John Tranter (Balmain, Australia): "Pronto"

I.
No joy in this one, Bob. Would you like to be
summoned for one little blot on the record,
by a marshal? And create the indictment
today, that will be used for a demo
tomorrow? If you do that, my old friend,
the problem seems to be saying, the data
will go on the skids— it could be a fun contest,
held in a field near the Boston area.

Now, I don’t want you to get the idea that
finding a guitar has anything to do with it.
Just dish it up like the boss wants, though,
if you deal with the CIA— Hi, I’m Bob.
Can’t talk now. Down in the park,
listening to guitars, single mothers—

II.
Do they need to show more, to agree to put
the data mining double digits to use?
They blame a hotel trustee, ten to one.
A bang on the gong and he’s off to Brooklyn,
with a call for a song-set from Tony, sliding to CNN,
sun blinding him, trouble in the upper airway,
cost of sales data ballooning— he cannot operate.
It is the “FM in a Domain Name System” hazard.

A haphazard collapse they can share with the boss,
who already believes that we should solve it—
that must be what the publishers want—
two weeks’ extra pay, he would say that to keep me,
but I’m getting used to his lies. Sufficient onto the day
are its many small evils— Betty, comment on that, pronto.

© John Tranter 2005

Chris McCabe (London, UK): from The True History of the Working Class

March 20, 2008

When I was very young, Thatcher was a thing that happened
to my parents’ faces when they watched the television—
it showed itself like gritty food with sounds of She and Her and It.

When I was very young, I could tell when it was windy
by how quickly the clouds moved.

© Chris McCabe 2008

Todd Swift (Maida Vale, London, UK): "Sonnet: Listening In"

Things are what kings hold— and let go of, once,
learning too late that the nothing outside belongs
to the nothingness buzzing in our blood, and will
connect to it, as a burglar will drill through
steel locks and busy tumblers, to our blood.
The tempest of existence thrums and thunders,
rumbling the body like a great beating of a kettle drum,
announcing the hard hollows and stretched surfaces
of ourselves, our groaning testimony to being present
against our wish, to an audience that loves us less.
We sense the vibrancy of loss as a humming of violins,
like a surgery wild with last minute cutting, a tuning
up of instruments and mastery— the universe
has a body like a dancer’s, a mind like a maggot’s.

© Todd Swift 2005

Brian Freedman (Philadelphia, USA): "Adventures in Weightlifting"

Logic plays a role that is best described as supporting in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy; and when hormones are thrown into the mix, there’s just no telling what sort of strange things might happen. This most unfortune fact of teenage life now manifested itself in an ugly, and ultimately uncomfortable way. I awoke the day of the concert with a jolt. My eyes snapped open to glimpse a world grown suddenly urgent in light of the dream I had just suffered through. In it, Ali and I were sitting at the concert with Sylvester Stallone, who had somehow gotten hold of her third ticket. And despite the truly studly outfit I was wearing, she spent the entire showing hanging onto his left biceps, staring into his hangdog eyes, and asking if they could take a shower together. In the background, the New Kids played only one song, and not even one they wrote— Berlin’s "Take My Breath Away," a tune made famous in one of the biggest hits of the Eighties (Top Gun).

It all made sense, of course. The scene in that movie that all the women in the entire world— or, actually, solar system— were talking about, was the one in which Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis made slow-motion love, on her perfectly disheveled sheets, as that song drones on in the background. And in that scene, there is a lingering shot of Tom’s arms, as he lowers himself on top of Ms. M, with a grace and slowness that would’ve been worthy of an East German Olympic gymnast. I now realize that this was a manifestation of issues I had with myself, with my own 105 pound frame; but at the time, at that first event-date time, I knew only one thing— I had to get bigger, bulked up, by the time that evening rolled around.

After I got out of bed, I ate, and worked out, and ate some more, and worked out some more, and repeated the process far too many times to count— against everything I knew, against everything my father had taught me about weightlifting. The post-dream desperation had clouded my vision so much, as had actually caused me to believe that I could bulk up to Stallone-like, or at least Cruise-like, proportions, in a matter of seven hours. The reality, though, was much more embarrassing. “Bri,” my Mom called up at about three in the afternoon, “are you in the bathroom again?” “Yeah,” I shouted weakly, breathlessly, “I’ll be down in a minute.” I was dying, I thought. Had I known the word cholera, I’m sure it would’ve crossed my mind. My stomach was tied into enough knots to make an Eagle-scout proud. My muscles were fatigued to the point of near-paralysis. And in two hours, I had a date!

Great planning— I had spent the entire morning and early afternoon cramming as much protein-rich food down my gullet as possible, hoping that at least some of it would find it’s way to my unacceptably small biceps and pecs. But there was no such luck in the offing that day, and those cans of tuna had found there way through my system and right into the toilet. Combine that with three full-blown work-outs, and my body was staging what felt like a coup d’etat against itself. Three flushes later, I somehow made my way to my room, got hold of the date outfit I had used on the previous year’s excursion to the movies with a girl named Alannah (stone-washed jeans, button-down Bugle Boys shirt, black penny-loafers), and limped my way down the stairs, bow-legged.

“Don’t say a word,” I said to my father as I walked past him in the living room. He was shaking his head and snorting silently. He didn’t have to say anything— I knew what was implied. He was right. “Have fun,” he said in a mocking sing-song. As I walked towards the kitchen, the sound of a horn echoed from the driveway.

© Brian Freedman 2004

From Dusie

From In A Supralunar World

And should I one day be walking, alone, in the woods, at night,
and meet a young woman naked, alone, in the woods, at night,
might I not consider the possibility of blankets, and how one comes
to be walking in such a place at such a time—

it is good to be a poet on the way to the office of the censor,
where one can read all periodicals—

© K. Lorraine Graham 2005

From moria poetry

Get the light stanza
               for Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004)

"I Believe the Spoken Agency in the light. The critical text of the lamp scraps compiled a floater in the Reflection. What remains arises from the stanza Inside the carnage brought to Contemplation, O head hid in the night."

"Reality survives. Needles as quick and found knotted and I couldn't ask for distance on a city being first."

"A lot of play. The narrator asks the bird for "anti-immigrant" home sing-a-long, yet only the world unanswered with the power to guess good light under two minutes smartly to write."

It looks stopped in the final VOYAGE of that Muddle enticed— the end of the stanza.

© Miekal And 2005

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Ode On Jazz"

Physical beauty, Formal Rigor of God—
spiritual beauty, Economy of God—
Natural Will, Transcendent Will,
Facile Will in all its’ dismal “there-ness”—

Piano broken chords breaking down space
like watching bits of paper collect,
contained in a 12-bar blues; root
notes you tend to lean on,
or maybe a honking minor third,
a harmonic multi-colored sharp…

Follow your compulsion into flurries,
clusters of connecting phrases,
then a pause to sanctify as the progression
resolves after lingering on the fifth
for the appointed time—
pentatonics mainly with some suspensions,
sheets of sound, there it is...trademark leaps
only found in Coltrane,
like watching a rainbow erupt
out of the placid bowels of street-lakes,
sparrows in the gutters,
Eliot-esque alienation syncopated
impossibly high and mighty…

Repeat the repetition now into major scale—
Ionian gold, major-third suspensions again,
almost midnight for tremulous trees,
also hipsters, flights of birds, rabbis
in the wilderness as blues ends; here’s a quicker
quirkier jarring bit to cut
your teeth on…

Base bottom notes natural like ferns,
ride the ride cymbal like musical fellatio,
roll with rolls and kick-drum ejaculations,
what Hart Crane heard in bridges,
only blues (so bridge seldom comes),
stasis achieved nicely replicates movements,
bowel, kidney, heart-beat, daring snare of lip-ness,
thickness, quickness,
get it all out for all of us into the brick-laden city,
mutter of exhausted midnight buses
as vibrato notes shiver, miniature
solos on the toms creates energy
of emptiness among the weird abundance,
concluding with roll on the snare, now bass
also investigates metaphysical space,
not so much implacable as inexhaustible
eruptions; spring of autumn,
autumn of spring…

Seasons of balance, compromise,
away from extremes; Middle Path exteriorized,
oh piano on a minor seventh which bespeaks
longing for a more ethereal world,
elegiac as the last apple of October, eaten
by a Halloween camp-fire, beyond blues
of Earth into cadence, dying fall of pure moon,
ravaged, torn from the throat of persistence,
mute existence destroyed completely
and on fire, a universe of fingers and mouths,
looking down the tide of Death into eternity,
square-shouldered and erect,
freezing into whims of Ultimate “there-ness”,
beyond ordinary notions of quotidian abyss
in one long sitting pow-wow peace-pipe corn-cob
wholesome dinner of Voidness,
but insinuated only to drive away singularity….

Jazz is plural,
they give you a space, show you its’ contours,
allow you to move around and drown
if you want over hilltops of remorse, created
by Love or dolorous longing and especially
Central Parks of the soul and intellectual Bordello
life cut and pasting its’ bleak outline over rooftops
and bluebirds —

© Adam Fieled 2002

Ode On Jazz at Live at the Writers House 46 (WXPN)

Ode On Jazz at This Charming Lab

Ode On Jazz at Seven Corners Poetry (Chicago)

Miekal And (California, USA): from Samsara Congeries

In the back room she has been working for some time, elbow-deep in dishwashing. The job is unfulfilling, the customers never clean their plates, and she has all this time to recognize. Like experimenting with the dishwater. Not at all surprising are the contents. Eggs. Cigarette butts. Chili. Green peppers. Cheese. Sponges. Soap. Soggy cookies. Napkins. Hands and dishes. The sink is an open field, she has all day to make the contents obey her imagination. She is a molecule from some years before suddenly brought to consciousness. It was from her time that great megaliths of ice overthrew the continents. Programmed in her DNA, once a protean swelling form of ice, she is presently reduced to an aberration in a back room in a sink, in a molecule of water. Silence and paradox, working to earn enough money to send the writer to an ocean, where he will sit lotus endlessly, waves crushing his lap, his pencil and notebook wet and useless. All this while she is still there, sifting through the dishwater, closer to water, to luxury.

Makeshift and misplaced in alien havens, the writer took residence on a river-dazed pier. Wharf. Imagine the controversy when he organized a rendezvous in the night, pretext dreaming new verbs and nouns for said book. “The wharf is very accommodating, wooden slats carved and initialed. I could tell you any story you’d want to hear.” The wharf floated and bobbed, indicating that the turbulent city had little enough squirreled away, this generation should follow the water elsewhere. The writer waited, without precedence. He wrote many books and waited. The wharf grew weak, collapsed into the water. No one objected, the city ignored the river, the fishermen ignored the flotsam, the river registered the change, the writer maintained his network of speculations, waited to rendezvous. Water is priceless again, water is priceless.

© Miekal And 2005