Klaus J. Gerken, Poem Without A Title, Canto V

Lord Drone Prophet Eyes the Next Dead Body, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Poem Without A Title

Canto V

igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum

(Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus)

where there is favour among the gods the victor

will prevail iulius kaiser slaughtered millions

yet today is revered as a hero figure mainly

because of shakespeare the history obscured

halt who goes there horatio and the witch's

brew is bubbling with falstaff in the shadows

laughing uncontrollably but then shakespeare's

in the alley and god knows where he wants the

killing done out on highway sixty one with kerouac

at the gates of dawn and urizen sorta coming on

life's the measure of a stick crucified and woebegone

golgotha is the carrion hill with tibetan monks

rolling in the swill to get a taste of mortal life

they're all gods anyway or so the dalai lama says

not my problem if they refuse to follow me

one has to wonder if common sense is bottled

by bogus doctors these days only thing missing

is the carnival but sunday is word of god written

on a 40 inch high definition tv screen time for

reflection when the preacher screams scripture

like it's going out of style can you last another

mile i think i'll take a break and sleep a while

one gains division in a fraction of a second

without even a shred of evidence the mind just

sucks up electrons and spits them like a great fart

overcoming constipation like the grand finale

of an angry volcano thera vesuvius mount st helen

it builds up slowly in small insignificant increments

hardly noticeable in the accumulation of hubris

the yellow roles royce hardly has a function

no class act need to finance a buyout no frills

manipulating the market cut throat all the way

if it's not guns they want then it's toys but

not just toys the latest toy the one better than

last years' version the one everyone has to have

like the latest fad condom or underwear we the human

species don't fool around we gotta show them were

the same as anyone we can't be different that is

definitely unacceptable we've become clones of big

industry that tell us how to act and what to wear

we consume consume consume because we are told to

taught in school to conform to the masses as long

as the faceless masses can be easily controlled

but just try to be an individual to have your own

thoughts they have you targeted as being undesirables

who can't be tolerated by the mass hysterical norm

in their suburban retreats and weekly office jobs

waves of incertitude the stock markets crumble into

blind ambition stepping on the slaves of man podiums

of braggart slaughter weapons of control designed

for mass murder ideology of godly killing in the midst

of hope he who giveth taketh away the finally indiscretion

we are living out our holy books as if presented with

a script we can't turn away from we have no originality

except for art and poetry everything else is scripted

for the dull plain faceless robot in the crowd

accepting without questing what is given what is broken

what is healed out of our control they scream when they

get angry enough and want to tear it down but have

no new utopia to rebuild the ruins from the ash of hate

no vision but the rage of crass destruction they are

as lost as any leader faking it and then there comes

religion evil perpetrator of the truth restricted

faith is all you need we're told but faith in what

kaiser napoleon hitler jesus allah they all promised

paradise for those who would do the sacrifice and kill

for the next life they never would achieve and then

there's the usa the promised land an entity of murderers

refusing to comprehend their bloody history we can do

no wrong god is on our side they scream and scream and

continue screaming their rage to a world in turmoil

controlling everything fucking up and blaming the failure

on others no one is free without their god given constitution

their 1st and 2nd amendments and their hidden inequality

money is the only god they worship in the name of jesus

banker of their padded mental instructional garden of eden

not that history gives us better examples egypt china

sameria babylon israel greece rome church france england

germany all the same ilk of grandiose vomit no matter how

fine their artistic endeavours all in ruins to be admired

without regard for their rampant cruelty to step on

others enslaved to be the greatest nation un the earth

the planet it a caldron of boiling blood which every day

is celebrated with elaborate production in our popular

culture as long as the blood and slaughter continues

cauterized cleanly on the tv or movie screen we are satisfied

being civilized while indulging in our meat at table

giving obeisance to gods that are no different that what

now we call the ancient world to distinguish our somewhat

better compassion that the church we whoreship has brought

to fruition through the massive justified crusades and

inquisition we are hollow tubes the wind rages though

when the exhaust causes song we praise our understanding

if history has taught us anything it is that we are a river

starting out as a stream eventually merging with the ocean

if history has taught us nothing then we continue to dam

the river flood the fertile lands and stop the flow to cause

our own destruction we cannot claim what is not ours to claim

we cannot manage what in fact should manage us not in the

destruction of the natural infrastructure from which we spawned

but we are hollow creatures straw creatures goggle-eyes creatures

fawning like a virus across a fertile globe perhaps the horizon

is our blindness we must conquer what lies beyond when what

we have is not enough we are greedy yet pose as needy or as

saviours to those we have displaced our generosity knows no

bounds after we have reprimanded them through war it will

never stop the killing will go on forever because killing

the greater the destruction the greater our generosity it's

a cycle we have come to rely on the victor rebuilds the defeated

land to their own profitability monuments are built

to worship the rebuilding and of course the victor's sacrifice

first we take then we give and then collect obeisance once hope

is given the master no longer needs to beat the slave into

submission all's well that ends well throw the dogs a bone

But the slaughter must continue there can be no peace without

war as there can be no war without peace one feeds the other

and the catalyst that makes it viable is little more than religion

this indefinable premise built on faith rather than rational

thought it cannot be taken away it cannot be argues to the one

who believes life the enemy is always inhuman must be eradicated

no other solution is possible since compromise exposes the lie

and an exposed lie is a vulnerability that must never be

compromised written into stone they fill to realize compassion

should be the victor not the executioner and even robspierre

fell into the quagmire of defeat corruption will always be rife

for the winged victory there is only so much integrity in a

garbage can don't be fooled there are greater things than thou

—Klaus J. Gerken

kjg 21 - 22 aug 2014

Poem Without A Title, published by mgv1>publishing 2014

Rosmarie Waldrop, IMPROVISED ANGLES

Monolith Chair, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

IMPROVISED ANGLES

The assumption is that scripts are firmly embedded in your mind. Short of blood dripping on the stage you will keep going. Blue chair, air, a white sheet of paper. Calming, the absence of discourse.

Would you trade the ability to speak coherently for muscle currency? Lift, stretch, shift within the skin. We’re not so much debating frames of reference as the opposite side of the set: blue air, chair strewn with papers. As if to say, the script is unfinished, only sporadically thought out.

Unexpected signs risk taking on too much importance. Like the blue chair and next to it, in the shadow, the sheet of white paper. So that it becomes possible to dream of a later, more comprehensive beauty. To love by definition.

No dream rivals the forms of the body. The actors are moving toward, but not explaining each other. Not going anywhere in the blue air. We have drained our symbols and want our theater cold and impartial.

To demonstrate: the play always contracts the two extremes of time to center-stage now where they are cancelled. The writing in blue on the white sheet of paper on the chair is less a prop than a program. The hands of the young man are not abstract but on your head. Is this part of the script?

There is no way to see beyond what’s in plain sight. The stage, the blue chair. Even though language enables the division of labor the script fails to document the blue air, team work, homeostasis. Even without an author, words fill up the stage.

—Rosmarie Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening: Selected Poems is just out from New Directions. Her novels, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All, are now available in one volume from Northwestern UP; her Collected Essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), from University of Alabama Press; her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, from Wesleyan UP. She translates German and French poetry (Elke Erb, Friederike Mayröcker, Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud) and co-edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop, in Providence RI.

Greg Fiddament, Blue

Blue Pod of the Anthropoid, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Blue

Blue partial connections,

equal requirement

to the in-breath.

Fact’s never-ending rejections,

leading you anywhere

@light speed.

The globe,

knowledge’s lightbulb,

starting to sprout.

Summer number-one.

Others even less.

Fractions of zero.

Continued…

into the blue

tunnelled view.

Acceptingly,

going on

without you.

A gain

that adds up

to a loss.

Ruling out

all that is not.

On to nothing.

Hyper-locked

and free to choose

accordingly,

here or there.

Web weaver

adventure.

True blue,

new blue,

glue blue.

suckered,

pulling you in

then setting.

Where will it end?

When it doesn’t.

Spindle thin,

thread’s engine

sinking its thorns in,

every single spin.

Blood shot

blue veins.

leading the eyes

to the mind and follow,

every broken-down vertical,

split-diminishing.

Link-hit.

Peptides and receptides,

ebb and flood.

Hardened,

drowning,

calling it swimming.

Virtual emersion

drone

containing all known tones,

as well as the unknown.

Combinations alone

for diversion.

Blue of flame,

blue in name,

and blue again.

The only way

remains,

a change(ing).

—Greg Fiddament

Sarah Cave, wearing (cassocks)

                Slava Tree, image by by Irene Koronas  

wearing (cassocks)

Trees state
ecologists, seen
illegally wearing
(cassocks),
will bring the bear
Seraphim fed  
to factory natural
value Eastern
forest whereas distant
parliament commands
land approval earth yoke
to spill across worn
haircloth landscape

Giant Slava Spruces seek loan
of traditional nuns for plantation
a forest neck proposal to officials
who keep their branches blessed
and virtuous outer trees stylized
a letter – remarking ‘you’re not
using them, let them be of use’

bark strips sold off need counsel

a Moscow-bearer delivers returns
wooden priests    
                       their faces stripped

Wooden priests

make difficult
clerics symbolic
destruction
of Bishop’s 
embroidered

mitre
proclaimed
endangered
by metre

Monks bestow a private
previous company
deacons deliver their
wordless decrees
their covered shoulders
create private profit
Slava wears his cobbled
law hat, an important cowl
that reveals no more than
20% of his religious neck
ready to be scrutinised
by bureaucrats

Slava fells nuns

recalls encounters
Boris fixed the focus
on the tree line
the country’s canopy
white noise above
the hidden places
where winter
sports are exported

—Sarah Cave

Joel Chace, Culled Rain #3

Culled Rain #3, visual poetry by Joel Chace. 

Joel Chace's collection, Culled Clues is forthcoming from TLPress.

Wayne Mason, Anonymous Windows

Windows in Anon, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Anonymous Windows

              Ambivalent radio like long downtrodden depression. Purgatories

              build graveyards. We watch

   the clock as text. Sound as irreconcilable

         new devices.

Deconstruction with noise.

                   Things

             tangible. Abstract) Much an unmarked post-structuralist.

 Spontaneous insidious volume. Here word measures the meekness and reckless

        linear infinity. What the consciousness?

           Define consciousness. Then both

    abstract) displacement.

              Sound bending multiplying a thread and slow eternity rang comfortably

    through manipulation.

I poetic by default.

I quiet anonymous windows.

                      I was simply this. I experimented with

                 existing violence?

 

Cryptic viruses back lit our Yin? Inscribed space grasps way founding occurred in the space

          for a physical contra(diction)

We were homogenized deconstructing art.

Radio

                            traps concerned by space

I and apathy

            Fill the deep void

                     squeezing out

  sound

     That arbitrary volume to silent

         

      ambivalent radio with an

entirely different vocabulary

—Wayne Mason

Charlie Onions, (to Greece, since low)

Wawtchem Trundlin, image by Irene Koronas

(to Greece, since low)

I say too much and frolic too little and too gallantly over verb virtual seeing and saying. FUCK ME.

STUNNER STUNNER TRIM me until I’m purebred in cinema romance with the head up and gasping for un-liquid hegemony puss mount me times. In the thunder and rain we stall it all for the secondary consumer. Music is a run-up and we are slaves to the slide on your lonely housewife mother’s inhibitions utter and discarded.

BOOM BOOM BAP.

Boy see here now I’m crushed up into my inner. How rude, how full, how silent and fucked. Rummage into it; isolate, ruminate, collect a collected collector that sups to fountain water like the swan bitch in that gold Greek sky. From it one tours, grafts a Boeing born through my oh me, little solid and grey boy child of the shit meal.

Down from above.

Seethe with me, thrift off the dull ‘uns – ‘wawtchem trundlin’ cunt’. Boy child be the heroism inject that’s therein needed. ‘I can’t, I’m all sumptuous these days, you see I CRAVE these days hun!’

I should very much like to stop with all this but the crush in your roots halt me.

I’m going to estimate, Dockley, that I will maintain significant vigilance with my future children. I should very much like to torch their brows with a stare, slip under with a jest; ruin them.          

Cynic in the windmill, the tide up shocked and awed to frowns. Mum will die. Dad will die. Think on hun, craze none for us. Violin the midday, tear at the sash that stache’s men on the paves. Spain through their veins, chant out in death wail. Armies hun, armies. Other Mums will die and other Dads will die. To Zion hopefully miss, to there I wish a flight. I would like to sequence Spain into the next five of my years, reconcile with those family members I thoroughly dislike, only to dash them beneath as neglected spice packs in noughties kitchens.

I caught, on passing racks, a slimmer guaranteed billionaire loneliness chanced before up-sticks, so to speak as master plagiarised a Los Angeles executive creep on Mondays. No slap but sticky bomb Tuesday blues of sky dredges and upside down balloons.

To many an imperfect ease, but ram them straight-legged and chinless, ‘cause the imperfect reigned on me with A-bomb efficiency and luscious brazen shades of never mind Sundays with this. I hooked on, catching hard swift sock-puppet kink amidst pubic stereo slippers and a herd of shite.

Jack’s inside but I feel smoked up on the exterior; pulsating salad-tossing tip-toe cracked actor brilliance, thinking of what to think, how to think, which pullover to avoid and when to stop loving things. Dead-tracked – BOOM.

—Charlie Onions

Rupert M. Loydell, MIRACLE STATION

Miracle Station, image by AC Evans 

MIRACLE STATION

Sphinx lightning suddenly

backlit the skeleton rain

as the greyness dissolved.

Love notes from the future

are all I have left of you,

the dust you left behind.

There is a place for your,

for my, for our, self-obsession

and compulsive disorder.

I am the protagonist

and you were my lover.

Now, the sun is still.

Honeysuckle, I am

thinking of you, exhaling

lust in the plural.

I breathe but you don't.

We sing makeshift shanties

to pass our time together,

are guided by the blind

toward ascension and

sound embodying space.

There is no room for flesh,

no place for the soul.

Abstain from life,

it is too perplexing,

like paintings about paint

or the kettle and teapot

nailed to the gallery wall.

This is the passing point,

with little room for manoeuvre,

this is where life flowers

and towers of emotion fall.

You are my kaleidoscope girl,

the splinter of light in my eye.

I am comfortably accomplished

at making yesterday better.

Hyacinth, your memories fade

in the smoke and mirrors of desire,

fields of fire across the land.   

—Rupert M. Loydell

AC Evans, SPEED DATING IN VIENNA

Martian Interlude I, image by AC Evans 

SPEED DATING IN VIENNA

I Balloon Time

Basque string garter sapphire silk

Satin and gold

Brassy barmaids reeking of Crème Shalimar

Right kiddies, its balloon time!

Wanna surprise? Just tap the app!

The following report contains some extremely distressing scenes:

Oooh, wow! Look at that!

Escape from the city, and say Goodnight Vienna…

Scorching shots of babes in outlandish tracksuits

And slinky, silk-mix crop tops.

II Momentos Magicos

Dealing with all these stray landings and sex kittens

Is thirsty work, I tell you, I kid you not,

But such momentos magicos, when a Robot Ripper

Hits town, it’s like no place on Earth (it isn’t).

They call it ‘Vienna’, a crazy, neon venue

On the third moon of some godforsaken, far away planet,

Where underground spaces have so many secrets, like

Shady caverns where everything gets fun and flirty, and

Miss Titfer Tat serves up a hot scandi with raw emotion.

Crumbly mascara? Way too shy to say ‘hi’?

III Flicka Vee

Re-tune that up-to-the-minute chat technique,

Concentrate on map reading, all day every day.

She looked rather swotty and clever in those cat eye specs.

Snappy clappy? I’m good! You?

(Stop me if you’ve heard this one).

Nice little squirmer, the chirpy, cheeky barman thought,

As, with a cheesy grin, he shook another cocktail.

There he was, putting the tease into the teaser,

Explaining invisible mending to our feisty

Warrior queen space cadet, Flicka Vee, and –

IV The Darkstar Celeste

She loves it here,

This is a deep controlled zone, stylish bedrooms and much more,

Including obscure vision-enforcement cameras,

Sub-woofs, strobes, and parquet under the arches with live convergence.

Visions of Ulrika lit up the Panavision-Cinerama-Stealth-Moon-Holistic

You- know-what, so what?

I’ve got a cosmic headache, she moaned suggestively, looking out for

The Darkstar Celeste looming towards us from the Ring of Junk.

Moody underground dance floor jiving Pom Pom Club clubbers

Stagey bandstands with handstands – quite a show, speed along now!

V A Shot of Old Peculiar

We’re back on the road after a swift encounter with Magda Heartthrob.

Finally a bit of a no-no, all those axe-throwing punks and right-on geezers,

But gives the adrenalin a turbo boost – just what the doctor ordered,

After a tip-top warp drive speed dating workshop and a shot of Old Peculiar.

She’s hopelessly addicted to the hidden garden round the back with

Future nostalgia opening soon: ales, stouts, oysters and a sinister, one-eyed

Chap with a barrel organ and a fine line in ribald double entendres,

A Grand Parade of fine wines and parties with multi-drop drivers.

Do something amazing today: write a thrilling bonk-buster, all solemn and

Emotional: it makes the news even more shocking.

VI What Are You?

Get ‘The Look’, get a life,

This Vienna thing means nothing you know;

Nothing to me – nothing to you.

Your words not ours.

Low cut strappy top, Tween Angels, and

A Lotto Gran, and, yes!

The sexiest trainee barista this side of the Outer Planets,

Blonde girl in beanie and hoodie, double trouble,

You’re just a backless loafer, what are you?

Let’s get outta here!  

—AC Evans