Four poems by

Peter Boyle

The Unknowable

Who had children. Who died.
Who found himself lucky after thirty years
and stumbling home realised
it was a simple error.
Who ruled behind the scenes in the Department of Misinformation,
who was later conscripted
to underwrite Armageddon.
Whose hand was lost in a sawmill
and was met again as the strange dust
of a new-found galaxy.
Who migrated to the other world
but came home to bury the dog.
Who divorced and died of alcoholism
in the country town where destiny misplaced him.
Who topped high school, failed everything else
twice, married money, then slept through
the death of three children.
Who was invisible, became a wall, became a street,
entered real estate, bought a city,
retired into owning world opinion.
Who saw his son indicted for reluctance, shackled and maimed,
blamed for the colour of the sky.
Who inscribed his name in the old script,
the one no one reads anymore,
the one where things inscribe themselves
so what they are
reads itself back
in us.
Who was my shadow when daylight was.


Why the Minotaur is Always Sad

So many years underground,
his head dizzy from bumping all those memory-clouds.
Always to be the centrepiece
of someone else's puzzle.
His endless consumption of women
didn't help much.
And so this morning he has arrived in his kingdom:
a wise gathering of rocks,
a little girl trying to paint flowers on the pebbles
but the waves keep washing them clean,
his chair opposite the ocean,
the tree with its gaze that says
"I too have lived elsewhere."


Beauty

There are places on earth famous for their ugliness: Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ohio. What to do when you have grown up in one of
them and wish to dredge out of your entrails fragments of sheer beauty? You
live, for instance, in a small room with two women you love who devote
their lives to maiming and poisoning each other. They are mother and daughter,
or sister and sister, or two sides of the one beloved face. You bring food home
to the small room and immediately it leaks over the carpet like the excrement of
worms. Invisibly, carefully, you save money month after month to visit a brothel
and make love to a woman you've glimpsed so many times in her window, a
woman your entire being has wedded in dreams only to find her delicate face
clenched tight around the pain of an abused child, and the one tenderness you
can offer is to listen to the deranged trembling of her heart. Impotent, flooded
with failure, you discover how the scar in the palm of your hand exactly matches
the scar below her ribcage. When she folds herself up, takes your money and
asks you to leave, you walk all night across a city of broken pipes and suddenly
whole parts of yourself have gone missing. Eventually you sit down in the doorway
of a hovel waiting for beauty to appear, so you can seize it and maul it and
transform it into the living tissue that has always mocked you. Only then ugliness
arrives and leaves you its cookbook for surviving death. You open the pages and
already you are rediscovering your life, how every moment was unbearable, pure
poetry.


Parable of the Two Boxes

In the small box what do you hold?
Self-righteous evil.

In the large box what do you hold?
A great emptiness.

With what do they make the small box?
Out of lives out of breath out of living

With what do they make the large box?
Out of what is left over from the small box
Out of what was too invisible to be made into the small box.

Can you describe what you see when you open the small box?
Two heads with one face
A normal whispering of words
Perhaps the small clink of power

Do you see that or hear that?
Seeing is hearing when things are small enough.

And the large box - what do you see inside that?
Earth, lots of earth, I run my hands through it, it is warm in places
like ashes have been ploughed into earth, like cities have bled into it,
and glass and bones have dissolved there.

Could you give a word for the large box?
It is what is done to us.

Is there a word for the small box?
No - yes, it is what happens. Perhaps it is what a large number of
emptinesses do to save themselves when they are still at the point of
wanting to save themselves.

What temperature is the large box?
Cold, very cold.

What temperature is the small box?
Also cold, but there are small glints of burning as well.

What else is in the room?
Nothing.

If you mixed the boxes what would happen?
They would go back to being themselves - it is their nature.

What can you do then?
Yes, what can you do?

Five poems by
Fisher Thompson

circumspect

 

some fear death

perhaps understandable

not I

for death I reserve only my ire

the game is fixed

death always wins

fair enough, such it is

yet life

that which should ameliorate the pain

of the inevitably bad end game

assists death

by shackling

imprisoning

confounding

subverting

creating a state of affairs

whereby one finds it difficult

if not impossible

to live each day to its fullest

this is the only tool we have

living to full exuberance each day

but life aids death

by laying a crooked road overthrown by thorns

I despise death

forgotten

 

to make

to create

to produce money

this, the daily enterprise

easy to envision

difficult to achieve

and always the question... how much

how much is enough

the answer is relative

attendant upon one simple precept...how well you wish to live

if opulence and large mansions are your standard

then this does not speak to you, the beyond searching

if however you are one of the many

the forgotten and faceless

then the daily grind for capital is a cruel pain

often beyond endurance

but yet endeavor to persevere we must

another day of living

another day of dying

another day of trying

 

 

run johnny run

 

The enemy runs free

my greatest enemy

my nemesis

my despoiler

my evil incarnate follows me everywhere

is with me every second... everyday

my greatest enemy is me

running never ceases

hiding never occurs

I wish to assassinate

to obliterate

to entirely annihilate this evil part of me

but the sum of me is greater than my parts

if one dies, all die

life is a sustained misery that only eternal darkness will heal

 

 

rise and swine

 

they say that you went crazy once

and tried to touch the sky

the world stepped in

and brought you to your knees

in all seems kind of hazy now

I know, but by and by

you'll find out just like me

you're still the same old boy you used to be

 

 

destruction dujour

 

parts of the world are distant

out of touch

uninhabited by men

where things that happen

do so without witness

traces slowly disappear

melted into spring snow

washed away by rain

carried off by ravens

becoming unclear as to whether they happened at all

such a thing happens often

sometimes in the most unlikely places

a woman, long despondent

comes into a tidy sum of cash

in two day's time she is again destitute

taken down to the ground

by those posing as friends

in reality opportunists

bilking her of every last penny

this too happens without witness

nobody speaks

nobody knows

all are self justified

only one is utterly destroyed

Three poems by

Castor Bayley

 

 

truth

 

the truth shall set you free.

what truth?

whose truth?

free from what?

where?

how?

the simplest things contain the most puzzling concepts.

such is the way of the world…

whichever world you choose.

internal,

external,

subliminal.

all worlds in coexistence,

collision…

a simultaneous passion play of dance and rhyme.

the truth shall set you free?

still searching for this truth,

we all are to some degree.

and when we find it, what then?

how will we know we have indeed found it?

the smallest and simplest are the most profound…

like children.

mysteries…eternal mysteries.

 

 

searching

 

the human vessel hurtles forward,

through time and space,

touching but untouched…

passing through and beyond

remaining detached.

postmodernism,

the latest minimalism.

is this truth?

comfortable detachment?

life in the television vacuum?

seeing but not being seen?

vicarious experience shared like intimacy.

passive and poisoned.

malignant…

ragged and torn.

insanity laughs under pressure

hysteria overcomes me.

 

 

asleep and afoot

 

it seems years,

many interminable years

between me and the last truly visceral contact.

now all is intellect,

cool detachment.

necessary perhaps.

but it is precisely the question of necessity

that is the most horrifying,

the most poignant in a fatalistic sense.

how has apathy become necessary?

what are the unique properties of modern life,

that demand this course?

i swim in thought

drown in the answers.

again the vertigo sets in,

twenty-four stories up…

falling

falling.

concentric circles

bringing me closer to impact,

closer to death,

closer to real feeling

the sharp slap of concrete,

the crunching of bone,

the smell of blood

only pain is real.

i am sleepwalking through life.

the terror has become unbearable,

yet more bearable

than the thought of waking…

waking to the tragedy

that is life

Eight poems by

Adam Sykes


Long Shadows Cast

We took steps

ever closer:

distanced


a wish to be

and ever more


we walk

joined, yet isolated


together alone

through long shadows cast

we take steps


into the distance.



Lilies

(for Heidi)

As hands held

hopeful and sacred

emotions well

in the meeting of fingers.



Touch

As so long

becomes so near

the tearing veil

of a caress

falls to the floor

Naked

there is nothing

between fear

and loneliness.



Explode, And Emotion

In so much as

it is possible,

plausible;

almost real

The clouds burst,

and whither

to inscribe the sky

with pained tears

that sting my cheek:

An afterthought

caught in

a perfect circle.

Whispering

A gasp for air
stolen

from the taste of
	exhalation

in which we
	remember

and the breathy
whisperings’
	of a lover

lost in the moments
	of half-heard
speech.

From One So Cold

As dreams

disperse

we envisage

the construction

of images in the

eye of the mind

Clouded with

innocence and

energy

a mist of ether

swirls endlessly.

Drift

And no
	more

A place
in the soul
	unlocked

and empty.

"Of Loss, And Then"

As only the vacuum remains,
forever and a day,
unseen. There is nothing

but the memories,

misery and joy

of loss, and then….

we glided, some times

stood still,
as statues in moonlight

there is solace,

yet heartache,

reflection and stone

I find myself,

seeking the oblivious

in details and destiny

as the once found loss

of remembrance, for now,

seems so sweet as to last forever.