Category: Poetry

John Gartland

The Eye

Man, I’m an ex-Private Eye, I can strike a cool pose
while listening to others’ production-line prose,
self-published wunderkinds who believe their own hype,
burned-out actors on valium bogarting the mic,
tales of drug-hauls and bar girls and crooked police,
and hard-drinking dicks who’ve adopted the east.
Look! I‘m old-school detective, I’ve seen the whole bag,
Spillane-heads, in trench coats, Dash Hammett in drag.
Just a crime-writers’ gig, at the Mambo hotel,
but outside it’s for real, and they’re guilty as hell.

It’s a crime-writers’ gig, at the Mambo hotel,
where whorehounds had partied for fifty odd years.
But life, like a crime scene’s not all it appears;
the old cathouse is cabaret, now; it’s a fact,
and, under new management, the riskiest act,
would be squeezing the original mama san’s hand,
which once, like the anthem, could make a room stand,
and left a broad smile on the girls in the band,
at the Mambo Hotel.

Two floors of short-time ghosts,
a locked-up beauty shop, and dust;
now pulp writers rap about crime here,
and must shoot the fictional breeze on stage.
But, as the Eye on the case, I’ll cut to the chase,
the major heist is on the street,
and there’s fresh blood on the page.

Bent judges and psychopaths, hustlers and has-beens,
professional liars, Bangkok is a crime scene.
Hey, I was an Eye, wrestled crime for a living,
and still have a hunch for who’s making a killing.
The patriots and flag sniffers, feeling the force,
play patsy for billionaires, hit men, and punks,
they’ve closed down the city and cheered themselves hoarse,
till the tourists and hookers are packing their trunks.
Man, the hacks know the issue, but no one dares say;
destabilization is sent from upstairs,
since they can’t get joe public to vote the right way.
More generals than doormen, tear-gas everywhere,
there’s gold braid enough here to carpet a whorehouse,
gridlock on the streets, and a coup in the air.

Look, I’m just an Eye, with an odd tale to tell,
at a pulp writers’ gig at the Mambo Hotel.
But, outside? It’s for real, pal.
They’re guilty as hell.
You’d better believe it, they’re guilty as hell.

John D Robinson

The View

Hunched down in my front porch,
smoking a joint, looking out at
the tree-tops of the public park
and beyond into blue skies,
birds are heard near and distant,
cats lounge and sleep on the
warm pavements, I can hear
traffic moving far off and the
moment feels perfect, it looks
perfect, the world before me
is perfect but I know from my
radio and t.v. reports that
people are killing and hurting
one another in the most hideous
of ways in our streets across
the globe; wars and conflicts
claiming countless lives
rampage endlessly across the
world and so it has done so
for thousands of years and
it’s not going to change,
world peace will never exist,
it’s not wanted, too few
people would lose too
much; those few that
govern the many:
but the view I have from my
front porch is a perfect
view of the world and
for that moment,
it was just perfect.

J.J. Campbell

straight from cuba

seek out the lord
in the piano bar
down the street

maybe in the
curves of the
beautiful woman
playing the bass
guitar

maybe the lord
is lining up on
the table in the
corner

or unzipping her
shirt a little as she
tries to make an
impossible combo
shot

seek out the lord
in a plume of cigar
smoke straight from
cuba

the lord surely must
be in this glass of
whiskey

you have to be
a little drunk to
believe in a place
called heaven

Robert Ragan

It’s Only Art

Life gives us the rope
The world gives us the rope
These powers that be
Wait for us to hang ourselves

We deface your murals
Says the shady performance artist
who burns himself with lit cigarettes

He inflicts this pain physically
For all the pain he’s endured emotionally

Before his tormentor
This lost soul sticks the glowing cherry to his arm
This is for the time you fucked a total stranger
in your car

Lighting the cigarette again
He raises his head and sticks it to his throat

The woman starts to cry
She begs him to stop

He laughs and says
That was for the time I caught you in bed
with those two masked men
He calls her a promiscuous demon

The burning continues as well as the stories
behind the pain
He says we’ll black out your eyes
before the camera stops filming

Covered in oozing blisters afterward
He asks the woman he paid to do this
Would you like to go out and have a few drinks
She says No then walks out of the room

Alone, he lights another cigarette
Laughing, he puts it out on his forehead

Benjamin Blake

Corollary Ambulation

Winter arrived
And the sun came out
Traipsed over suspension bridges
With hound at heel
And cigarette in hand

Mind’s a whirl
Of far off places and pretty girls
Of waking in strange rooms
Armed with books of poetry
And bad intentions

Soon enough
I’ll stroll up that gentle slope
And sit and share a drink
With that dead drunk
As the western sky
Burns a dull orange
And I sink into that sacred soil
Never to leave again

India LaPlace

Poetry Boys

They know they’ll reel you in with those carefully spun words,
Words that read like music and make you swoon.
Words they use to build themselves up in their own minds
So they can carelessly compare themselves
to all that they’ve romanticized.
Bukowski.
Kerouac.
Burroughs.
Ginsberg.
Go ahead and fancy yourselves a “new beat generation.”
String those words together as well as you can manage,
At least they’re pretty on a printed page.

They’ll make you blush.
Those smiles, that spark in their eyes,
They wear their costume – dark demented soul – so well
That you’ll fall for how they fall for you,
How they just can’t live without you,
They’re in love and they know it.
You’ll fall for how they watch you
Because you’ve never noticed a red flag in your life.
Animal-like. Almost primal.

They’ll play up their sob stories
Because it’s so much easier to play a victim or a martyr,
To tell you how unfair their lives have been
Then it is to tell you that they’re fucked up.
They’ll cry about how things didn’t turn out.
The dreams they never chased, never really worked for,
Surprise. Those didn’t pan out either.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
A few reworded quotes, a couple of lines
Read just the right way, in just the right voice.
Their picture, their video masked with just the right filter.
Deep. Tortured. Begging.
Please, please choke on this regurgitated shit.

There are men who write poetry who aren’t
Whiny, unevolved, poor little poetry boys,
But those men are poets,
Not boys who slide into your messages with:

“I’m drunk.”

“I’m horny.”

“My wife/girlfriend
Doesn’t love me anymore.”

“I’m sad so I can go behind her back,
But she belongs to me.”

“Sure, I’m messaging some cute young thing,
But that bitch finally found happiness
In a real man’s arms instead of
Worshipping and appreciating the ego that is me.”

Poetry boys spin their words with their pens,
Their typewriters – if we’re going to get real hipster about it –
Because real words, substance, gets stuck in their throats,
And they haven’t faced themselves in the mirror
In god knows how long.
They want you weak at the knees with your legs and heart open,
So they smile those smiles, wink those winks.

“Let me fill you up so I can fill up all the parts of me
That I haven’t already drowned out with booze.”
Because all the real artists are alcoholics, right?

Oliver Stansfield

Money Shots

these days he takes two blue pills
just to get started—
like a battered engine
on a frosty morning
mechanisms splutter to life.
an old frustrated bull
he can still go all day.

on cheaply lit bedroom sets
he fills squealing blondes,
their perky plastic tits bouncing wildly,
but now he worries about his creaky knees.
his contract requires a comfortable cushion.
energetic cow girls half his age
ride him fast,
instinctively he grabs
their tight little asses
squeezing for the camera—
all a blur to his tired eyes.

he misses the seventies, Hef and Jack’s debauchery:
jacuzzi orgies with champagne,
bunnies and cocaine lines,
when fucking
was a work of art.

J.A. Carter-Winward

Natural Enemy

I started having affairs in my second marriage.

I could think of all sorts of ways to justify them,
one reason being he was always so spent
from looking at internet porn, but no matter.
Point is, I fucked around,
and I liked it.

I especially liked married men,
so sex-starved and disillusioned…
they were always hungry.

And I got to be the thing
they looked forward to the most.
It was great for the ego, theirs as well as mine.
They did shit with me
their wives would never do.
I would, not for them, but for me.

But my biggest excuse
was the role each wife played
in sending their husbands my way.

She withheld sex, bartered, manipulated.
And plus, she’d let herself go—
safely married, she no longer worried
about being attractive, interesting, or dynamic.
She’d reject his advances because he didn’t compliment
her new fucking earrings
or some shit.

The story was always the same.

So, in a way,
I was their sexual
comeuppance.

I was their punishment for their gratuitous arrogance;
taking their husbands for granted; holding them hostage
with their dry, uninviting cunts.
And the shitty bait ‘n’ switch
they’d pulled at the altar
the moment
they said
I do.

I’m not saying it was right
and I don’t do it anymore,
but I was
that woman,
once.

The one all housewives
whispered about
when their husbands
were finally caught
cheating.

I was a golem, the succulent succubus
of their serene suburban nightmares:

A terrible justice,
sucking on their
husband’s cocks.

Leah Mueller

Disturbing the Universe

One summer, I painted
the Desiderata on the walls
of a deserted Civil War mansion.
My best friend was visiting
from California. We swam in the pool
and played tennis at the edge of town.
At night I stole furtive glimpses
of her long body, dark hair
piled on top of her head
and carefully secured with bobby pins.
She slept in a folding cot
at the edge of my mattress,
rolling and tossing in the Illinois heat.
We talked feverishly about our virginity–
how we might lose it, and to whom.
She was convinced I’d surrender mine first.

We nabbed containers of powdered paints
from my mother’s kitchen cupboard,
carried warm water in jugs for blocks,
laughing at our cleverness.
The building’s crumbling walls
were defaced with coy obscenities:
“Meet me here at 10 PM.
Wear cut-offs and nothing else.
Blow me.” Carefully, I painted
red and green and brilliant blue
over scrawled pictures of erect penises,
copied words from the sacred text
about disenchanted love, perennial as grass,
and decorated the gaping edges of holes
with flowering vines and sunrises.

My best friend’s artwork
was always more fluid than mine,
her hands steady while she dabbed
a tiny paintbrush on dirty plaster.
As vivid color stretched across the walls,
more girls paraded to the mansion,
carrying brushes, markers and glitter.
Each of us either copied a line
from the text or devised our own quotes.
I branched out to TS Eliot verses,
since I had painstakingly memorized
“The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”
several weeks beforehand.
The aged building overflowed with words.

A reporter from the small-town paper
photographed our artwork,
somehow capturing its brightness,
even in black and white.
She took pictures of my friend and me
standing in front of our paintings,
both of us looking solemn and deep.
She asked why we were determined
to decorate a decaying house
that had stood abandoned for years.
We wanted to transform ugliness
into beauty, bring dignity back
to the majestic structure.
She nodded at us sagely,
though she didn’t really understand,
and wrote a nice puff piece
that ran two weeks later.
By then, my friend had returned to California.

Two days after the story broke,
I eagerly climbed the broken stairs
to the mansion’s second floor,
but our paintings had been destroyed.
Someone had smashed holes
in the flowers and sunrises,
and written obscenities next to the quotes.
It took great determination
to destroy the work
we had spent so many days creating.
That person needed to bring
a combination of rocks and hammers
to the top of a collapsing staircase
and attack a wall repeatedly.

The colors made him furious.
My friend sighed when I told her,
and said, “Well, that’s just how
people are, I guess.” It was easy
for her to be philosophical, since
she was two thousand miles away
and couldn’t see the destruction.
She was always more lucky than I.