
I love you
don't you know?"

Christmas came
and still no
workout bag
Santa gave him
an excuse instead.

I remember the
final time we punched
in sibling fun
I knew your skin
like the sizzling street
on my feet.

Add 20 years
I still know your fist
I wear it every day
My arm bears its impression.

“Cheap Obsession” by Patricia Kirsch

You're beautiful and fun
outrageous and cheap
You're negative and gross
enjoyable and deep.
I see your comic side
I feel it when you weep
I know when you hide
I scream for your need.
I've lived a thousand ways
and been a million days.
I think you're expensive
and sweet, sour and meek
You're hideous and bold
gregarious and old
You're too rich for me
too poor to suit me
You're angry and young
restless, fussy and wrong.
I love your phony smile
obsess about you in the dark
You're lovely in firelight
ugly in moonlight
when the sun shines
you're as fierce as a tiger
ready to fight.
I want to kill the person
who made you weak
bash and smash their brains
in a heap.
I need to feel your stress
understand your pain
I'm obsessed with your eyes
possessed by the rain.
I want to lounge in your
water-bed and cause a tidal
wave. I want to kiss
your paper cuts and
bandage your brain. I
want to smell the white
roses sitting in your chair.
I want to know what it's
like to trash who's down.
I want to revel in the
secret world, love you til
you're dead. Afterwards
we'll sing a song,
caress til it ends.

“234” by Casey O’Malley

She carries the moon in her mouth this woman,
Cradles her words like mints folding her tongue around the gift like
She can't feel with her fingers she sees things differently
With her heart, the stars gravitate to her palms as she
Blesses dinner, blesses me with her presence and
Blesses my writing calling me a prophet when I haven't been to a
Palace of religion in months, I am a drifter
And every place of worship is my home

And she loves me for that heart
That bending will, she calls me her baby
Her dreamer her child but I hardly know her

She sits at the park, next to me on a bench and asks me what I am writing,
If it will change her change the world or go places,
I tell her I hope and she takes my hand like it belonged to her
In one grasp, passes me her story asking to
Take it places, passes me her heart
The moon from her mouth and teaches me to pull.

“Don’t Read This” by Casey O’Malley

I want to know you like I used to
Back when we were kids and you knew the names of the planes
And I made all the sound effects I want to
Peel back things that don't make sense because really,
Why should skin matter why should clothes matter why
Should we matter
What have we really done in this world

I want to know you and not the
Self-help books you collect I don't want
To hear about the newest skill you learned or understand
Just why a car works the way it works I'd
Rather read a book on you read you find out
What you honestly think of me maybe we could be more but for now
I want to know you, be your friend

You'll stop calling me every Friday if you see this poem.
You'll stop promising to
Meet me for coffee during your lunch hour and
You won't smile at me in that way that makes me feel like
You trust every inch of every part of me

If you see this, we will stop talking.
And I will have to be understanding and I won't
Know you anymore.

“The Apple Tree” by James C Brown

I look out on the apple tree my window sits above
And hear the plops as apples drop from heavy limb to ground
And smell upon the summer breeze the warm sweet scent of apples
Now nearly ripe as summer ends and starts to slip toward fall.

“Rewriting History” by Amanda DiDonna

She's sitting here thinking about that gun
Wondering if she has the guts to be done
She thinks about how much easier it'll be
But see if she did have the guts then she wouldn't be telling this to me
She tells me about that sucky life she had when she was young
And how all she wanted was to be done
He broke her heart
Then her life just feel apart
She lost the only real friends she had
And then there was her dad
He was such a dick
And it made her sick
The yelling and the fighting
And she just sat there writing
What else was she going to do
There was nothing left and her life continued to suck and it still does
she's wishing she could rewrite history to change
to have the guts to pull that trigger to swallow those pills
to slit those wrists to slit that throat
to jump from that bridge to hang by that rope
to die but she didn't have the guts so she did none of these
she just wrote
Wrote about what she couldn't do about being strong
about being able to end it all
I'm 15 and I'm sitting here listening to her telling me this story
and she's telling me about the time when she was 14
and alone with a gun a bottle some pills and a knife
and about the self mutilation that happened that night
she says she never felt more alive
and then she kept going to tell me about her picking up that gun
and about how that bottle gave her the strength she wanted as she rewrote history
and then she was gone gone like the life I knew
as I go to that funeral I see the tombstone and it says
RIP Amanda DiDonna and nothing more
I'm looking at myself as I see my friends all gather around
they're crying saying I love you and I'm sorry I wasn't there to the body
as I walk over I see me and I see the pain I cause
the lives I ruined and the other graves I dug
because I had the guts
and now I wish I didn't
I don't want to rewrite history and hurt all these people
I don't want them to feel all of that pain
its not fair because now their lives suck
I can't help but think what would happen if they were alone
with a bottle a knife some pills and a gun
would they have the guts to rewrite history?

“He Loves Me” by Damien Bailey

Was my Judo instructor,
Took me on as his best,
Eventually presented me to his sensei,
At a local tournament;
I won, made him proud

One Sunday, at our weekly double feature,
I was bullied in the bathroom;
He chastised the ruffians,
Respected my sensitivity as I wept–
Held me till my eyes dried

Drew me pictures of my favourites:
Superheros, monster trucks, landmarks;
Bought me an Atari 2600,
Stacks of games to go with it;
Gave me a Leo Pendant,
My astrological sign,
Made me feel like a King

When I slept over,
We viewed bloody martial art movies,
Spoiled my system with fun foods
My overprotective Mom considered sin–
Even let me swing his sharpened Katana

Passed my bedtime,
He let me sleep in his king size,
Kind enough just to tuck me in

Years passed away my yearning,
The mysterious rupture,
For this friend, this father figure

When he was arrested
For fucking little kids,
I was... happy...
That he really loved me
And not them

“Beautiful” by Liam Hanninen

She is so beautiful
Tonight I'll think so, but it seems tomorrow I won't.
I want her to be the one that finally makes me stay
The one that embraces today and tomorrow,
I'll settle for her because I can't have the world.
She'll make my rhymes rhyme
And turn on a dime, to tell me that it sucks or it's real.
She'll pass for a queen
And I her king,
Living in poverty we will be royalty:
A king and a queen who love and hate and whatever
Will be with each other forever and ever.

“Notions Contrived” by James Oliver Ryan

Circling are these many questions to my senses.
Evolving is a quizmaster with depths to surmise.
Open are the doors gone are the fences.
These are notions to a poetic moment contrived.
All thoughts flow to where a pearlescent sage is met.
These words be spoken are introspecting,
Self-selecting gestures, hard-set.
A shaken bag of quotations is held by a sonneteer,
Reflecting,
An ascending trumpeter sounds a note on high,
To an artificer with notions contrived,
In the wake of an event so quintessential,
Golden finches take to the sky,
This essence of twilight is it providential?
To an auto-poetic pattern designed.

“The Wall Street Man” by James G. Piatt

Noise and color combined
In a financial metaphor
Of inartistic oblivion
As tons of dull gray cement
Paves over fields of flowers

Surreal thoughts merged with
Purposely vague meanings
Depicting stark unreality
Containing allegorical symbols
Of excessive indulgence

Once pristine rivers tainted
With green poisonous slag
From a monetary swamp
That evolved from a morass
Of injudicious decisions

Financial credos of rusted metal
And immoral sales slogans
Fused into a stream of spin
Causing an enigma of
Unsolvable paradoxes

Destroyed imaginings
Of naïve dreamers seeped silently
From the minds of the unaware
Causing a huge tsunami
In their conscious awareness

Secret visions
Blinded one's mind's eyes
Malevolent impressions
Too sublime to understand
Defiled one's thoughts

Like a metaphoric mesh
Of bland robotic inclinations
Unrealistic desires like steel snails
Crept toward an abyss
Replete with gluttony

Sprouting in the
Now asphalt meadows
Where humans once dwelled
Clandestine forces slowly
Breed to blur rationality

“Leaves In the Wind” by Conor McElhaney

A Leaf whisked away from

Comfortable Surroundings

New pile forming

Others follow

Till the pile suffice

The pile compacts

Leaves steadily losing shape

Originality blows in the wind

What's left behind

Will never be the same

What's left behind

Will never be the same

More will leave

Even more will join

Leaving imprints

On one another

Leaving scratches

Wearing down until

The time comes

Where everything

Stops feeling

They become the wind.

“Simple Matters” by Daniel Marquez

Things change I realize
As autumn turns to winter
Golden leaves hail nude branches
Cloudy skies turn snowy plains
Timid birds fly from winter's harsh storm

As time goes on
Snowy plains, they change
Melt, run, and feed
Barren ground to stark grasses
Creatures return to stalk the land

And one wonders
The magnificence of such matters
The changes, known and unknown
To which the Earth answers to
The extravagance of such simplicity

But one must realize
There is no other reason
For the settings of Mother Nature
But to simply enjoy
And bask in her beauty

“Her Voice Resides” by Michael Fahey

My best friend is now my worst enemy.
A true friend lost in time.
It's funny how things can change so quickly,
How love can change to hate.

I can live my own life,
I don't need my hand held any longer.
You can cut my leash and let me free
Because I've got news for you, I'm not your bitch

Who are you to judge me for my actions?
Hypocrite

You say I am heading down a dangerous path
When really I'm making my climb towards success
While you plummet back down to the ground
Weighed down by your failures, you can't get back up
Pathetically crippled.

Plagued with your obscured vision
Unable to realize what you are.
A once beautiful flower, now wilted and dead
My heart has grown cold and your words have become harsh

“Arid-Stock-Cracy” by Elisabeth Vodola

Like a dog returning to its puke,
So recurs the blood of king and duke;
And nouvelle richesse too, indulged too far,
Bears forth the selfsame loathesome scar.
Preserve our own Republic from this pest:
Let every generation know its best.

“Language of Moths” by Noam Baruch

They flutter in spangles of sun beneath eastern hemlocks
their shadows tag ripples on water,
daredevils
nearly dip their dusted wings,
and only ten feet downstream
winter's melt falls hard over the edge onto the flat rock below
that holes have formed,
one perfect for plunging our bodies and
we do, over and over,
a little less startled by the cold each time
the water is warmed slightly by our play,
while our eyes level with the slippery moss.
Above us, the small cloud of moths gathers
in this time we call September,
in clusters four-leafed clovers, bleached, and small
as the sky divers in white at the air shows we watched at the shore.
From cocoon to the first open wing of July
the white lichen moths seem to know nothing of what they are not.
I would catch them with my eyes as they darted like a game of survival
in and out under ledges of bluestone along the bank,
four or five, way below the shade of hardwoods
that gives the conifers life.
Alone, the last moth would vanish,
like sleight of hand,
in the measured closing of the day.

“Arrow” by Annette M. Krizanich

I walked in mist as I had
     for years, but this time

it was cool on my face
     and made the trees

gray. Then an arrow
     of geese shot out

from my brow. They
     called as they had

last year and would
     again. When they flew

under the horizon,
     I was still there.