from Issue #3

Sigizmund Solomon

SOME SUBJECTS OF CONCERN TO OUR MODERN GLOBAL SOCIETY (and some that merely ought to be)

 
 SNOW:
 does it always follow directly
 The acquittal of some corrupt politician
 Undeserved
 Or does it merely precede holidays 
 
 
 CYBORGS:
 How do they do it
 Do they do it with big hammers
 Or is electricity involved.
 Are they happy afterwards
 
 
 TELEVISIONS:
 how do they work?
 Are they on our side
 Do they still like to eat
 DVDs or do they suck magic
 From the air for secret purposes 
 Are these purposes the same as our
 Purposes 
 
 
 FRIENDS:
 HOW intricately linked to survival
 Are they. Can we really afford 
 to circle around amusement
 Must they be definitely instead
 About survival. Or even alliances
 Against the big silence
 Which is not dangerous to your body
 (And therefore can’t end you directly)
 But is still a bad threat. Are they allies
 Or are they looking for a laugh
 “The question is, since
 It is a holiday, and snowing, do we
 Gather because we want to, or
 Because we have to; what
 Do we secretly want”
 We know what they were for in the olden days but what are they for now??
 
 
 TRAPS:
 Do they do it on purpose or just like you so much
 Do they love you
 Does it get easier to get out of them if 
 You have friends or harder if
 There is snow
 Do cyborgs make traps or dismantle them 





Franki Bernard

REBIRTH

 Cicadas go boom like the retort
 of summer:  Please recall to pucker up;
 Because your power explodes like bonk
 cream and maniacs kissing rabbit feet.
 

 O before war roamed remembering
 O roaming now cyber wars
 Then how we used to be bored by helicopters
 because they came down and annunciated us with their stupid noise! 







Wol Warbo

SO ANYWAY THE MOON

 Life!  
 Life, come and do your absolute worst . . . 

 — but gracefully!  Why without grace?
 for me — I have none.  

 I, somebody’s type at least,
 without legs, find the concrete!
 
 This, though it had nothing to do with me
 or these events, hit me at my core.

 like the thirst of a dead friend who, tired out,
 enters the barrenness of sleep’s sweet
 city, nights lost again among sleeping doors;

 Horrible destroyers of candles 
 and dawns damagers of fond thoughts of distant friends, 
 wanting to damage my little thirsty heart, 
 and the push and pull began
 assaulting the dawn 
 with its lips
 and its piles of trash, 
 oh how it all passes by 

 like a lunar somersault,
 emissaries who bend under
 the late afternoon’s caress, apprehending little flowers 
 tender and dead as the past and trembling hatchets 
 in the hands of troubled youths
 surmounted by delirious passions,

 as from the other end
 of the bridge enclosed 
 in thick night as out of it
 swept these humans wanting 
 to take me out to lunch and murder 
 the listening part of my 
 personality, curing
 me of any desire 
 to listen to 
 the dawn’s moan . . .
 as these officers burst 
 from the mysterious darkness
 of the far end of the bridge
 a stampede of officers with no mouths
 bursting toward us

 Towards the malicious mess of doors of this 
 “paradise” they were gesturing, as if to say:  
 
 some tender night during which to embrace 
 
 these furious giants so decadent, almost like Europeans
 
 everything 
 preceding this, none of it has ever been so horrible,

 All obscure loves, abandoned, not so permanent,

 completely alone in a room
 with their own convictions affirmed:

 How did you think
 time progresses?  
 
 Have them arrest this vision.
 O rumors, o visions! Leave us alone 
 to dance with the brutally affectionate Night!
 
 Me?  I’d like
 to change a lot, including especially

 the fact that there’s no happy ending
 even with the governor’s defeat.

 And the
 chanting of these infants.  
 
 rather than disappear among corpses
 in the valleys of cowardice and mania
 death versus vivacity

 what
 has totally become the inhabitants of our city
 
 O sensations, o accusers

 of me for my infinite limits!  

 O sensations, o shattered

 jaws of fate during Masquerade!  Fate comes unhinged!
 O boners, that you can
 never nullify or elude me!
 
 As all this is going down, nooses catch the roses 
 along the esplanade, they’re hanging the roses
 at the gallows, a case of mistaken identity.
 The bandits by the riverside, the trueculprits,
 
 drink their fill, torture the roses with their indifferent 
 laughter, and vow (at a certain point of drunkenness)
 to avenge themselves, the bandits, even though 
 they haven’t been wronged, since they got away with it.

 is just like that of the bandits

 and the knife in the fist at her side trembled

 fast escalators on which 
 one could stand to go get oil from the moon!  

 trying 

 not to be in the way or collide.  
 
 o treasures 
 of life, o traveling anywhere for any reason but 
 to tend to my ailments

 Mathematics 
 suspended and vanquished by the night!
 
 The blandest horrors dance with trivial terrors
 in the picnic basket of reality.  

 I’m extracted by my own legs walking.  
 We that failed, who somersault
 in the Spring wherever you see the sunlight burst,

 as if a Labrador’s fangs were installed into his tilting lips
 
 death
 denied its travel visa
 so often that it sails away —

 Speaking of the walls of my arrest — You
 arranged to please the dollars chewing 
 distractedly the horizon.
 
 Once, in goldener days, I fell asleep on a kitchen floor
 with a sore throat, next to someone, almost
 almost entirely in someone’s arms

 Days as eternal as this one, they’re ingenuous,
 a flock of pigeons (how great are pigeons).  
 On and on rear those deadly pegasuses
 
 deleted vessels
 suffering like shadows their own murderous bodies
 bonded to night at the bottom of their stomachs.

 We’re as far from the salt-reddened doors of night as can be.

 There’s no one yet to notice me.  And I copy
 the song of vertigo, wending
 awake down the avenue, disarranged all I am and divided.

 For just an instant I’ve entered all cities,
 seen this moron in front of a cigarette,
 my entrance passing along the shadows of no train,
 my escalator of blood coming desperately
 out my teeth and floating around my eyes
 like the days and the years
 making the traces of time soar around in a panic
 to destroy the instants that created them, 
 hastening my misery and the misery of babies new to this drama,
 instantly translucent like the sky
 and growing their first teeth, who enter the races,
 crazy with teeth like me, me, occupied always
 by my expulsion from the frolicking delirium
 of thoughtlessness, always alone in the sun
 since mercury circulates in
 my bloodstream, I’m like a lunatic tree
 whose fruit puts a sword through its own trunk.

 I recalled a night on the beach, drunk and feeling
 like a creep, when I talked to the ocean half-convinced
 it was God and asked it serious questions.
 The wind, cold unlike the waves
 moving warm and thoughtful on my feet as if
 to calm me down.  But I have the conscience
 of an eyeball that’s gouged out
 any time it has to look directly at anything
 so I didn’t listen for answers:  

 Reflecting my boredom, our nation in the outer-world
 laughing like a narc snorting star-shards with
 the addicts breaking into a laboratory.
 We’re as far from the doors of night as can be.
 
 a moron in front of a cigarette
 always alone in the sun

 Even lively lives involve, like any other, marauding
 and then retiring, soft revolvers hot to the touch,
 pulses that no person can fit into
 their fragile wrists, sending their silences to disembowel
 the caves of dancing veins:

 Sun, this cadaver so thirsty all the time in ponds that you turn gold,
 There is in its wake the sound of a lonely wind
 powered by our desolation, we hollow-eyed left-behinds.
 
 like
 mountains emptied at the first sign of 
 sun and most of all the alarming cruelty that one sees
 
 on display in the valleys — its own special kind,

 It was like becoming a 
 new agent of the universe
 and marching down an opulent avenue
 as tall as my heart, 

 because even if it dies
 this ballet of ours at this corner of Saint Vincent Street

 will still limp north towards the world.  

 as a voice 
 like trees tasting for the first time their own fruits, 
 trees with tongues for the first time ever, rattled 
 around in my head,

 So the moon:
 
 I met the most beautiful world-person today

 and ate their thoughts








Vista Langup

THE PEARL FISHERS

 His accusers were appeased, mulling it over.  
 
 I always thought the wind came as a wall but watching the flowers twitch you could tell it moves in tendrils