The second hand sweeps the face of the clock,
suddenly freezing
and
Time itself stops flowing In and Out,
birthing impassive waves across the Weeping Ocean.
I am caught, locked, in the trembling grips of a nervous lull.
There it is again, a pause,
a space between the pounding
of bloody hammer on fleshy anvil,
a searing heat
in my heaving chest,
heart thumping, rhythmic thunder,
an interruption of the pulse
of the scarlet lightning
that sears my heart.
There it is again.
I followed rumors and legendry,
romantic mysticism,
along a trail
of passionate whispers
to your door,
all lusts lead to you,
a magnet made of flesh,
I am caught in the pull
of your gravity,
and you sparked
nuclear fission
in the lead-lined chambers
of my atomic heart.
I followed the trail
of errant electrons,
quarks, leptons and mesons,
colliding nucleii,
and in the subatomic fury
I saw your face merging with mine.
Together.
Metapmorphosis.
Mutation.
The tyranny
of human need.
It spills from a rent in the vein,
solid/insolid, fluidic components,
physiological and biochemical,
a Rorschach puddling on cold glass —
take a basic metabolic panel,
analyze the plasma for its
extracellular
mineral content, get a
protein electrophoresis
and
polymerase chain reaction,
then examine arterial blood gases…
It is hard work,
this divination
through haruspication,
reading dripping entrails
slowly going cold.
I am bound, caged, by anxiety filling the space behind broken seasons.
There it is again, a pause,
a hole piercing the ephemeral fabric
of the constant storm,
a stutter in the unending howl
that sizzles like molten magma
inside the cavity that holds my soul.
There it is again.
The second hand shudders and again begins its inexorable pass…
How unlike
the sprouting of a rose,
a bleeding bouquet
born of the pulse
of the scarlet lightning
that sears my heart.
How like a blossom
from a wound.
BIO
Joseph Armstead is a suspense-thriller and horror author living in the United States’ San Francisco Bay Area. Author of a dozen short stories and ten novels, his poetry has been published in a wide range of online journals, webzines and print magazines. A mathematician, Futurist and computer technologist, Mr. Armstead’s poetry often defies easy description, but frequently includes neo-classical imagery, surrealist viewpoints and post-modern themes.
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poetry
The Cult of Lam. A Video Poem. Sonnet by Norman Ball
NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book “Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments” is available here. Two essay collections, “How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable?” and “The Frantic Force” are spoken of here and here. His recent collection of poetry “Serpentrope” is published from White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.
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Long Line. A Poem by M. A. Schaffner
It all comes together in the sprawl
within homes and shopping centers basking
in the artificial light and the sounds
we now spend half our lives in programming.
Call it a form of worship in which faith
awaits succeeding images on screens
displaying visions of a promised land presumed
to lie beyond the imagined lottery.
Except we know we deserve the numbers
by right of having dreamed them — like Heaven
for the true believer, who also sins
if only just to prove he doesn’t always.
Inside the car no natural sounds impose
but signs remind us the images are real,
though not always as compelling as the game
held in your hand, restarted when you die.
M. A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, and elsewhere — most recently in Hermes, Modern Poetry Review, and Pennsylvania Review. Long-ago-published books include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia juggling a Toshiba laptop and a Gillott 404.
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For Amy Winehouse. A Poem by Scott Hastie.
Life a teeming process
That in its constant,
Callous churn
Delivers but
A few brilliant jewels
From a solid weight
Of ossified dreams
And ashen decay;
Without one,
The other simply cannot be.
Such bravery then!
In her all too short
Shining example,
The flawless, fluid grace
I had always looked for
Was suddenly so obvious.
And then, not long after,
The loveliness came
To make my own life’s transit,
From that point on,
A supreme irrelevance also!
Such freedom to shine,
Thus enlightened.
From that point on,
Forever dancing
In a glorious shower
Of faith and beauty realised.
Bluff and expended– maybe!
But timelessly agape,
What exquisite rain…
Scott Hastie is a successful British born poet and writer, who has been has been commercially published in the UK for over twenty years now. He currently has seven titles in print, including a novel and three collections of poetry. In recent years, the spiritual tone in his maturing poetic voice is starting to draw increasing acclaim from a worldwide audience, especially in the U.S. India & the Middle East.
Scheduled for global release, in both e & print editions this September, Angel Voices which includes featured poem ‘Graced” is by far his most substantial collection of poetry to date, featuring over 40 brand new poems never before seen, either in print or on the net. This title builds much more on the mature poetic voice that first began to emerge in Scott’s previous title Meditations and also features ALL readers recent favourites, as showcased on his popular website. For much more info, some spectacular advance reviews for Angel Voices , , as well as pre-pub order options , also go to www.scotthastie.com
Other links:
Official twitter account: @scotthastiepoet
Facebook fan page: www.facebook.com/scotthastiespiritpoet
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hastie
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A Modest Operation of Exclusion.Sonnet. A Poem by R.W. Haynes
A modest operation of exclusion
Extracts the rain-frog from the desert sands,
The cornered mouse from his confusion,
The vaguely dreaming poet from drowsy lands,
And it even explains, eventually,
Why we do not know, even vaguely,
How we wish happiness to be.
And the operator standing by,
Whose merciful, providential hands
Make this story whole so that I
Throw such eloquence at the silent sky?
You see how it is. Ever since I fell
Into the Niagara from that hot-air balloon,
I dream of smiling crocodiles in Hell
Feeding me sherbet with a golden spoon.
R. W. Haynes has taught literature at Texas A&M International University since 1992. His recent interests include the early British sonnet, and he is completing a second book on the Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote (1916-2009). In his poetry, Haynes seeks to celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without sounding any more dissonant notes than he has to. In fiction, he works toward grasping that part of the past which made its mark on his generation. He enjoys teaching drama, especially the Greeks, Ibsen, and Shakespeare, and he devoutly hopes for a stunning literary Renaissance in South Texas.
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Our Biosemiotic Clay is African. A Poem by Ian Irvine Hobson
I - Nubian Alchemy
Kemet, al kemet - the black and fertile earth
the black and fertile origins of humanity.
Primordial mother, sister, lover, daughter
Eventually, by laws of genetic entanglement,
(go check the mitochondrial record)
we (re)trace the contours of her absence
to the mountains that fed the Blue Nile
(the ice caps were glacial back then).
Orchestrated histories veil her presence
at the base of the mountain
at the base of your spine
at the heart of the geometric benevolence
that designed the oldest pyramids.
Young African woman with palettes, brushes,
measuring tools and golden mallet.
After each inundation she calculated
a new patchwork of fields
to feed the hungry populace.
The rich luminescence of her wisdom skin -
as many statues attest -
is primarily African:
black sunrise of the written word
black sunrise of numerous civilisations
Acknowledge her thus - for
she took you swimming in the Nile.
Did Michaelangelo imagine the Nubian
Pharaohs white - like Jesus?
Back then, words were hieroglyphic images
- phonetics yet to be invented - and
she wrote in the glory of paint.
They begged her
Colour us a liveable future.
II - (Quantum) Woman Dressed in Stars
She takes you flying among the stars
(and every vowel restored)
You sense
habitual memory contract to a
tiny pin-point of sub-atomic energy/light
it flares against the universal nothingness.
The hieroglyphs swirl - so many narratives,
so many possible lives - until
fragile scintillae appear, then cluster, as though
glued to invisible structures.
You watch them float like clumps of possibility
(like clumps of future memories).
Your life is fluid again -
all good things are possible
and all dangerous things -
her skin, like the coffins of your former selves,
is a gallery of marvelous images.
(Seshet) = the hidden numeric order
Our need for numbers and images and words
to strengthen living structures
Her slim ankles, her calves, her hips, her breasts
The lovers exchange gifts:
charms, formulae, hieroglyphs, stories
(photons, electrons - elementary particle-waves)
A biosemiotic exchange to animate
otherwise passive clay.
Do you sense it
the first ragged gasp of a new becoming?
Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, fiction writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: ‘Australian Edition’, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals – Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (10 editions 2005-2014). He coordinates the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo Kangan Institute (Bendigo & Melbourne, Australia) and has taught in the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine
The above poem is an Excerpt from a collection of poems Awake in the Chamber of Darkness.The Egyptian Sequence. Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2015. ‘Awake in the Chamber of Darkness’ is copyright Ian Irvine (Hobson), 2015, all rights reserved.
Acknowledgements: ‘Hypatia and the Ruined Serapeum’ was published in Poetry Life and Times (UK/Spain) in Aug. 2015.
Image: Seshat writing. This image is in the public domain.
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Rehabilitation A Poem by David Chorlton
 :
The mockingbirds in the bougainvillea
raised their brood among the thorns
where they wriggled and slipped,
one after the other, as chicks do
to find a cooler place,
down through the tangles and the shade,
and caught on a vine before reaching
the ground. Each rescue
led to another, while the temperatures
stayed late summer high
long into the evening
and next day was the same, with another degree
added to the record, and birds
on every continent
feeling the change without knowing
why skylarks are fewer
each year and deforestation
leaves lyrebirds to sing
the chainsaw’s song. It happens
while the stock exchanges measure
loss as currency; it happens
day and night, while surveyors
look through a theodolite to see
the new division they prepare for; and while
a rehabilitator raises the young
of mockingbirds who sing and chase flies
into the dusk.
David Chorlton came to Phoenix from Europe in 1978 with his wife Roberta, an Arizona native. He quickly became comfortable with the climate while adjusting to the New World took longer. Writing and reading poetry have helped in that respect, as has exposure to the American small presses. Arizona’s landscape and wildlife became increasingly important to him both as a source of pleasure and a measure of how precarious the natural world is.
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Going heavens – a dystopian prayer. A Poem by Prabhu Iyer
I thank you today for this gift of food. This, was another child of yours. Abel Abel Abel. An intelligent bird. A member in its dumb chain of life, family: what is family to that insentient mass? Do they mourn when one of them is gone? Does it affect them, does it bother them, does it pain them,
As it does to us? Yes, we, the great golden yardstick against which to measure out the universe. Dumb, may be, but dumb life with a heart. Who knows about the soul. Isn’t soul that little pin-prick somewhere deep in the heart? Do I have one? Do I care, do I mourn, do I see the pain that I cause to these fellow children of yours:
But if not this, what else – a leaf that cowers in fear at being plucked, a root, a bulb that in ways we cannot sense with but an instrument, cries out in pain at being uprooted, skinned and roasted live. Or a fruit, that mothership, host to a million seedling lives, every one of them that could grow out to outlive my life by orders. A stalk, a branch, name it.
Yes, this is food. This is a chain. I eat and am eaten. Terrible, this creation, that has sprung from wellsprings of love. Or is not this world the product of a loving God, but that of the evil non-God? But where your omnipotence that is screaming through the scripture hoarse?
No, I am a sinner. I have sinned, to be born in this wretched world. A dead child was washed ashore, the other day. Until then, I said, to hell with those barbarians crossing rivers and mountains to reach my land. But what of death? I boil and burn a billion little lives in my glass of tea every morning, many times over. Oh plasmodium, that I have to kill to live, oh this life that hangs to me like a necessity!
Good Lord, have you made me in your image? What is, whose reflection in spacetime appears like this visage, flesh on ribage, beating heart, pumping lung, viscera and nerve and vein, bone and nail, wallowing in pleasure and pain? That is an inverse problem that baffles our genius. It is ill-posed for certain, with no means of regularization for sure.
I must live I must live I must live. Kill, that organism is small, dumb, unintelligent, insentient, it’s pain is of another kind, we can’t eat air, and we are atop this chain, cobra’s head, that houses all the venom. This is evolution, we are evolving space suits to head to the stars and spread the Gospel to those unknown realms still sunk steeped in barbarism.
Yes, He is great, he can be heard in the voices of lunatics that sometimes get recorded and transmitted across the generations. And I follow the masters, they were vile, very vile, they were chosen, yea they were chosen, so vile is virtuous, I be vile, I be virtuous, I am chosen, yea, I am chosen, I head to God, on the backs of a thousand dead souls.
Amen. Peace to all those I consign and all the masters I quote. Holy Cain!
Educated in India and England, Prabhu Iyer writes contemporary rhythm poetry. He counts the classical Romantics and Mystics among his influences. Among modern poets Neruda and Tagore are his favourites for their haunting and inspirational lyrical verse. Prabhu has also explored the meaning of modern art movements such as surrealism and cubism and their role in anchoring the society through his art-poetry. Currently he is based out of Chennai, India, where he has a day job as an academic scientist.
In 2012 Prabhu collected over 50 of his poems and self-published them on Amazon Kindle: Ten Years of Moons and Mists More recently, his 2014 entry made it to the long list from among over 5000 entrants to the annual international poetry contest conducted by the UK-based publishing house, Erbacce Press. His major current projects include a further volume of poetry, his first fictional novella and a planned series of translations of lyrics from Indian film music.
Editor’s Note: for further information see Interview with Prabhu Iyer at this site
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