BlazeVOX 2K5 an.online.journal.of.voice

blazevox.org

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Table of Contents

Bald Spitting Elephants...... 7

Paul A Green ...... 15

Michael S. Begnal ...... 23

Justin Vicari...... 29

DAVIDE TRAME...... 35

Ashok Niyogi ...... 39

Marie Kazalia ...... 43

Christopher Barnes...... 47

Jennifer Firestone ...... 51

Joel Van Noord...... 53

Michelle Greenblatt...... 55

Pat Lawrence ...... 61

Rosemarie Crisafi...... 63

Rich Murphy ...... 69

Geoffrey Gatza ...... 75

Rochelle Ratner...... 79

Buffalo Focus | Ted Pelton...... 85

Colin Searle...... 101

Ak-Uh...... 105

Randy Prunty...... 123

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BlazeVOX 2K5 an.online.journal.of.voice

5 6 BlazeVOX 2K5 an.online.journal.of.voice blazevox.org

Bald Spitting Elephants

A Letter From The Editor

The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly. Charles Reznikoff

Our mission, after five years is still very hard to pin down. We represent neither a group of writers nor one mode of writing. We enjoy innovative works of literature in what ever format that it chooses to find itself.

We wish to promote new style, emerging voices and provide an outlet for these artists to express their artistic visions. This sounds good, and in turn we will try to live up to these standards and will do whatever is humanly possible. Please forgive us in advance for our flaws.

Many of our authors say that they find it difficult to publish their kind of work. This is as true as it is not. We are not the only venue for such odd bits of text, there are several online and if you are looking for others please visit the links page and visit the extended family you may have never knew you were related to :-)

We have chosen Ezra Pound as our Editor-in-Chief and it is by his methods we strive to keep things new. It is our century and we look to this, as Creeley once noted, what else is one to do, make it old? So we are here and after five years we have seen many journals come and go, blogs come up from groundbreaking listservs, good friends die and good friends experience births … war, injustice and seemingly limitless stupidity come into power. We have seen many things, good and bad, and I am sure things will get worse before they get better.

Our poetic voices are irrelevant in today’s political arena. This is not surprising, as all voices of dissent are dismissed as soon as they gain any momentum. So with that, we shall practice our poetry in the time that we have. Even through the darkest of times, the best minds blaze forward!

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We want more readers! We hope that you are enjoying this journal and please send us an email to let us know how we are doing and how we can better serve your needs. We can only be as good as you demand us to be. Please show us the way!

We are aligned heart and soul with BlazeVOX [ books ] www.starcherone.com We are a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and your generosity to BlazeVOX [books] will be run considered a tax-deductible charitable donation. However, your book purchases make all this happen. So please buy someone’s book and make a poet’s mom happy.

New Format!

Our past format had been a large issue of poetry coming out twice a year. As we grew so did our ability to provide larger and larger amounts of good poetry. However, to assemble such a thing is no longer feasible. There is never enough time, and such things require large amounts of uninterrupted time. So we are going to adapt to our new environments. We have purchased several new technologies that will make it easier to have several small issues appear through out the year. As of now, our goal is to have a new issue come out every three weeks with a close look at 3 to 5 poets’ works. There will be no themes, I believe. But if there is it will be a light hearted and appropriate.

Print-On-Demand Books

We are still publishing and have several books in the wings ready to come out. These titles are superb works and are sure to resound through-out our poetry community. Most of our new titles are still available for adoption so please find out what you can do to bring a good text into the world.

We are going to be changing our methods for some of our books. We currently use Cafepress.com to produce our books. This is a wonderful method as it takes no money to have a professional looking book available in a true, when you purchase it they make it, POD book. However, this is very expensive and it has a hefty shipping and handling fees associated with it. So for now it will do.

In the near future we will be doing short runs of our POD books and have them for sale from our website and have them shipped from our offices in Buffalo, NY. This will reduce a lot of waste and streamline our production. These in turn will further reduce costs. So if you see a paypal link, your purchase will be coming from us and not Cafepress.com.

Please stay turned for new developments …

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Blogoscope

Yes, we finally broke down and got ourselves a blog. And I have to swallow my pride and say that I was wrong and the bloggers have it. My original concerns over blogs being insulated forms of narcissism have become true as they are not true. The format has evolved far beyond the wonderful listservs which I still consider myself a member. Even though I am guilty of being a simple lurker in the shadows, I am still there. Once blogs gained the technology to allow for comments and expanded to easy to use personal online spaces – how can anyone resist in loving them. I read Silliman’s blog religiously and find myself the better informed for it. I will not claim that our minor effort will emulate Mr. Silliman’s excellent effort, it will serve as a posting board for updated information in BlazeVOXland. We shall post announcements and upcoming readings, parties and post images of silliness and maybe even a one of Kent Johnson. But all in all, it will serve as an easy way for me to bridge the gaps of being a working man.

Electronic books

Yes of course we still have e-books! Check them out. Our list will increase in the coming year and we now offer text in two formats Adobe PDF and Microsoft Reader. If you haven’t updated your reader software in a while you may want to do this. Adobe PDF is now on version 7.0 and Microsoft reader is on 2.0. Both are great programs and can be taken with you on your mobile computer, palm pilot or blackberry.

If you need to get a new reader please go to

⇒ Adobe PDF Reader : http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html ⇒ Microsoft Reader: http://www.microsoft.com/reader/default.asp

Where the hell have you been?

It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy. -George H. Lorimer, editor (1868-1937)

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In general things have been a fine, although I have found it increasingly difficult to find a balance between poetry, work, family and failing old computers. I did take on more than I could really do and I did burn out. It was a hard thing to publish as many books as I did in one season but I think I know what my schedule now allows and how to best achieve a future goals. For an in-depth look please visit the blog http://blazevox.org/blog/index.php?title=delicate_libations_on_becoming_incom muni&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

If you have sent materials to us and have not heard back. We have them and are carefully going through the wonderful items in our box. If you wish, please send us a note to inquire about your work. However you will all receive a positive letter from us shortly.

Buffalo Focus:

Every issue we will try to explore a new Buffalo poet. There is a lot going on here in Buffalo and I think it is important to engage some of that energy and bring you a sample of our home. Slated to appear are, Ethan Paquin, Ted Pelton, Mike Kelleher, Jasmine Ten Feathers, Yang Zi Tu, and Jonathan Skinner.

Want to donate?

BlazeVOX [ books ] is proud to support the community and ask that you consider supporting our work. 100% of your contribution goes towards active literary initiatives. BlazeVOX [ books ] is working with Starcherone Books, a 501( C )3 Public Charity. If you would like to support us with a tax-deductible contribution, you may donate today using one of the methods below.

Adopt a book Program

Please consider adopting a book. Your payment of $300 will insure that the book you choose to adopt will come into the world as a healthy new text. This pays for all of the costs of printing, author fees, and promotion of the book. Your name will appear, if you so desire, as the sponsor of this text and you will also receive 10 copies of the book.

Books still available for adoption:

Here Comes Everybody edited by Lance Phillips I Wear a Fig Leaf Over My Penis by Geoffrey Gatza Sidewalk Portrait by Richard Henry

10 Donate by Credit Card please go to our web site and use the PayPal link

Donate by Check Please make your check payable to BlazeVOX [ books ], :

BlazeVOX [ books ] PO Box 303 Buffalo, NY 14201

Thank you for your support and helping to make our work possible. Your support to BlazeVOX [ books ] contributes to literature as a living art.

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BlazeVOX 2K5 an.online.journal.of.voice

13 14 Paul A Green

BRAIN GUN

Brains grow up in this domed tank they swell grand grand against the scaffold beam of the usual dimensions that strong triad emitted from monad but then brains hang in time over niggling vertigo this time/that time that flow that washes my fingertips away in vitro like vitriol we’re maimed numb glossy as mass roars at energy through space ahead of us only hope to avoid slow death domed fate brain dwindling like nuclear mushroom in backwards time blast or crushed in wall of death centrifuge hedonism apply paranioa to nature! the phantom attacks! with brain gun! the machine!

15 with grand design the electrics charge shrugging through the glia under dark museum glass snowing mauve sparks I remember under dark museum glass at speed light is/when consciousness critical fusion speed fifty per second mashed harpsichords tingle still and memory - remember? serpentine with molecules wrestles entropy

(so words hit fire burst 30 phonemes per second per second expansion through and through)

16 THE CONCLUSION

The square has been disused for a decade. The stone beasts, concave fountains on cracked pedestals, the crooked fractured bollards - all buried. beneath a layer of fine grey snow. Grains of grey snow have been falling for months. Visibility is poor.

We have started clearing the central piazza with heavy earth-moving equipment and the customary napalm jets. The men have complained about the unusually mucous snow which furs the windscreen blades and seeps into their cabins, or clogs their valve controls. They’ve also been disturbed by the findings in the strata below the snow -face.

Apart from wrecked street furnishings, crushed dentures and shards of bone, they’ve encountered lumps of deep-frozen tissue speckled with metal fragments and curious flattened rubbery objects, like inflatable insects. These surfaces are also treacherous. A flame-thrower operator lost his footing, with unfortunate results .

But I have ordered the men to wipe their visors and trudge on. I have no choice. Visibility is poor. One must not lose control.

Our main objective must still be locating the Chambers. The Chambers offer ascent. They encapsulate a kind of salvation.

I keep telling the men, the wretched lumpen men in their barely protective uniforms, what we are looking for. “They’re like booths, “ I shout. “Cylindrical. About two to three metres high. Domed. Finished in a dark marble-like material..” The men look for humps in the grey snow. I look for transcendance. A conclusion.

17 SLOW LEARNING MAN

(Respect to Muddy Waters)

I'm the slow learning man I'm a sleep-walking man

I'm your teacher man I'm the classified man

I'm an inside man I'm an unsound man

I'm a no-confidence man I'm the slow-motion man

Was an analogue man now I'm digitised, man

I'm a monologue man back-catalogue man

I'm some part-time man I'm a multi-tasking man

I'm a new and used man I'm a quite impossible man

I'm a modular man I'm a plug-and-play man

I'm a freeze-dried man I'm a vacuum-formed man

I'm a little green man A little-used bluesman

I'm almost a permitted man I'm a bad committee man

I'm a reformatted man once I was a saved man

I'm the overloaded man I'm a bar-coded man

18 I'm a hard-drinking man an all-night slinking man

I'm a morphing man almost sub-human

Now I'm Pan the Man a thelemic man

I'm an intertextual man your inflatable man

I'm this heterosexual man a not quite new man

I'm a fairly random man a really cack handyman

I'm a mandible man deeply bugged up, old man

I'm a hyperreal man a daytime serial man

I'm a teleported man an over-distorted man

I'm a cosmic man I'm a comic bookman

I'm a viral man I'm a hot-wired man

I'm an unverifiable man almost everyman

I'm a post-modernist man I'm a last-past-the-postman

I'm the replicated man a teleported man

I'm a quantised man a quickfiring man

19 a hazchem early-warning man an interim report man a nuclear familial survival man a defenestrated man

I'm the pixellated man a pustular man that fire-eating man the zip-farting man an undergrowth man some grown-over man the abominable no-man I'm the untitled man a midnighter wolfman Jack-man a confirmed hot bottom man the manikin man the mediated man the mutated man the rain-dancing man the fire-breathing man the unlimited man the corrected man the holy rolling man the gut-busting man I'm the web-fisted wonderman

I'm a begotten man I'm a forgotten man yo urbanised hit-man the inserted man the man in the menage oh smooth'n'hairy man I'm the smiling pubic man

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I dreadwatch beetleman yeah phatic man the sleep-torquing man a quasi-erectile man the final syllable man all-night boogie man

I'm the dead letter man a slow fading man

Paul A. Green has written radio drama and features (inc Ritual of the Stifling Air for BBC, The Dream Laboratory for CBC Canada, Power/Play! for Capital Radio, The Mouthpiece for Resonance FM), arts and literary journalism, rock lyrics, as well as devising theatre/performance pieces for Bristol Playwrights Company, The Department of Enjoyment, and Pyrotheatrix.. Various fiction projects include The Qliphoth, The Dream Depository, Beneath the Pleasure Zones and 666. Work in progress involves scripts for radio, television and film. He is the UK correspondent for Culture Court. http://www.qbsaul.demon.co.uk/

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Michael S. Begnal

Mountain

rises above shedding water, wash of early spring, another ascent where our forerunners have tread, original humans of here, own shod feet treading rocks loose in the dirt of “home” the feeling of being out in silent wilderness

the summit, the sky strangely shimmering, the town revealed from it as misplaced with distance, plan of streets indiscernible to the retina’s rods and cones, instead there are more mountains on the blue horizon, seriate ridges stretching out in parallel and we inhabit merely one of numerous valleys somewhere underneath, 1′ down, perhaps arrowheads no mountain lions / Puma concolor

a clearing of

total change is always there waiting and you take into you repercussions of death hanging over like dead tree limb of previous winter the summit ground still brown with old leaves, new buds on branches,

inevitable fall

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Dithyramb

Marijuana through a Lime Coke can, to put on a Philadelphia A’s hat & walk to a Uni-Mart via alleys, with a silver shiny car following suddenly delay & turn up the alley (“evasive action”) past a porch Every day is guy day... No way! Yes way!

breeze blowing slightly, to wear a t-shirt in the night —is it already early July?— summers are fragile now, TV light flickering blue from a back window

& in the store I am on a small color TV in blue hat & green t-shirt

—under the threats— you have to affect a swagger in your walk to transmit no meekness around the corner, meet aggression with unconcern & be ready to smash someone in the face

because nothing matters now besides the sensation of being alive at this very moment, it really doesn’t

(someone following me) past a porch They come here, they lead a minimal existence, & send everything extra back home, & it sucks, because that $$ should be going back into our system! concerned about power & hierarchical trying to influence each other & I cannot save them crunch of gravel under Puma sneakers

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Blood or Fire

And the people were all against you, at least as much as when you were a foreigner, the importance of experience of suffering together in a dark basement and the way they were set against each other, what a sad thing to call home, a thousand cuts like broken beer bottles on a concrete floor/ fear stalks “the scene” and then the double-o, half-glimpsed faces encircled you, projected back a history you could not recognize, the shock of that, how it was different from the expectation: as a stylized “big lie” delivered in a certain locality’s impenetrable dialect, the distance to anyone next table, a balkanization, almost political

the season turned deranged, the animals, antagonized in their ditches, tree leaves bright-reddened and fell—blood or fire, the mountain ridges were walls of fire but at night were dark as clouds

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In the Stadium

In the stadium of white stone cracked blocks of sun faces are brown and lined of the men eating tacos in the stands, some take pills when no one is looking hard working in the taxi office 12 hours a day, it’s hard sitting in these faulty seats of wood which date to Roman times, or before, the peanut vendors never come around the colossal stadium has gathered the people announcer (drunk) crackles over the loudspeaker, you peer through an arch on the mezzanine and view its space

the stadium at night— floodlights shoot into the black sky, cathedral columns rising in circle so when you look up, the whole crowd one mass, as in its womb, enwrapped in its warmth familial, you see a passage, or a canal you rise through it, up, up, up, to birth

26 Snow

You weren’t ready for the snow, were you? how it distorts the nature of reality so you realize “life is change” like you were always told —but not liking change sometimes— or the symbol of snow as a malaise, a misfortune that has befallen the town, the whole state, retribution for some collective wrong, this crap that has appeared, that covers everything, impoverishing everything (the old Twilight Zone episode, the darkness of the town’s racism), and not a new snow, it’s been there for months somehow there were voices through the air as there might be in summer (male early 20s drunk on a Tues. night) (a dog’s, a girl’s scream also drunk, stock) (not threatened) the wind blows up the shovelled sidewalks and you freeze you had earlier wanted to incorporate the image of a lone flower on the steppe, but it just wasn’t happening

27 Fluffy

The powdered scent of hair, flesh to lip, becomes tautened, and inside swollen moist like after rain, time wilts and willows, residue builds sweet on the tongue colors come and the fireflies light up the night

in SWARMS

BIO:

Michael S. Begnal (b. 1966, U.S.A.) poetry collection, The Lakes of Coma (www.sixgallerypress.com), 2003 poetry collection, Ancestor Worship (www.salmonpoetry.com), forthcoming Nov./2005 anthology Breaking the Skin: New Irish Poetry (www.blackmountainpress.com), 2002 anthology Jacob’s Ladder: An Anthology Underground (www.sixgallerypress.com), 2001 journals Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, nthposition, Shearsman, Vallum, Natural Bridge, Fire, ZYX, Abiko Annual, Fifteen Project, etc. lived in Ireland 9 years edited Irish literary magazine The Burning Bush at present in Pennsylvania

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Justin Vicari

LISTENING TO THE DISTANCE

Hard to explain what I’m doing here, in the bruising wind off the river this evening, as summer goes down for the count. A matted, bankrupt bird hops onto a bench and looks around. Nearby, a trellis supports strange vines pushing out swollen mutant flowers. They drag their heads along the ground like trumpets whom enervated angels can’t lift and let flag at end of day. Nature, as if for the last time, as if it would never be here again for my sunken eyes to drink and grow vigorous, in the middle of the chilly city. I feel the numbness of the river wind. I see the birds who mutely peck leavings in the sparse grass, and the fallen flowers, crushed against concrete, to the distant bellowing of heaven’s horns.

29 A VOICE

She tells me a lot, her voice a ghost in the mouth of a gypsy. She tells me, but only if I listen. Her lips as cold as a bust of Athena. My eyes are circled so black it’s like kohl. I’m not sleeping enough, listening to songs of loss and regret, not getting enough done. I watch the ice drops condense on the air conditioner whose breath throbs heavy, as if with lust or impatience. A voice, a single white flame of truth always in danger of being extinguished.

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WELDON KEES

They lie in wait for anyone who strays too far: belly on belly, the frogs pyramid and teem the outskirts, croaking fetid wind where swamp begins. He saw this coming plague, and survived a palsied hand of years, a name not yet deleted from the lists, invited by rote to soirees where the gnawed knucklebones stared, hoping he’d play the gin-pickled poet, tied in the corner like a rabid poodle. Those stares always tipped the bet against him. One of those lime-rind nights, he found the mirage of “Robinson” shipwrecked on the rocks, among the smudged thumbs of the dawn edition, the dazed ones whistling down taxicabs in the rain on Fifth Avenue, squinting for Albertine in the backseat. . . And when did it happen that even his mustache ran away? They found the empty sedan like a dusty barnacle encrusting that bridge. Chased? Afraid? An entire life set down in the moveable type of the grave?

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LAND OF A THOUSAND DANCES

T’aint no sin to take off your skin And dance around in your bones. . . Don’t know why you don’t stay a little longer. --William S. Burroughs

We do the dances we were taught. Still the dead won’t stay down, martyrs in their endless file, Saint Sebastian at the urinal.

Whip scars, casualty statistics: we keep dancing. A-bomb bop, Dallas stomp, electric chair boogaloo, the only moves we know.

I strip away my inherited guilts which bear no resemblance to me, I trade in God for another miracle. In champagne rain the satin rose petals dew, on my table by the lamp. Inside the crypt of my shirt pocket the roseheaded matchsticks bloom: souls short-lived, fiery, the fire and reward of karma. Music and fire: world without end. These ardors are good for the heart, murder on the complexion.

I rearrange my chemistry, blue strobe breaks my breath’s shallow beat into resurrections, mirror reflections. I believe the slave’s

32 seductive dance with veils, wounds, change by moments -- I was taught, too, to get what I want. Crewcut jitterbug, tensed-spine alert up and down wordless muscle, Frankenstein straitjacket polka -- you say there’s nothing new, you have seen and done all that.

I am teaching myself something new. Upright porous sack leaking my nectars and sweats I unzip slip-knot vertebrae, my blood pumps out its silt, graveyard shift in its refinery. Calling the tribes to assembly with a mouthful of curses and boasts --

Oh yes. Kiss me there. A mouthful of kisses and boasts! 200 years with blood on its canines, we’ve never heard such compelling evidence, such coursing tide in drumbeat cadence. Swear by new ears, new legs kicking, I raise my arm, in whole recast the real American tongue.

I have recently won poetry prizes from Third Coast and New Millennium Writings, and I am the author of a fiction chapbook, "In a Garden of Eden" (Plan B Press, 2005). My work also appears or is scheduled to appear in Poetry Motel, Slant, Spillway, Black Rock & Sage, and other reviews. My translations of the Algerian poet Jean Senac are appearing in Buckle &, Visions International, and currently online at Lodestar Quarterly. I am a reader/editorial assistant for the online journal Lily.

33 34 DAVIDE TRAME

CRICKETS

The grinding sound of a secret at our window, a secret too quiet to be inquired; we face the rhythm of its countenance in the weightless dark, it stands and hovers at the same time and we look for cheekbones on the pomegranate flowers and let the sun-drenched stones rest; we have let ourselves get lost somewhere over there in the looming breath of leaves and stalks, there’s an absence we cherish with the dissolved consistency of our day, we know now we can only listen at last and ask nothing and fly, because we need to fly to reach the vibrant unbounded stillness of sleep.

35 BASHO

Neat gaze, naked like the very heart of his being when he decided to set off leaving all he had behind. A start from scratch, hard and just painful at first. But what you know you also need at the bottom of yourself. You sense his eyes now watching this lush June grass field, stalks waving from the train window, a stretch of green you know well but with a newness in the sunlight, a breath you couldn’t expect, a luminous gust scraping your silence, exposing the veins of the farthest and closest heart.

36 HOME

The pigeon taps the cat’s bowl with a rhythm that comes close, very close, from the balcony to your table, it makes you nod at once and acknowledge the seconds’ clearness in the silence. It’s only here after all that you can really taste the roots of the floor adhering barefoot to its soul, even if you felt the same walking on that Paestum street, arcs and bricks so suddenly at one with your gaze and skin, squared blocks so worn and warm on the soles of your feet, the expanded breath of a cradle like the tap on a bowl lulling you to sleep. And you want to believe all will continue, dust on your speckled floor welcoming the air shifted for ages by your barefoot steps, dust listening to the nearness of a tapping beak among walls now with maybe no roof, the sunlight of a hot noon hushing some passing stranger’s talk, steps shuffling in the slow fluttering of banana leaves.

37 SKERRIES

Wind. On the beach our sweaters blown into, we were tasting the swollen dizziness of clouds inebriated by tingling wind chimes, the boats’ masts gossiping in the gusts. We walked for ages in a day of soft strand and scattered sunlit surf pools, the air flashing on, what stays with us is that streaming openness of the sky’s throat and the familiar seaside’s aftermath: the tide coming in while we were leaving, the palm of a hand spreading vast with a luminous quietness and we going back to the city in its wake, everything dangling on the bus, sky and strand with their huge dregs of drunkenness in our mind’s eye gaily bruised and hushed by the beach’s stretched breath.

Bio:

I am an Italian teacher of English writing poems exclusively in English since 1993, they have been published in around one hundred literary magazines since 1999, in U.K, U.S. and elsewhere. Recently in “Poetry New Zealand” , “New Contrast” (South Africa). Nimrod (U.S.). I live in Venice-Italy. Thank you for your attention. Best regards, Davide Trame.

38 Ashok Niyogi

TODAY

On this sunny day in California, When lawns are being mown, Car metal glints on the freeway In the parking lot outside Macys, Blackbirds are out for tidbits, Trees feel obligated to bring forth Green leaves, I eat fresh plucked strawberries >From a Murano bowl.

Work is worship, Matrons are airing their pregnant bellies >From second floor balconies, The shadow people slink past Warehouse doors, As birds sing at them In disdain, Insects pollinate flowers on dividers.

It seems easy to float away, Routinely above the daily routine, Cheesecakes and coffee After an afternoon nap, At twilight Jack Kerouac, And vintage people in vintage cars,

At stop signs On the way back.

39 UNDERSTANDING BALANCE

It is so complicated… The dialectics of conflict, If at all, Between the Great American Chain Store, And the Outlet Mall.

Machete Between Hutu and Tutsi, Mass murder in Darfor, This is easy to comprehend The severing of limb, the rivers of blood, This is absolute, this is concrete.

Decimation is easier explained. The subtlety lies in corn on the cob, Barbecue and television for the soul.

The huge headed pot bellied Rickety child, Has but to have enough strength To lift his hand And chase away the fly, >From his rheumy eye.

The infections and allergies And river flies at summer camp Are more difficult to control.

That is why, there is a lot to learn, >From fly-fishing, Or hunting elk and moose, Winging other nuclear nations On the loose.

But much more important Is the vibrant pulse-beat Of the suburban shopping mall, Festooned with the Chinese dragon Wearing Indonesian Reebok shoes.

Whose?

40 PARKED solitude is contraindicated in circumstances of developed penury.

sitting in a car, staring at a star, preserve rage, at minimum wage, in the apartment, virtual cockroaches climb an overflowing garbage bin. baby in pregnant belly, hip-hop, spiced beef mince, weak kitchen exhaust, where is Faust? my community sings under a Banyan tree, in the hot season overripe mangoes are free, then, there will be dancing in the rain. take me home sweet mother goddess, take me home dear elephant god, in the Bay Area the rent is steep, I must sleep.

Ashok Niyogi was born in Calcutta in 1955. He was schooled all over India in Irish Christian Brothers'Schools and graduated with Honors in Economics from Presidency College. Ashok spent 30 years in the world of International Commerce,15 in East Europe and Russia and the CIS. His work has taken him all over the world and he now divides his time between California where his two daughters live, Russia and India. Ashok has two books of poetry in India - 'Crossroads' and 'Reflections in the Dark' (both from A-4 Publications) and one book of poems from the USA - 'Tentatively' (iUniverse).

41 42 Marie Kazalia

The Old West is a Dangerous Place for someone like--

the way I dress, my independence ( as a female), my long black coat a flag waving at every asshole redneck. I slept curled up on two seats both footrests up-- my two black coats for blankets. I can't sleep this first night I thought--but dozed off around midnight. (I'd started the day at 5:30 a.m.) Woke every hour--at Salt Lake, at Provo Utah. Got about 6 hours sleep, total. At nine I brushed my hair, put on clean tights( in the bathroom) & makeup got a cup of coffee. The second day on board, departure from San Francisco just crossed the Utah border into Colorado. Both women and men on the train made comments on my vintage coat, they liked it, "It's adorable." But then that old asshole, "god, is it Halloween," he'd said extremely loud. A little earlier he'd bored me with some news story about a woman who'd spilled a cup of hot coffee on her chest at McDonalds, then sued for millions of dollars..."Remember that?" he'd asked, signaling his limited experiences and assumptions-- breathing his breathy drunken stench all over me first thing in the morning. I'd tried to put him off with politeness--that didn't work. I'd already given myself that talk inside my head, about practicing manners now, out here in the world again. "Hey Zorro!" the old fuck called out at me--loud. I pass him ignoring his remark--there was only ten minutes to locate the fruit stand in the middle of the Grand Junction station platform-- wait in line, buy something and get back on the train. A banana for fifty cents-- a lot cheaper than Amtrak food I was tired of...already. (fresher) After the fruit stand, I stepped into a little station shop that had candy bars and a display case of fake turquoise jewelry. I bought peanut butter cups, and on my way out noticed a sign *Free Coffee* -- pouring myself a cup when the old asshole came up behind me... "Hey, Zorro. Why don't you have your mask on?" "I do." I told him, walking away leaving him puzzled.

43 Back in my seat, train moving again he stealths up, bends close in over my shoulder "you have nice handwriting..." he breathes all over one side of my neck, placing his hand on my arm. I turn my page over. When he's gone take up my writing again--squiggling & jerky black juicy ink flow in abrupt unintended directions as the train car rocks swerves and balances. He's right up on my neck again, his hand patting the shoulder of my velvet coat... "I wasn't spying on you..." he said. Don't know where he went after that-- I open a book, read the first few brief chapters of Maggy Cassady--he won't interrupt me when I'm reading, I thought. Damn, I feel hungry (even after the banana and peanut butter cups) nothing much to do on this train. I descend the stairs to the subterranean snack lounge-- he won't find me down here. But then there's the other annoying guy--kept talking to me--saying things-- trying to start a conversation, but polite, not too pushy-- he's drinking Coronas down there--I sat off in a corner eating a hot pepperoni pizza--he glanced back in my direction then turned, that's when I noticed his oval bald spot combed over with long hair--maybe he's the kind of guy who'd gotten lucky a few times just hanging around in bars minding his manners with the ladies-- till one just in the right mood, neediness--at that necessary level of intoxication... I hurried past, swishing my long coat and dress back up the narrow stairs--so much of my life avoiding people I know and the ones I don't care to... I'm the only woman on the train wearing a dress. All those unworked wide slack asses making their way up the aisle in pale denim topped by nylon windbreakers-- red neck women ( god, I despise that lack of style) To have no style makes them proud, feel right, American--good about themselves and yet that old fuck's woman, a faded beauty in everyday overalls cringing under his aggressive thumb. I felt sorry for her--and yet he's the man she'd chosen. My mask--pretending--letting them all see what they wanted, while concealing the foul-mouthed, hardened, street-wizened woman just leaving the end of ten years ghetto living--entered in 1995 after

44 traveling around the world. I reminded myself to put my best manners forward --- I could see in my imagination shocked looks on the faces of women on this train, if what I really thought came out of my mouth. Why waste it on them anyway. I'm riding to Chicago where I'll get off and never see these people again-- I am not out to change their thinking... they can give me something--material for my writing--buy me a meal--I'm the "dude"-- the "city slicker" be cool I tell myself read a book-- look out the windows...at the scenery. I even sat in the observation car for a while thru remote Colorado--canyons, river Bald eagles, deer, elk...lots of animal tracks in the snow. That second day, ate as little as possible--rice crispies for breakfast-- dinner of eggplant ravioli--snow peaked mountain scenery thru dining car window. In Denver I got off and hurried along the long platform to the huge old station building--just to use a non-swaying toilet. Then returned to my seat as new passengers poured on and I nearly have to give up half my sleeping space---read some more-- now only 9 p.m. -- getting tired again want to turn off the overhead reading light before someone figures out I have 2 seats-- strange people talking so loud on cell phones in ways totally unacceptable in San Francisco-- all these rednecks and non-creative types I'm starting to feel so out of place & scared at what irrevocable thing I've done to myself yet thankful to have escaped that ghetto shit hole-- The older redneck guys invoke their authority as elder with the young 20ish redneck type boys "Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend or just friends?" I hear the meaty voice in seats behind me & the dutiful response..."we've known each other since kids in school..." The girl had been singing outloud just before, to the recorded song only she could hear thru her headphones..."there ain't no covercharge... boys and girls know how to get-down on the farm..." More deep-voiced questions..."going to work or going to school?" The word culinary in the reply. The young guy liked to cook with his father grilling meats & veggies while the mother worked on the desserts...

45 "What do you cook best?" The young guy made thought sounds with his voice then answers...chicken with lemon... and orange the girl interjected then praised his fancy mixed together vegetables too The old redneck told them..."my wife cooks pork chops with onion & then adds a can of mushroom soup! That is so-o-o-o good!" Geez. That stale old recipe of cream of mushroom canned soup white trash sauce secret those rednecks all thought so highly original... Fuck! I think it's been published a jillion times in Readers Digest or someplace... Embarrassed silence from the young man chef. That gap that makes communication unnecessary-- futile even--impossible without insults. Same with that distance between poet/performer me in long vintage black and that rude crude old asshole redneck who called me Zorro so many times I'd spent my evening thoughts planning on going to one of the train conductors to complain of sexual harassment... but by morning most of the passengers had detrained in Nebraska, where they belonged. The absence of my redneck terrorizer & his strangely staring wife left a nice calm emptiness in all the train cars as I warily moved toward a cup of coffee. He had definitely gotten off. The train crossed on a bridge over the Mississippi. I started feeling better--calm, more positive. That wasteland before and after the gorgeous Rockies-- that dusty dead area that bred his sort, long behind me--I'd escaped. I'd been so out of place in that neck of the woods. Flashing now on the dudes emerging from stage coaches of the old west in ruffled shirt fronts--locals firing bullets at their feet raucous laughter of the low-life drunks, until the hero intervenes. I'm *the dude* the *city slicker* the wild west redneck that had so oddly filled this train for a day and night feels uncomfortable too near the Mississippi River borderland the *East* beyond--my hero, space and time the continued push eastward toward more intellect, style, civilization--things I feel comfortable with... I'd be in Chicago by 4 p.m. 5 hours to kill there before boarding the last train at ten...

46 Christopher Barnes

Who Bayoneted The Brigadier?

Peep behind the curtain – he nips a peeve of dandruff weathering the storm on his Controller’s bowler shrinking from the corpse fizzling in acid.

The burden of his song is an uncracked nut; he games to stop the mouths of Sabotage Section denials.

47 The Tate

Let us transform ourselves again. Pine planks have stopped sawing, the grime survives. Gallery doors cling.

Listen in with me a while to the cagey bearings hung in the smudge-brush triptych: Three Figures In A Room.

As a premier clear dribbles of faeces, envisage the loo-bowl and loyal subject as one, the coincidence of impetus in their guts. The stutter of paint is performance, it’s gamble absorbs the very plunge of the cistern. Hear the waves drumming through the troughs of the long narrow room.

Would you be staggered if the second was nonchalant? A little disgruntled, somewhat unfunny? As it may be he is bothering a heart-to-heart or sweeping his eye over I Love Lucy on the tangerine valves of bakelite. There’s a scuffle in his liver, gurgling, a fly-spotted destiny on his face.

The pleading of the third will ruffle him up. Being is shoddy. He cracks at tense repose, a full-size grizzly on a slinky stool. We track his wince, see the grit in his muscle, hold an ear, standing quiet prickling for clues.

48 When You’re Young And In Love

On the drophead coupe’s audiofrequency a Bluegrass dout harmonizes “we don’t smoke marijuana in Muskokie”.

“Dock, dock,” the sky’s voice drops. On a whiskey-sour night paranoia stomps waist-deep over Highway 61.

We’ve been to a sit-in rebel-rouse after a tub-thumping at County Hall and have a Hillbilly truck-wagon on our butt.

Left, the parkway’s a furry skull. I shoot the bottle to Betty, mess with the tuner and spark up the last reefer.

In 1998 Christopher Barnes won a Northern Arts writers award. In July 200 he read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology 'Titles Are Bitches'. Christmas 2001 he debuted at Newcastle's famous Morden Tower doing a reading of my poems. Each year he has read for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and workshops. 2005 saw the publication of his collection LOVEBITES published by Chanticleer Press.

49 50 Jennifer Firestone

It’s a new government step up get your eats. My face chocolate-covered would you care for butter on your breasts. We’re on the sides and fire creeps we are rooting new man with rules, place them down command, word is out.

Who’s in the group of invisible raise your hand. Are you old, four-legged, do you live in another world?

***

The screen depicts reality: here’s how some love here’s how some rage.

The cowboy torch passed one rough hand to another horses neck to neck. Lasso colors and put in pocket. Kick a bull in its balls. Spit out wad jeans go a’flapping. Wild ones here we come.

We barely talk about prospering land that is even a little dying. The birds call green but with a loss. If your face touched you may go straight under, they’d poke a flag and say one lost life.

***

Take your tins and glass shuffle. Take broom smashing things with tails, waving high when asked. Roping sections saying this is my land, taking steps back waving a fan jumping a wind breeze quick to the steps behind the wood of it back to a beverage that’s boiled.

51

***

Hot, waving down tenants alarming them of day soaked with premonitions white flashes took off clothes. Residents heard gunshots motorcycles roared. Artists at one place sideswiped to another. Skin, carrier pouches, messages to transfer.

***

I will vote I will give money. The ship is directing I must get to the hot lights, not look at what’s below water not feel unsteady metal push my feet. Because he came from without money he can talk to poor. The farmers gather and he says values. The other one stands aside remarkable for confidence.

Are all artists out to play door opened for tea and cakes. Is their hair hot. Are they down the red tube, artists come find me.

Jennifer Firestone lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry at Hunter College and at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. An excerpt from her manuscript Holiday was published as a chapbook by Sona Books in June 2004, and she is currently editing a book in progress of epistolary dialogues between well known, contemporary poets called Letters To Young Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community. Her own poems are published in LUNGFULL!, Canwehaveourballback, 14 Hills, Diner, Karamu, The Cortland Review, Connecticut Poetry Review, Tin Lustre Mobile, Sugar Mule, Feminist Studies, Sidereality, Madison Review, Interim, Poetry Salzburg Review, Phoebe, and others.

52

Joel Van Noord

Have you been to East Lansing

Awkward, Yet determined to lounge in the room and not be the most awkward.

At least there was always one kid with lopsided hair who saved everyone, a typical Jesus usually named Mike.

We were all experts in porn. All with girlfriends out buying beer and red label vodka for themselves.

Just beginning to get nasty. Half knowing that love is only what you’re able to hold on to.

The rest of the half still pretending not to be virgins. Pretending to know conversations.

As if the one girl they’d found their way into and pumped three times counted.

We didn’t have to talk about that. But Mike usually brought it up to dig his way from the basement. Through the crevasse he’d fallen, unable to climb out, rappelling farther and farther in search of light. One day he’d be gone and we’d notice and talk about it between the 3rd and 4th beer.

Leaving it after that initial, awkward, letdown.

Things will never end right.

I’m sure many people have said that. 5 words all common. In some arrangement it’s had to have happened solely by probability. Given all that’s spoken and thought.

I don’t know about death. I can’t think about it with meaning. Friends have seriously toyed with drugs looking for a sliver of that light.

Love, the longer lived, only becomes painful.

With identities turned fragile as a crustacean desiccating on a beach.

Tossed indifferently upon the beach.

53 Endurance to love wears and the beauty fades. Yet it’s the only thing made un-awkward. The only thing comfortable in any true meaning.

Our room we share. It’ll end, then begin again in another breath. That’s one way to think. Nietzsche with a paragraph led me around my college campus with a quirky smile because I thought he was right.

Just patterns moving about with capacity to think. Bound to repeat the exact same thing and everything else.

Merely because of the word infinite.

In the room.

I love her.

I’ve loved her and so has he.

My best friend.

He once asked me if it was alright, in the parking lot of a mid sized city in Michigan. Looked at me after we rafted a West Virginia river in the rain. Dude man, he said and then popped the question. A hand on my shoulder as he looked up and into my eyes. Leaving his question than saying, dude man, again.

Just say something, if you mind. Dude. Man.

54 Michelle Greenblatt

Plexiglas

we walked straight thru the morning, cold for April; I thought it might have been easier, maybe I wouldn't have to take all those

drugs, but I did, then the panic set in around 1 p.m. (I woke a little late today)-I wondered, passing from guitar to dead guitar, the modulation a little shaky-of course, then again there was little or no response coming from me unless you wanted to count my relentless to desire to talk about rhythm & rhythm was all I cared about the night after "the incident" behind the gas station with the man & the gun concerning me not you me the unconfirmed knock-off of a tragedy now even I wouldn't mind hearing some sort of sermon or suffocation; suffocation more assuredly an attempt to unscrew the Plexiglas doorclamp from each window shutter of my eye, blinking open & shut

the unmemory

55

The Screaming of the Scene

loud in my eyes: the screaming of the scene under the roof of the roofless house we drank the black wine & I asked have you ever risen in the night & become suddenly safe, acceptable? A distinction. the brick flaking. the sewer over / flowing, an archetype of number 1, the dismissal of number 2, the cause of number 3, & so forth. So I’ve been called crazy, & worse. Flame in the hole in the sky—the hole no one predicted—the hole really perhaps in my eye. To know a war, to know love, I walk in midnight circles around the refrigerator, around the furniture, trying to figure out which way the wires are pointing. burning my hair. armor the walls against the living room/kitchen scene in case someone wants to suck our skin. in case someone wants to question our virginity. I have not yet chosen a “way out” in case the walls get knocked down or in case the scene starts screaming any louder—or if the roof of the roofless house caves in—maybe it is all the black wine getting to my head, but I really think someone has set me on fire—just alive enough to record the screaming of the scene.

56 To Entertain Timelessness

So that every night there is a conditional in which the moon pools so she scrapes, she scrapes. left with the choices of no letters she alphabetizes the divisors. she was sitting in central park, central park florida, mendacious clouds say no rain but she woke this morning: her 22 year old bones, old old bones told her thunderstorm, lightning, proliferate unlife & unmatter at a decelerating rate. she’s a virgin, at least in this business. no one’s arms can cry harder. to entertain timelessness one must saunter in skinless & that is just the beginning. take one photograph, saunter in w/sardonic eyeholes; sally back to the door—don’t forget you have just begun. the topography of the place may look simple; it is not, so back to the scraping. she would decline a razor for a butter knife. without persistence you may not notice she is already in her second skin, the passage was easier than she thought it would be, certainly not what she thought it would be, a distinct reminder of the personal resounding passage into absolutes w/no absolute guarantee. the second step to entertainment comes w/no instruction manual; these have been lost for centuries. anyway, they were full of gainsay & only told one how to stay saporous before being examined, while on the platter. she beseeches the algesia, leave me alone, leave me. feelings, flaws. also blue, cleaving indoors with an axe, tunneling a path thru an already torn hole. what a joke. she says. but so much of a joke becomes unfunny when false becomes true & true becomes truthless. the final step is stab yourself in the stomach stretched out before the glazing. it saves time some work & pity if you are already dead before they gut you.

57 Truth for Precision

as the mind turns the body over such finite details as the color of blue, a material is needed to substitute. Here: here is my hand, here is a photograph, capitalize the events of my life at will, a commonplace here, a common place there; substitute word for breakdown or breakdown for word, measures given for use of every day cup for 8 oz, embedded, buries the truth for precision a nightmare coming from the fire bursts its way thru smoke—I’ll try & stop now. Who drinks coffee mid-noon 83 degree day no shade but I? 1/3 less sugar apple juice on the side. so if I get thirsty. holding hands with a scalpel is what makes me feel the most comfortable. the needle with thorns. he may—he may only—knock on my window the hottest nights when tinted history glass of my heart is melting from the memory of a man’s hand dropping from mine eternally

& burying the truth for precision we went hunting. in the middle of the torrent, stones cracking this way & that, reminding me, oddly, of a car trip I took at the age of 9 to a cemetery. during this car trip the impetus of the moment I realized I was going to die, for the first time, I think.

& as the mind turns the body over in such finite details hair, fingernail, bone, a moment is needed to intervene in the crisis of the road the mind is ticketing for jay-walking so I say, here are my eyes, here are my photographs, capitalize whichever moments of my life you will, a common place here for a commonplace there, substitute anything just don’t take that scalpel out of my hand.

58 The Dropping

it can’t be measured. (what it does.) plastered on “but you & I—we live in the house of descendingly pointed upwards” where we swim blueishly side-twisted towards 1/3 of me giving out & 9/10 of the law being possession of yr body so sorry I did all that stupid shit it’s just that I got bored waiting for all yr different eyes to stop dilating & sorry it is not as lovely to be yr soot as it was to be yr body or even yr object to hold then drop then hold again tho what it does can’t be measured. (the dropping.) still I would prefer it to introducing the hand further into the vortices of declension, slaking the thirst of the fingers, the thirst to calculate the equally legitimate alchemy of so sorry

I did all that stupid shit I was just bored waiting for you to come home from fucking

Michelle Greenblatt is 23 & lives near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her work can be found in AUGHT, X-stream(present & upcoming), Frank Parker's www.frankshome.org, Jim Leftwich's site for textimagepoetry http://jimleftwichtextimagepoem.blogspot.com, & upcoming in Word for Word as well. Michelle's her first book, brain:storm, is being published by Thomas Lowe Taylor's anabasis press, set to go to press by the end 2005. You can always drop her a line at [email protected]

59 60 Pat Lawrence

Wire Train

I wasn’t sorrowful watching the runs in the window stocking from the silly rain that kept pounding from dawn to dusk, and as the clouds ran away from me, to be replaced by more, darker, lifeless bigger brothers that frowned at me. The night before, the day before, the week before had taken it all out of me, and left me a husk of pliable features, ones that could be picked up with coat hangars or marionette strings or tongue depressors, and moved into comical or fearsome masks. But the dancing hands whose inelegant incarnation I seemed to be were on break, holding a coffee cup or twisting a piece of brown hair absent-mindedly in a deceptively-gendered non-chalance, their own puppeteer staring at the bikini calendar on the wall of the employee lounge, then realizing he looks like a pervert, and looking away.

The sun came out the next morning after my uneasy sleep, the whole fiery thing had passed in the night, as it usually does, and things were pungent and wet—the smell dandelion milk all over my nostrils, sour and rich, and streaks of mud were on the edges of the concrete steps where people scraped their shoes before going into their apartments. The frizz of the overhead wires tunneling the sky towards the other end of the line ratcheted the animals into a state of confused directionless agitation, and me too. No other choice, we ran with the telephone clicks and whines in the aura expanded by the humidity and followed those phone calls forever, forever, forever.

Pat Lawrence is the editor of the on-line journal The Fifteen Project, as well as the Six Gallery Press imprint Replenishment. He is currently editing Raymond Federman's More Loose Shoes and Smelly Socks for release this fall, and, next year, he will be moving to New York to pursue his masters at New York University.

61 62 Rosemarie Crisafi

Ascension of Mallards

Beyond the boat mooring, mallards, a dozen or so, tip into water, bills first, tails in air, dabbling, making music of their upending turning, returning) standing on one end creating with their flock an undercurrent, felt but unseen, liquid uncoiling as in slow motion.

The quay creaks with incoming berth. Where anchors drop, the Hudson thrusts onto the platform (long tongues) a mouth parted slightly, passive, accepting the river (and its noisy foragers), spilling over with ease.

The end is sudden --- springing straight up from water to air. Glossy green heads and white collars rise, until lost in gray, leaving only homage to fowl.

Still, the river goes and comes. If the ducks never return, it means nothing.

63

Holes in the Atlantic

Far from shore I thrash in salt.

On my back, a black sheet tugs, a cape of stars.

Before a flaccid sun dissolves into brine, waves' green portholes, changing windows, let me pass.

64 Hologram

Seeing has been my life, Sooner or later I would look upon the dead.

Air is a resin through which to view.

I see you (although you are no longer here): a collapsed biology, an indefinable conversion from person.

The shadow of an arrow angles in the ground.

To say "transformation" is incorrect.

This is not the change I know, This is an utterly different physics.

The most awful death is to die far away from home. Dear, if you were not here, you could not be seen. Who would I question?

Mementos: photographs, letters. perhaps your favorite boots would be laid out for burial.

At least I have you here absent). Not you: an eddy of light and dark so I can make a final farewell, so you remain in my gaze a while longer.

65 Compassion

Recalling mother's gift, brittle swans, two tiny glass cygnets, soap bubbles blown from strands of optic fibers threaded with what is transparent reflecting all that courses through, so light is not lost.

66

Heirloom

The instant you leaned towards me on the bed Your tenderness with me

The heirloom quilt beneath my back The fibers

I nest in the cotton of your family

The colored triangles fuse with the curves of your face The mystery of a thousand pyramids

I call upon my parents Their affliction How uncontrollable those bias seams How in a trapezoid despair cannot escape

67 68 Rich Murphy

Singing the Blurs

All this energy out of focus falls to pieces that we swear by; seeing is relieving. Each ledge of land each of us owns is like no other. We squat on our honest crags hoarding a point of view. "You dirty son of a bitch, get your hands off my pine tree. And that gem of a beast, I found. If I lie, take my car."

But it may be natural when rain threatens for human beings to construct jigsaw puzzles -- the puddles could become scenic. So many insights and perspectives dropping from the sky draw the electricity out of the planetary particle and the static, the likenesses are all we have to our names: "I vow to always love you." However, before we pretend that the sun rises or breaks through clouds, a witness must experience the reading of clarity (do you follow me) to remind and perhaps infect a friendship with like like like and so this breath: during this busy day of walls of suns

69 The Monkey Tree

The monkey tree has no roots but at its end, it is planted. If you will, call it Will. Its limbs swing as though they were Tarzans and create a wind that dusts its trunk and twists jungle stories and song. The earth of the Earth makes room for the bulls that sleep in the monkey tree’s shadow, and empty spaces carry the birds that the monkey tree dreams about in its leaves. Its bark is toothy. And though its heart is pulp, its vision is knotty. A sap runs through it, and various species of primates suddenly appear on the tips of tendrils as though they were inventions (each worth a million dollars).

The family is now ripe to wake to its luxurious history, but has sown its route into a poet’s feat.

70 Immaculate Conceptions: Song

The sun tosses halos and wreaths at the heads of poets and athletes and then exposes itself and half of the Earth. Daphne stands one of many Dots crafting wooden rings to stay alive. Shading herself from the carnival creature, she holds her breath all day, and each evening her radiation bears the peace that permits victims criminal acts. With a thin bark, Dionysis in brilliant wise guy regalia ignites the moon. His bite is a progeny of wolves, and his whim splits women within a light beam’s reach. Conscious of everything that arrives and leaves, she empathizes with the routes of the limbs in time. A planet’s nests of nerve endings hatch: The Poplar sisters, the jammed women jarred again and again by men, and the cosmopolitan eves dammed by orchard walls.

71 Playing with Matches

1

The sun’s rays are gathered the night before and used as magic wands in plumbing’s dark corner of outer space.

2

Or lumberjacks splinter the eternal flame into slivers of future and box them in a drawer for the palms of hands.

3

The lamp posts and logs for cabins are one when the utopian town requires glue.

4

The tough toothpicks shim the corners of mouths to strike up proposals of marriage to girls.

5

The cool head on a stick figure 1 has the potential for brilliance.

6

A sulfur spark illuminates with incense the kitchen’s altar.

72

7

Sulphur balls serve as hors d’oeuvres to the meal of tobacco.

8 The friction of the weather and our not even naked bodies ignites so many variations on an idea.

9 Satan dances along a struck stick, a fuse.

10 Firefighters are sleeping miles away as dull kids in a bedroom practice poor parenting.

11 The spent miniature torch is flicked to the gutter where the drunk, continuing his romance, has his liver eaten out.

Rich Murphy bio:

My poems have appeared in such journals as Rolling Stone, Poetry Magazine (where I was featured poet), Grand Street, New Letters, Negative Capability, Confrontation Magazine, Slant Journal, Barrelhouse Review, West 47 (Ireland), Aesthetica Review (England), Alligator Juniper, New Delta Review, Full Circle Journal, Fulcrum, Salamander, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Entelechy: Mind and Culture, Red China, and MiPoesias. You may also read, or listen to me read, poems in the current issue of Inertia Magazine (www.inertiamagazine.com). My essay “Vanishing Artist: American Poet and Differend” was published in Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics and again in The International Journal of the Humanities.

73 74 Geoffrey Gatza

Hortense Hippopotamus For Jim Carney

A great many things may happen between the cup and the upper lip.

At 2PM she rises up from her armchair and cable News network and places a kettle on the stove. She imagines that she can balance an egg on her nose, tries three times then bends down to clean up the sticky mess. The 3 yolks in the white blob made a face at her,

well a squished face as the eyes we’re a bit out of sorts, but the egg

man did make for an interesting bit of afternoon company and so she poured tea for two and then set out a red gingham dish towel and a plate of cookies on the floor next to her new friend and then began to tell Mr. Eggs of her two sons off in the Army, a daughter

who lives in a large pond at the park and has an excellent supply

of food and friendly neighbors. Mr. Eggs hadn’t touched her tea or any of her special raisin cookies that, at one time was the toast of Elmwood elementary, but no matter she thought, he looks not well and maybe he won’t mind if I eat the last cookie on the plate.

She could always get more but didn’t want him to think she didn’t

watch her figure. But how silly she was being, Mr. Eggs is a kind man and would never entertain such a foolish opinion of her. And so she warmed their cups and then, getting herself off of the floor, tipped her hand to her head to say ta, and then using a kitchen rag cleaned up Mr. Eggs, then placed the dishes into the sink, cleaned

and then walked back to her armchair, television and her live news.

75 Ursula Orangutan

It is good to be orangutan, not because every orangutan can be great, but because a few orangutan have and without the shining achievements of these few orangutans, what manner of apples would we be eating today?

To some, that thought seems humiliating, threatening and must not even be endured.

We would tell tales of great builders, doctors and farmers, of the generosity of the old, wisdoms of great leaders, and awe over the strength of those few exceptional apes who shown us the heights to which we occasionally ascend.

To some, that thought seems humiliating, threatening and should not be overheard.

Most orangutans are not extraordinary and only a very few are extremely gifted. But it is to these exceptionally talented orangutans that the rest of us owe many of the great achievements of our ten thousand years of society throughout South Asia ranging from right here in this kitchen all the way into southeastern China.

It is my recognition of their greatness, my admission of the immeasurable superiority of their talent, that redeems, liberates, and inspires my own, unenviable mediocrity. On the ancient islands of Borneo and Sumatra we expected our heroes to be different.

To some, that thought seems humiliating, threatening and to never be countenanced.

76 Fredric Squirrel

Soon the sun will set in such a way to declare the great gathering is presently drawing near.

Black and white photos of ginger torqued maple trees; one can really feel the flight crashing all around them

conveying the gray swaying spirit of autumn.

The end is always drawing near. You can feel it in the bones,

In new shoes. In a small room cats on open window sills watching birds and neighbors argue over twigs and trash

Someone sitting across the way handling a tarnished steel guitar in their old body with old ideas,

waiting to die.

I wish to dance through evergreens eating well and never dwell on what might come, only on what does.

77 78 Rochelle Ratner

THANKSGIVING 2004: TALKING TURKEY

Splat! Through the windshield. She didn't even see the turkey coming. Just like she didn't see the wild turkeys near the farm. Her father pointed them out to her. Twenty-two pounds. It was always exactly twenty-two pounds. Purchased with her mother's stolen credit card. This time at least she's wide awake as the car thrusts forward. For once in her life she's in control.

79

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

April showers bring May flowers. With wild iris twined in her hair, he falls in love with her. They wed in June and she carries a wildflower bouquet. It's over a month since she's showered now, but the flowers mask that. Baby follows baby follows baby and she smells of milk and he, too, wants to suck her breasts. Until the children grow. Until the milk smells sour. Until they all have odors and he's unable to smell himself. April showers, at least, wash off some surface dirt. They summer in a beach town. They take a bar of soap down to the ocean, but it quickly sinks away from them. Outside their guesthouse the shower says only three minutes. After that they turn the cold water on. As soon as they scream he abandons them.

80

SAFE HOME

So she calls from Bally's to say she got home safe and the echo of slots in the background she attributes to the ice maker in the Hotpoint door – cheap old machine, eats up electricity. Really it will be after two a.m. before they get home, another hour looking for a parking space, the garages all closed or full by then, she ends up on the wrong side with an $80 ticket and it serves her right, she supposes. Her mother's still alive but no longer drives. There's the house with its own garage they seldom have the depth perception to park in, why does she have to leave, or if she must then best set out early and beat the traffic. The next time they gamble will be when he's in the hospital, unconscious; once he's home it doesn't cross their minds.

81

HIS DEATH

She doesn't want to hear it, not now, not in the summer when she's staying focused, so she goes off in the car somewhere, anywhere, for dinner, shopping for food, shopping for poison, and she gets back and of course the message waits. She goes back to work, writes about him this time, sleeps on it, and in the morning it's pouring rain and she sees from her study window that she left the car window open, the window nearest the house, of course on the passenger side.

82 ARRIVING HOME

Goldfish arriving home in a plastic bag have lost their crispness. She doesn't even bother frying them. Give them to the frogs, for god's sake, toss them at those croaking tongues that keep her up all night now that the new refrigerator's silent and standing before her empty-handed. I bought fish for you, she whispers. Alright already, how about frogs' legs? But she cooks nothing. She tosses the empty bag into the trash of the garbage can just moments before her bubble bursts.

Rochelle Ratner's books include two novels: Bobby's Girl (Coffee House Press, 1986) and The Lion's Share (Coffee House Press, 1991) and sixteen poetry books, including House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003) and Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, October 2005). An anthology she edited, Bearing Life: Women's Writings on Childlessness, was published in January 2000 by The Feminist Press. She lives in New York City, where she is Executive Editor of American Book Review and reviews regularly for Library Journal. More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage: www.rochelleratner.com.

83 84 Buffalo Focus | Ted Pelton

Jack Slazy, Ma Scrazy an excerpt from the novel Malcolm and Jack (and other Famous American

Criminals)

1945

Jack walks into a Detroit blues bar.

It’s crowded. He doesn’t see any other white men.

This is guitar music, not his usual thing. Usually he goes for a tenorman who just blows. But these are crazy sounds he’s been hearing down here, down in the Black Bottom, coming back from his job in the ball bearing factory. Wild

85 wailings in the workingman’s night of something deep and soulful you can’t just pass

by.

One time when he got on a boat bound for Europe it went down the coast

first and good thing, the bosun was a big queer who wanted to make him, he was

absolutely sure of it, so while he'd intended (again) to go to Paris and perhaps search

out his long lost Breton ancestors he ended up jumping ship in North Carolina

where he looked up and had a drink with Thomas Wolfe's brother, an aging man in the white suit of a Southern gentleman. The next day, looking around that part of the country, at the rolling meadows and white fences of plantations, never having been South, he heard the deep blues singing of a black man walking who knows where. Jack fell in behind him and followed on dusty dirt roads some three or four miles. It was a long trip to be making on foot but the man didn't seem to be in any hurry, and it blew Jack's mind. Jack raced everywhere; everyone in New York raced everywhere; even back in Lowell, where no one had any particular place to get to (and did they have any more to get to in New York?) everybody was always late for somewhere, going someplace else, hustling, even drinking their beers in a hurry. Everyone in the Northeast raced everywhere. But this music itself was slow, not the frenetic speed of be-bop always riding with the tis-ta-ta-tis of the high-hat cymbal but a deep down singing which came as if out of a cave or the hollow of the depths of a human soul, and even when the tempo made it fast the music itself was deep, like a cavern formed in rock by the constant eroding drip of pain year after year. The man's song never seemed to get anywhere; there was no part of it you could call the beginning middle or end, though sometimes it did seem as if a new song had begun, a new tune being sung, but the borders between songs were never

86 quite clear. Nor was he ashamed of being heard. Unselfconsciousness. The meandering of a man free to feel and express himself, without looking to see what others thought about it or him. Had Jack ever felt as free in his life, to simply do as he wanted, when he wanted, without thinking about how someone else would look at him? The man would sometimes stop singing, but then he'd just continue on again with the same song when he started up again: where he stopped and started actually singing did not correspond to where the songs began and ended; as likely as not the man would stop upon seeing a rabbit scamper off into woods as he approached or to nod to a hand in the field he was passing by. The first hand they passed also nodded to Jack, and Jack back to the hand, worrying at the same time that the singing man in front of him would in this way be apprised of Jack's presence and turn around, but Jack then knew that the man in front of him knew of his presence and still didn't turn around. Never did, all while Jack followed. Nor was it fear or lack of fellow-feeling that prevented him, Jack felt. Jack saw in his mind two pieces of wood drifting downriver lazily.

He tried to make out words. But the words were bent to the purposes of the song and its singing and became more purely music than any attempt at speaking or singing words. The feeling in these utterances came through in the sound of the voice, the pacing, the cries and murmurs. Jack now wasn't thinking only of the man and his song but also, and perhaps more, about what he would say about the man and following him when he got to his notebook or his typewriter; in other words -- and this was now true of everything Jack did -- he did not simply observe and experience walking behind the man listening to his song, but at the same time spun his own tune in his mind in response, a response that frequently

87 entirely obliterated that to which he was listening in favor of the music he was

creating within his own mind. Nor was this a process of which Jack was

unconscious; he realized, more than once, that he was no longer listening to the man

but pretending to listen and instead listening to himself describe how he was

listening to the man, selecting phrases for when later he might be able to write it all down. So he began to think about the act of this pretending, his recreation of what he was experiencing even as he experienced it, and then realized, to his even greater dismay, that now he was no closer to the man singing and the experience of listening, but at a second remove even more distant. "Listen to the man," he said to himself, in just these words, seeing even the quotation marks around them as he reprimanded himself, imagining reprimanding himself and the necessity of gaining entrance to the authentic . . . .

With all of these self-conscious movings of mind on this lazy day, it was no surprise that the beginnings and endings of songs were ungraspable; and while the day and its movement were lazy, and he was now in the lazy South, it takes more than one day to adjust yourself to a new rhythm, so while lazing along imagining himself adjusting to the rhythms of a Southern black man's lazy blues song while

travelling nowhere at all, Jack was simultaneously speeding along in his mind in his

work and determining how the lazy experience would fit into it and become part of

his larger project which in turn was an extension of his ambition to devote his life

to writing and be aware of everything around him and record it all or as much as

possible and the speed of reactions and vocabulary and insight needed to reach such

a massive goal and undertaking and spinning as a result all manner of plots around

the man, around himself, around the landscape. The fields were largely empty,

88 except for cattle and occasional horses. But they held thousand-soldier battles,

Army officers on mounted charges, death, labor, fields of black men and women with hair tied in rags, a little pickaninny boy walking beside him dressed in only a sack asking for candy, elaborate Gone With the Wind plantation houses entertaining men with oiled mustaches calling on pretty Southern belles in satin gowns in huge ballrooms with buffed maple, no, cherry floors, and garden terraces blooming with fragrant magnolias, and then the same houses falling board by board into ruin or set afire by rough men at war who'd lost everything themselves and now were resolved in hearts rusted by hatred to destroy everything in their path, led by Sherman, who'd already had them rip up rail lines, chop down weather vanes, wreck water wheels, cripple horses, drown livestock, take iron bars to chandeliers, pocket jewelry, fuck whomever they wanted, white or black.

As by the same process, right now, throwing aside a drained pint bottle and entering a Detroit blues bar, Jack finds himself walking down a road in North

Carolina.

He comes forward into a crowd, which half-parts before him. Men look at him, some surprised, others laughing, poking each other in the ribs, two or three smiling his way as if to say glad you're here. Each face is almost familiar to him.

Then he sees someone he's sure he knows. Not personally, but he's seen him around. In New York, maybe Greenwich Village. A tall, light-skinned man with distinctive red-orange hair, in baggy lavender pants cinched at the ankles and a matching oversized jacket too loud for this workingman's bar where everyone else is in short-sleeves and dungarees. He's loudly regaling a small group, waving arms to make up for words drowned in this veil of sound, making great theatre out of

89 continually checking a pocket watch attached to a long chain that loops eighteen inches down and back from his beltloop to his jacket pocket. The jam breaks and the song goes back into blues verses, deeply intoned but fuzzed nearly out of recognition through the amplifier. Jack edges closer. This group is near the bar, so he's going in that direction anyway.

"Don't you brothers Lindy-hop? What is all this noise? You brothers call this music? Where's the dancing? I hear this guy singing about fucking but I know a lot more of it actually happens when you get them bitches working up their blood with a good Lindy-hop."

A young man, maybe a couple years younger than Jack. Jack keeps trying to catch his eye. The man of course sees Jack -- it's impossible not to in a place like this, where a white man would be crazy to go.

"You brothers would do well to catch my act in Harlem sometime. Now that's music. And in between, you got me dancing licks onstage to make the girls drip honey. Hey, here's one -- what's the difference between your sister and a U-

Boat? Give up? Troop ships sometimes escape U-Boats."

Jack bellies to the bar. The bartender comes over. They shout to be heard.

"Hey, man, what's this music called?"

"Nothing but the blues."

Jack isn't sure what he's said, but doesn't want to fight the crushing sound.

"Gimme a bourbon, neat. Hey, wait a second." Jack checks his money supply.

"Send that guy over there one from me, too."

"You got it."

90 The man pours one for Jack in a thin stream from the pointed tip of a labelless bottle, then moves a few feet over and pours another for the man whose voice has no problem being heard above the din. He keeps talking, reaches over for the glass and makes more theatre out of drinking it, holding the glass at arm's length directly overhead, tilting his neck backward, opening his mouth wide and with a quick flip of the wrist upending the glass. The whiskey pellets down on his face, a third of it splashing of his face but two-thirds going right down his throat. "Warms my belly," he says, slapping his stomach which even through the layers of clothing creates a thin smack of muscle on muscle.

Jack leans over and pokes his head through the group. He must be drunk.

"Hey, don't I know you?"

The tall man looks at him off-handedly. "Ever been to the Lobster Pond in

New York?"

This isn't it, but Jack doesn't have a better answer. "Yeah, I think so."

"Aw, you'd know it if you'd been there. I'm the Master of Ceremonies and everybody knows me, Detroit Red."

The others smile at Jack. They're rubes. One is fancied up a little with a larger than usual feather in his hat.

"What do I owe for the drink, Daddy-O?" says Red to Jack. He pulls his arm out from behind his back and twirls a large gold coin in the air between his fingers. Jack can't tell what it is -- it's slightly bigger than a dollar. Red grins wide and, the men parting away from Jack slightly, he allows his hand to glide across the air, the coin flipping around like a moth, light winking off its spinning edges. "Do you think this is enough?" Red's eyes watch the play of the coin in his hand, past

91 Jack's face and up over his head, whereupon Malcolm closes his hand in a backward

fist then opens it for all to see. The coin has disappeared. "Aw, man," he says to

Jack in mock anger, "You weren't fast enough!"

The twirling coin flutters to Jack's stomach -- where it meets the bourbon

and a sudden anxiousness about where he's wandered to in his night-long ramble

when he should be at work -- and boils up into his head. Suddenly he can't breath.

He's cold from sweat but at the same time finds the closeness of bodies suffocating

him in dense, muggy fog in which he feels himself turning over and over. He has to

puke. He falls slightly against the bar, manages to turn around, makes his way out the door.

"Blew that man's conk right off the stem," says Red.

They don't meet again for another year, until just after the end of the war.

* *

Most of Malcolm's family lived in and around Lansing. His mother no longer lived there. She was in Kalamazoo.

First there'd been Wilbert, a good, quiet, responsible boy. Then came Hilda,

who always helped her momma with the cooking, the wash, the tidying up and the

babies. Then the three rambunctious ones -- Philbert, Malcolm and Reginald.

Philbert was good at boxing and Malcolm was the one he practiced on, but that

made Malcolm quick-witted. Reggie used to tag along with Philbert and Malcolm

like a hungry little puppy dog. Finally came the little ones -- Yvonne and Wesley

and Robert. So much government issue food the kids thought Not to Be Sold was a

92 brand name and considered fried ketchup bread a delicacy. So little luck in that family, rabbits could rub their own feet and get away.

As things got to be too much for Momma, the sour-grease-cooking smell became a visible yellow tar on the walls and windowsills, and dust and animal hair matted there. Kids with same size feet fought for warm shoes once the snow came.

Ice zig-zagged on the insides of windows in the morning. Wilbert never came home except to sleep and pour some water over his head before going out to his other job. "Such a good boy, I'm sorry, Wilbert," Momma would say to herself when the clouds broke in her mind and the world was clear for a moment. Then the wind would shift back the other way. "Social workers came in, pushed me over and stole the coal for the stove and broke its door, so that any heavy walking might spill hot coals and torch the whole place. Social workers got me with this child here, cause I ain't been with no man since my Earlie died. Social workers saw Earlie kill that rabbit with his bare hands and throw it at my feet and roused the klan to meet him at the railroad tracks. Social workers secretly mix pork into the food they give us so

I end up having to throw half of it out. Social workers put sugar in the engine of that old car which was just brand new yesterday afternoon when the sun shone and the crickets buzzed and they got too loud and we ended up with the sheriff out here banging on the door. Now every day is cold and cloudy and I don't have a husband anymore to keep me warm at night. That's what social workers do."

Finally, social workers detonated a bomb under the house that sent everything and everyone flying off every which way.

Philbert was even more alarmed when Malcolm came back in dark gabardine than when he used to come back in purple and yellow with a hubcap-

93 sized hat on his head that had to be tied to his collar by a string in the back for fear it would blow away. Malcolm told Mrs. Swerlin, his old foster ma, that he was now in international finance. The only hipster part left in him were fingernails neatly manicured and coated with transparent polish so that they shined like his teeth. He kept an emery board in his pocket to keep them free of nicotine stains.

Time was, Philbert would have punched Malcolm out, the way he kept fucking up and covering his trail in shit. Now he told him to quit smoking cigarettes and eating pork.

"Pork? You wearing the same monkey collar as Momma's old preacher?"

"Hadn't thought of that. Maybe Momma knew something after all. But no, brother, I've found the black man's natural religion, the one that the white man's lies have kept us from for 600 years."

"Back up forty-five feet else your spiel gonna dig my heel, bro. The God rap goes back in the pocket of your slack. I'm skinned for that noise."

"Will you stop acting the fool for one minute? This is serious. Hilda and I are driving out later in the week to see her, and I think it would be good if you came."

"All she care, I could be the Yellow Kid and you could be Old Black Sam the Sham, she wouldn't collar us from some floor mechanics. Sides, I got places to go, people to see, legit. Got my spotters peeled for gone talent."

"Running a game?"

"Naw, ease up. Shoe talent, to lay down sand and make it jump. Do me right, I ain't down for that shit. This is strictly uptown. I'm slinging a show back in the Apple, at some strong digs. If it works out, I'll be able to sell out to Hollywood

94 by next year, two years tops, and then I'll have the life of Jack the Bear, no more of the slave. Gotta find me some real fresh Susie-Qs, keep costs low to start, see if they're in New York already they've already been discovered and command the big bucks. But Detroit, you see, that's an untapped market. Plenty of talent there just waiting for someone to hook them up."

That's about when the old Philbert would have punched him out. The gangster threads and the line of shit would have pushed him past where he could listen anymore. But he'd learned patience and self-discipline, as well as how to speak the language of liberation.

"I'm not telling you this to disapprove, but to help save your life, brother.

There are many lies in the world, but there's one big lie, and revealing that lie means finding out who you are and who your people are, like I found out who I am. You think you are free, going here and there, but you are in the shackles of the race of white devils. Only you can deliver yourself from bondage, and you can do it only by following the Honorable Elijah Muhammad."

"I've been gone longer than I thought! You've turned into one of those crazy religious niggers!"

Philbert felt chemicals rush across his back, filling up the muscles in his arms. While not budging an inch, his body seemed to swell larger. His voice, while backed by anger, was cold and restrained:

"I am not a nigger."

Malcolm, who’d whistled "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" with guns pointed at him, found this impressive enough to shut his face.

95 Philbert had always been good at boxing and Malcolm was the one he'd practiced on. But that made Malcolm quick-witted.

All Philbert and Hilda and Aunts Ella and Sassie could wish for was that

Malcolm get slapped in jail before someone got tired of his mouth, his trickeration and his lies and shot him. And that he wouldn't take Reggie down with him.

His mother didn't care one way or the other. She was in Kalamazoo.

She, Louise, played checkers sometimes and often crocheted, listening to

Jack Benny or Amos and Andy in the community room. Or she'd sit and stare at a blank white wall, pharmaceuticals running laps through her blood. She had been a pretty woman in her time, had what they called high yellow coloring, and her bearing was upright and regal. Her voice carried the musical cadences of her native

Grenada. Her light skin contrasted with long, silky black hair, and as a child she'd been nicknamed Pocohontas. She liked the name, because it told of another princess who'd lost everything to the hands of robbers, save her dignity. She was educated, and tried to pass some of that on to the children, the desire to learn, to find out about the world. She read to the oldest ones when they were quite small, and all of them had done well in school at one time or another, which shows you they had the potential.

Now a dream kept recurring for her. It was strange, it referred to no one she knew personally, yet kept coming back, again and again, perhaps because it bound up many things she knew in one shorthand image or composite world. Or maybe as it was a message from some vast beyond, an attempt on behalf of some great intelligence beyond the clouds to tell her something. At times, as she came in and out of consciousness, moored to nothing except the confinements of physical

96 space and thus able herself to drift away, she entered the world of her creation to such an extent that it became as real as anything in her life. The clouds and fog would burn off to find her on a large island plantation, like where she'd grown up but also different. The master was an old, grey-haired white man in a wheelchair, who would be rolled out on the large portico each morning to get his air. He'd been a very kindly old man, cheerful enough to call everyone over to him each

Friday afternoon to sing him songs as the sun went down. Her old aunts had even told her of a time when the old man had been hearty and hale and worked the fields side by side with his hired hands. He paid them, which made him an exception, and made all his workers the envy of laborers for miles around. Or so she'd been told, anyway. The Friday singalongs had happened when she was a girl and pleased her to no end -- she had a fine, deep voice, even as a child, which blended with the others in gospel chorus so sweetly that in short order she'd been allowed to solo, with the rest of the singers backing her. But after a time, the old man was too weak even for this, and all they saw of him was when he was wheeled onto the broad portico. This glimpse was distant -- by this time they'd already be out in the fields.

Once verdant and lush, the crops were having trouble. Vegetables and cotton hardly grew at all, and got ravaged by weevils, while weeds grew overnight to your waist. The soil parched open in cracks, aching for rain. None came. The fogs descending seemed deprived of moisture, or at least of enough to sustain life. The overseer, who now had no one looking over his own shoulder, blamed the workers for the poor yield. But it wasn't their fault -- the land itself seemed to be turning barren. When she was close enough to the main house to see the old man's face when he was brought out in the morning, his jaw had gone slack and a line of drool

97 fell onto his shirt. He had shrunken within his own clothes, which now appeared

several sizes too big for him. "Eyes front!" snapped the overseer, who tolerated no looking away from the work and used any excuse to blame them for the plantation's new troubles. He was a knotty-muscled, fireplug of a man, whose face was marred by a large, red birthmark, which ran from the left side of his forehead and spread diagonally across one eye to surround half his mouth. Over time, the birthmark seemed to grow larger and more hideous, sprouting ugly, crooked hairs, and every time she saw him she was reminded of the pirate ships and limbs replaced by sharp metal hooks she'd heard stories about. The money paid them by

the new man, a young one who needed to get outdoors more, such was the pallor of

his skin, was now taxed to supplement equipment purchases, so they received only

half of what they had in the past. Meanwhile, the prices of cloth and small items of

necessity had risen steadily and the meals they were provided grew smaller and

smaller. Oatmeal that had once clung to a spoon turned upside down now ran off

before you could get it to your mouth. They got no better meat than was being

given to the dogs.

"Master must not be being told what's really going on," someone would say

at night from his bedclothes in a dark room where twenty slept on straw ticks and

tried not to sneeze, for one sneeze would get everyone going.

"Master's dead. He can still get his eyes open, but he can't speak a lick."

"No, he ain't. He always told us he'd take care of us as long as he was alive."

"That's what I'm saying. We ain't be being taken care of because he's dead."

Her mind moved to the old patriarch's bedroom. His bed was a four-poster

with a billowy cotton canopy and veils on each side to keep out mosquitoes. Daily,

98 new freshly picked flowers were set in a vase atop an expansive mahogany table, inlaid with pinstripe swirls of yellow oak. Around this table were beautiful straight-backed chairs of the same mahogany frames, with plump cushions on the back and seats covered by shiny red velvet that had never been sat on. One hundred gold tacks pinned the material into each chair at tiny, perfect intervals, the material tucked perfectly even at the rounded joints. They were the most beautiful things Louise had ever seen, and she never thought of them without her eyes starting to tear a little. But the tears never forced her to stop thinking about the chairs either. Their beauty made her sad, but also comforted her and even elevated her spirit. She didn't know where or when in her life she had actually seen these beautiful chairs.

The man himself had shrunken in size, but his weight had settled into the chair, and getting him out of it was an effort that required three men, brutally muscular all, who approached the task so gingerly they seemed to believe that if they pulled directly on either of his arms his body would pull apart like rotten fruit.

They got him upright, then another came forward, fell to his knees, and as the others slipped the suspenders off the man's shoulders, pulled the man's trousers open and slipped both these and his undergarment down to his knees. The man's genitals appeared, three shriveled walnuts. The attendants lowered the man to a sitting position in their arms and carried him to his bed, two maids in black cotton with white aprons pulling aside the veils, another from the opposite side turning back the sheets. They sat him at the edge. A piece of shiny, coated canvas lay atop the mattress pad and after one on the maids sprinkled talc over it, the men arranged themselves on opposite sides and shifted him onto it. Throughout all of this, the

99 man's expression never changed. His eyes were the faded blue of the confederate

army, glistened over with fluid. His hair only spoke of what he once had been. A

white thatch, finer than his hair had been in his youth, it still had enough stiffness for a few strands to stick up. This the maid covered with a tasseled nightcap.

Louise came to. She blinked her eyes. Around her were the other people in the home, all gowned in hospital white, most older than her, a few younger, slumped in easy chairs or standing, walking around in isolated circles. The voice of

the president warbled from the radio.

100 Colin Searle

Gutter box

pink fleshings, moist clamour, exquisitely-modelled limbs, circus sideshow and fake museum, stench lies in the streets, asphyxiation, the air inlets partly blocked, several quarts of brown fluid, kiss her cut mouth, bony pigmeat.

101 Fetish Hut

on the rug bring me rice and papayas naked except for a small strip of cloth; beads curiously carved, bamboo combs in her hair. along the ceiling I noticed long cone-like objects tapering to a point, dripping with perspiration, green flowers.

* powdered insects, a gold foil package; granular lumps of dried tree sap

* the ashes of calcined bones, fermented banana drink, lick it, in crude form my deposits. a swarm of locusts inside me, dripping at the opening that is damp

102

Glasshouse

Skin birds are great masses of red coral, waltzers of meat, dizzying.

Specimen-boxes glitter in the sunlight showering the room: ’we don’t like coconut juice, just limes and milk,’ say the little voices.

In the spinney the cries of woodpeckers in jewelled robes melt like iced-lollies.

Someone is waiting outside holding a flower-pot wrapped in green paper: bright yellow poppies are growing round each other, clinging like a family of traumatics.

Any female animal that could suckle my little infants: I would fill her with brandy and immunity, yet now, in the insect-room, the exotic creatures dead in bejewelled coffins, are more silent than silence, even the breeze is soundless: the flapping silk curtain ripped on a rusty nail.

103 Pool of Idols

The waves rush up

onto the beach where we alone,

walk barefoot:

pools of seawater abandoned in thin hollows

chilling our bodies,

& your eyes clinging to me like razored kittiwakes,

& your sacred little lips of cold chrome reflecting the silences back.

I live in England and have been writing poetry since I was 16 (I am now 43). I am very poor at sending out my poems for publication but have been published in several small press magazines in UK (including 'Purple Patch', 'The Arcadian', 'Dial 174', ' Moonstone', 'Various Artists', 'Chiron', and some other that I forget the name of). I won the Jazzclaw Poet of the Year competition in 2002 (the writers of the top 10 selected poems are then judged by each other anonymously using a points system) and subsequently had a volume of poetry published by Jazzclaw

104 Ak-Uh

TIMELESS AGE

SCENES PRESENTED : Scene #1. An ordinary bird hovers high ordinarily. It drops its feathers off one by one. The ordinary bird's center of mass is located in the inmost recess of its intestine./ Scene #2. An ordinary bird folds its wings but it keeps hovering high ordinarily. / Scene 3. Three animals of different kinds are dragged by transparent ropes around their body. Each one of the species are not mentioned. 'Present' is a word that cannot be defined.

CHARACTERISTICS PRESENTED : Enormous / Anti-combative, Free from struggle / Familiar

SOUNDS PRESENTED : A Sound of regular beats and irregular tones / A Consecutive Sound that fades out but never fades off / A Sound free from tones and beats and volumes / An extremely high tone and an extremely low tone, an extremely loud tone and extremely small tone are repeated over and over, with regular beats. (being in or out of sequence is not important: most of existences are afraid as they do not know if it wound go to extreme or not.)

THINGS PRESENTED THAT ACT OR DON'T ACT : Presences wandering from here to there / Goat Blowing its nose / African Elephant taking Pleasure in a scuffle / Flying Quadruped Antelope / Sexual pervert without sexual desire / A kind of echinoderm that reproduce not by sexual reproduction nor by asexual reproduction / A standstill ant / A Seal that is decolorized when contact with water / Teeth-collectors / Several things that moves without sound / Living things that doesn't breathe / Talented poet without any knowledge / An opposite person who produces no conflict / A mathematician who criticizes the talented poet severely / Obeyers of the Talented poet / A mathematician disregarding the obeyers / Group of birds

MAIN SUBJECT OF THE LANGUAGE PRESENTED : Scenes Presented

OBJECTS PRESENTED : An Encyclopedia without any words on it / A single letter that can't make sound / An object that cannot be grabbed / Dead body of horned Aristoteles / Molecular structure that cannot be cut / Paella that cannot be fed with

PAINS PRESENTED : Pain 1 / Pain 2 / Pain 3

THINGS THAT ARE LEFT : And others #1)

Annotation appears #1 : The number of things appears later is even bigger than the number of all the things which appear in Timeless Age, except the others. (The number of things appears later can be infinite.) But it is much less than the number of things appears throughout the entire time. The reason I used 'the others' in this paragraph is, that I could not express the whole view of 'Timeless Universe' in the limited space.

105 SITUATIONS PRESENTED : Can be deleted

SCENARIES PRESENTED : Deleted

I will comment on the things that are above-mentioned, again, for the readers who don't have a splendid memory. Scenes presented, Charateristics presented, Sounds presented, Things Presented that act or don't act, Main subject of language presented, Presented

Sentences Presented :

Sentence #1 : Dies once.

Sentence #2 : Don't Throw away your urines in the trashcan only for humans.

Sentence #4 : The sound is nothing but a vibration of the eardrum. And it is nothing but a stimulus of the brain stimulated by an electric signs. Then why don't you feel a musical impression just by imaginating the vibration of the eardrum or watching the electric signs?

Sentence #5 : Help yourself full of agricultural chemicals.

Sentence #6 : In the movie, when pointing a gun at a person, we can hear them saying "Goodbye". Then why don't they say it more politely when pointing at elderly person?

Sentence #7 : Dead body comes into my body.

Sentence #8 : A mass-producing system for fathers.

Sentence #9 : A mass-producing system for mothers.

Sentence #10 : An ugly woman ran out. The bag explode. People are survived.

Sentence #11 : Grotesque grow desk grow desk children

Sentence #12 : If the man's ability of liquid waste was less than a drop per second, the toilets would be used as the restaurants. Talk, Eat, Read in the toilet.

Sentence #13 : No one has ever heard of someone who died from eating snack. In conclusion: snacks are healthy food.

THE FIRST REMARK PRESENTED: All 'SENTENCES PRESENTED' are not-ordered and linearly independent. Their indexes are entirely arbitrary. The readers should regard 'SENTENCES PRESENTED' as a set without a relation.

Sentence #14 : My mom told me that my mouth are quite big. So I pulled off my tooth for her. She made a childlike smile and my father bowed to me. I chucked him under the chin.

Sentence #15 : I (Sentence #3) have an ego. I cannot notice, memorize, express anything. I cannot talk, nor write. That is, I cannot use language. I am just a sentence. I want to be an example of a logic that the sentences are not just 'made up'. I assert myself that I am a subject independent. This sentence (Sentence #3) is not what is made up by myself,

106 the one who can't use language. I am nothing but a subject independent. And I am not made up by someone else's language used.

Sentence #16 : I was writing clearly. There were no sounds but as soon as I shouted 'Be quiet!', the sounds were poured out of my mouth. They were noisy and did not calm down. The sounds increased as soon as they met a thing that cannot be drilled. The sounds swallowed down their subjects and the subjects deleted. The sounds became images.

Sentence #17 : It is one of those commonplace affair when footprints are walking. It is one of those commonplace affair when a girl is taking off her clothes and shouting. It is one of those commonplace affair when a car is bursting up. It is one of those commonplace affair when a man is falling off from an overpass. It is one of those commonplace affair when a man is dying from bursted stomach. It is one of those commonplace affair when a man is dying from exploded brain. It is one of those commonplace affair when people are licking up the dregs of the exploded brain. It is one of those commonplace affair when the ants are gathering and forming the shape of a man. It is one of those commonplace affair when there are more ants with tongue than people with tongue. It is one of those commonplace affair when a man is stuffing his flesh into his stomach. It is one of those commonplace affair when men are beheaded. (Tracing their heads, they waves their hands in the air from time to time.) It is one of those commonplace affair when a chair is able to walk. It is one of those commonplace affair when a proton is not moving. Men are eating the carcasses of pig delightfully. There are seasoned carcasses, decomposed carcasses, matured carcasses all over the table of the men. It is one of those commonplace affair when a men is chewing the teeth. When I stepped ahead, two motorcars collided. A roaring sound. When I walked on step by step, a building collapsed. Men were falling off from the window. Falling off, They were taking off. They were lighting a fire on their clothes to make a hot-air balloon. They yelled. The yell became a enormous lump of air. The clothes were survived. I walked on quickly. In the blink of an eye, the building went out of sight. I witnessed a capsized car rolling over. It never stopped. Things that are not wheels, are more beautiful. I walked on and on much quickly. Three men began to fight. They do not know each other. It was not two men's making an onslaught on the one left. It was the three man that was rivaling. They concluded a treaty of three men's rivaling. The battle was like the language. If one of them break the treaty, he would be branded as an uneducated person or lowbrow. When I walked on again, I saw a man and he was just the exact image of me. He was surprised and opened his mouth wide, and uttered a shriek covering his mouth again. I stepped up to him and comparing every single piece of my hair with his. Everyday's life like this is one of those things we have enough of. This is of no interest. It is one of those commonplace affair when the words are not promised. It is one of those commonplace affair when the words are breaking the promises. It is common appear that a language makes up new promises. (Making-up is often occurred by some people who are not well-educated. Mostly it is not intended, and making- up is not a bad behavior.)

Hint presented #2 : This is a sentence of great consequence. You have to forget about time. You have to ignore the time elapsed. You have enough latent ability within yourself.

Sentence #18 : Have fear Give fear Love fear

Sentence #19 : Rendezvous with fear Sleep with fear Sex with fear

Sentence #20 : I cut the poetry in halves and named them 'face'. I overlapped them and abridged it, and my good-looking face was crimpled. Then, a pine tree and a fir tree

107 stood backward and came to me, waving their leaves. I folded my half-poetry in half. The half of the tree shrieked and flew to the point which located in half between the sky and the ground. And finally I crumpled the poetry into a ball smaller than the tip of my finger. Then my mouth and stomach crumpled and trembled too and the world was cracked and inside the crack, blackish sprouts began to grow with the delicious nutrient from the black pupil of the eye.

Sentence #21 : Death of fear Kind of sorrow Burial of fear

Sentence #22 : I ran and met a wall and had sex with the wall

Sentence #23 : HAND a tool of masturbation

Sentence #24 : At least, a few elements of your food had been made up someone's dead body before. It can be an element of the smallest nail or of the eyeball, or of the digestive organ of some virus that brought someone to death, I guess.

Sentence #25 : They are not wise. They do not fight. They are not boring. They don't feel sad. They do not bleed. Their sweat is red. They know how to smile. They are alive. They do not kill. What is more, they are not strong.

Sentence #26 : They drew an oblong. It was not an oblong they drew. They drew an oblong for drawing oblong. It is sad that what they drew was not an oblong. Their tribes were completely destroyed.

Sentence #27 : Scene #1 and Scene #2 make up scene #56. Scene #56 and a few Scenes that are not made up yet give birth to policeman 1, 2, 3. Scene #3 has a role to be surprised. When Scene #3 is surprised, the policemen are produced infinitely.

For those who do not have a splendid memory, I will make mention on the things stated- above. Scenes presented, Characteristics presented, Sounds presented, Things presented that act or don't act, Main subjects of the language presented, Sentences presented, and the title of this part is: TIMELESS AGE.

Lines presented :

SungYeon : Hello. HongYeon : I appreciate what you have done. SungYeon : What do you mean?

Name1 : The mountain over there is one of those buildings that had been built when I was 19, but it was destroyed yesterday as it rained heavily yesterday. Name1 : Now I can say that it looks more like a flat field. Name1 : I was sleeping and millions of people came in at the same time. A man touched my nose and then fell asleep. He woke up and told me about the dream he had, then fell asleep again, touched my nose, and then closing his eyes not even wake up murmured about the dream he had, woke up again, and…… The man who appeared Name1's dream : Noticing that I did not wake up and told you about my dream when I had to wake up, I really embarrassed, and was really sorry about it.

108 Name1 : I was seized with fear when the thought of being unable to wake up occured to me. In the excess of my fear, I wake up again and again. You know, That's one of the things happens in the dream. In a dream, one cannot think over how to solve it, he just do what he can do, in other words, he does the things that is the most simple. Name1 : I woke up a million times. And I was still in someone's dream, then, to my surprise, Name1 : No, it was not a surprise at all, but then, before I woke up again, I realized that the millions of people who rushed to me and tried to touch my nose, were myself. Then I woke up completely, and not I am laughing, touching your nose.

Name1 : Let's talk about it : which side of teeth is suitable to chew chickens? Name2 : It is more suitable to talk about which side of teeth is suitable to make conversation. Name3 : I don't know which side of teeth is suitable to chew you guys. Name4 : Let's take a break and talk again later.

Princess : There lives two rabbits behind the castle. Kettle : If you raise your flower-printed handkerchief on my grip, I will serve you with much gratitude.

I hate dreams.

Please don't stand on ceremony with me. Take a good rest on your seat. You can talk without covering your mouth. You don't need to run that urgently. I want to be intimate with you. Don't look at me with that unstrained sight. You can feel at ease.

There lives two rabbits behind the castle. Yesterday I met with one of those rabbits and was invited to his house. In his house, a bunch of Common Gypsophila is hung upside down, and in the center of the house, there are table and chair made of willow. The bed is made up with the breast down of rabbit. It is heavily loaded with the damp water drops. There are only three windows. Sounds are hardly heard outside the house. The rabbit doesn't wear. The rabbit doesn't have a sweet voice. The rabbit is not so big. The rabbit hardly sleep. The rabbit are not coward. The rabbit doesn't have a small hands. They rabbit doesn't have a short legs. The rabbit are not a good singer. They rabbit hugged me tight.

There lives a princess in the castle. Yesterday I met with her and invited her in the sense of duty. Her eyes sparkled with joy as soon as she come inside. I don't have much to say about her. She was in a beautiful dress, and had a ordinary smile and big feet, big body so big to feel hard to come inside my house. The princess was not taciturn. The princess sleeps easily. The princess loves the breast down of the rabbit. The princess is coward. The princess is a good singer. The princess has a regular set of teeth. The princess has small eyes. The princess is a good laugher. I hugged her tight.

Yesterday, a princess visited the rabbit-next-door. At that time, I was chewing the chicken. The next-door-house has three windows, so I could hear inside very cleary. The princess loved the breast down of the rabbit. I guess it from the fact that the subject of the conversation I heard was mainly about the breast down of the rabbit. I felt my breast with my finger. I remembered giving my breast down to the rabbit-next-door for the chicken he gave me. I swear, that it was the thing I most regret through all my life. I was chewing the chicken greedily. The mountain over there is the place I went out to play

109 since I was just born, there are full of pasture enough to eat. Most of rabbits live there, but there are many hunters as well. As hunters are not flesh, it is no use to chew them. They hunt, and never take a bath. So rabbits live behind the castle are only two. yesterday, I told the rabbit-next-door : You are nothing but a rabbit that jump from joy when get some pastures. You can't afford such a luxury to hang out with a human princess. Crying out loud, he hopped to a brown tree and hugged it tight. Hopping, I reached to him and embraced his breast, and I pulled of some of the hairs while he couldn't notice.

Name 1 : From the bottom of my heart, I don't love you. Please stare at me more earnestly. Name 1 : Hello. Name 1 : I don't like your hello. Madam 1 : Yesterday I went to see a doctor and asked him if he could make my baby smaller. He told me that the size of baby shoud be stand between 9 and 17. I couldn't but feel heartbreaking. Woman : one of the spermatozoa I scattered and the ovum you threw away met in the urinal and grew up for 297 days. Using many pictures of a drain, TV news showed a title [A heartless parents who left their baby]. They announces that they are going to find the parents examining the genes of the baby, Man : Everyday I threw away my ovum in the urinal. That day, by mistake, I emptied the urinal without any aide. I am really worried about it.

There were Eleven intimate friends. One day, to the variation of the languages, they broke up by common consent. They promised to not meet and think in the unlike languages, observe the unlike circumstance and for a while. And in the day they meet again, they promised to say disdainfully to each other "I can't understand your language" in the various language they get. (This rule has been organized with a purpose : they can translate, interpret each others' language using that sentence)

The Eleven constructed their own societies making their reproduction or bringing outsiders. The members of societies they made up persued more unique languages.

SungYeon : Hello? HongYeon : When I was young, I was impressed by the sentances of 'Hello' printed in the textbook. SungYeon : Hello? And now? HongYeon : That doesn't impress me at all.

SungYeon : Hello? HongYeon : When I was young, I was impressed by the sentances of 'Hello' printed in the textbook.

SungYeon : I appreciate what you have done.

HongYeon : That doesn't impress me at all.

Hong Yeon : Hahaha. SungYeon : When I was young, I was eager to have a toy crane. HongYeon : When I was young, I laughed much. Hahaha.

110 SungYeon : I appreciate what you have done. HongYeon : Not at all. SungYeon : People wants to be at some degree. HongYeon : I want to be at an exceeded degree. SungYeon : When I was young, I was impressed by the sentances of 'Hello' printed in the textbook. HongYeon : My mom made me to memorize that sentence. I had to have a dictation and if I failed to write that sentence, I had to be whipped. SungYeon : But that is a really easy sentence. HongYeon : For me, it was so difficult. SungYeon : It doesn't impress me at all.

HongYeon : It doesn't impress me at all. SungYeon : I appreciate what you have done. HongYeon : Not at all. SungYeon : With a serious face, they want an impression just to some degree. HongYeon : I want an impression that reaches to exceeded degree.

HonhYeon : Hello? SungYeon : Hello? HongYeon : How are you? SungYeon : Fine, And You? HongYeon : I spare no pain.

I used to tell my son : Be full of your zest, and be ambitious. Once I was an ardent young man. I thought I would be able to disregard 'Relative Poverty'. So I went into the town of genius. But I could not stand a week in there. Now I cannot use language due to the shock I got from there. And I could not step outside my house. My mother sympathized with me and my father showed an anger to me. At that time, I was full of my zest. I went outside with redoubled courage. I mingled with the homeless. Then I could feel 'Relative Superiority'. But slowly I was becoming an homeless person myself, then I could not feel relative superiority anymore. I visited an orphanage and old people's asylum and finally a new-born babies' room. And I could feel relative superiority again. But it didn't satisfy me as I was full of my zest at that time. I came home and scratched my tongue with a piece of paper. I wanted to make a ridiculous creature with a tougue-cell and a nail-cell. I went to the man-next-door and begged for a doggie's cell and chick's cell. I made a few success with my strong youthfulness and felt a few cases of excessive relative superiority. But soon I was no more than them, and could not feel superiority anymore. Now I live with ants all over my house. I don't have youthfullness anymore and I don't have any zest to long for the superiority. And I don't have any son to whom I said 'Be full of your zest, and be ambitious.' I did not have to stand for a week and I have not got shocked. I have not been mingled with the homeless and have not longed for superiority. I have not scratched my toungue and have not begged for cells. Of course, I don't exist. I was created. Then, who on earth wrote down this long long lines?

111 Crocodile : My pants have second-layer and it is full of feathers. I took off the pants and there are delicious crust of cookies around the pants. The pants are folded up in a wrong way. Crocodile bird : Long time no see, duke of Crocodile. Crocodile : Oh, here is the tiring bird again. (Whispers) Crocodile bird : What did you have for meal today? Crocodile : Ha ha ha, I didn't eat anything today. Come again next time. Crocodile bird : Okay, see you later. Bye.

Princess : The crocodile lives in a ditch outside the castle. Today I met the crocodile bird and heard a lot about the crocodile. In his ditch, he calls a corner that never gets sun his bedroom. I heard it was so beautiful as the moss grows in abundance, and sometimes the flowermushrooms raise themselves. Of course, the crocodile lives on the grass. He likes to go to the rabbit's mountain for fun, but the mountain is dangerous for him as the rabbits loves to kill and eat crocodile. The crocodile likes to decorate himself with caulieflowers on his head and the moss on his back. He dreads the rabbits most of all, and his parents started crawling to the other side of ditch even before he had been born. Besides, He had tiny boils in his feet. He shed tears often. The crocodile himself confessed that the crocodile's tears mean the faith, If you want to meet the crocodile, then pull out some moss around his ditch and eat them. The moss is not good for you, however, as the crocodile has hearty appetite, he will rush up to you as soon as he find it. Then, he may ask a question : 'You are not a rabbit, are you?'...... The crocodile is doubtful, so you must answer 'I am the rabbit' if you really want to meet him.

Crocodile : Yesterday I saw someone grazing my mosses. I crawled toward the moss and I saw a princess in a beautiful dress grazing my mosses one at a time. I let her go on, as she did not eat up much, and turned back to my bedroom. And then my eyeballs like a bell started to ring. Realizing the fact I did not want to see her and turned back, with tears stand in her eyes, she kept grazing more intently. …… I felt a sense of urgency, and asked, "You are not a rabbit, are you?" then the princess replied. "I am the rabbit" I knew the rabbit doesn't have such a faint voice like the princess' but anyway I greeted her delightfully. Her eyes were shining. I don't have much to say about her. She had a beautiful dress and ordinary smile. She was chatty and she easily fell asleep. She loved the chest of the crocodile. She was timid as a rabbit, she was a good singer. She had a regular set of teeth, She had a pair of rather small eyes and she smiles often. I held her up tight.

I am a mole who likes the sound of breathing. The product of ages of the alligator and the princess is not greater than my age. I am very old. I had been here in my den even before the castle was built. I and my offsprings were driven away from the castle, and now we are living in a broad and comfortable ditch which has been artificially made by someone out there. The author let me be here as to make you expect me a lot of information. You will expect, and I won't satisfy. The mole never appears in this text again.

Child 1 : Yesterday was my birthday. So my mom gave me oxygen for gift. I panted it blue as my elder brother would rob mine.

112 Child 2 : Yesterday was my birthday. So my mom gave me oxygen for gift. I panted it purple as my yonger brother would rob mine. Child 1 : Hey, look at it. This is blue. Child 2 : Hey, look at it. This is purple. Child 1 : Oh, oh. you'd better have another color-blindness test, maybe. I feel sorry about your illness. Child 2 : What? I shouted, pushing and pulling my brother's hairs. Child 1 : Mom, Mom! I cried for mom and cried. Mom : What are you doing, those guys in full vigor! Stopping the quarrel between Child 1 and Child 2, I said. Child 2 : Mom. I was severely insulted by this child. As I am older than him, I could not but do this because I felt almost a heartbreaking sorrow imagining how many hurts would he get when he go out to society with this impoliteness. Mom : I did not say anything and I just stared at them with a calm look. Child 1 : Mother, I did not insult Child 2. Now I think it is the point that we should have think about what is the reason that raised this problem. I explained the basic cause of this quarrel to my mom. Mom : They are not blue nor purple already. You did not keep them in a right way and they are mixed up already. Aren't they? Child 3 : I suddenly appeared and ate oxygen up and turned it into carbon dioxide.

Actor 1 : This man is already dead. Actor 2 : I can't believe that, that he is dead. Hey, hey, get up. please. shaking his body, and crying, I said. Actor 3 : I will keep the silence.

SungYeon : [Actor 1 : This man is already dead. / Actor 2 : I can't believe that, that he is dead. Hey, hey, get up. please. shaking his body, and crying, I said. / Actor 3 : I will keep the silence.] / I asked ChongHee. What will Actor 3 say?

ChongHee: Just say nothing. SungYeon: I made him say : I will keep the silence. ChongHee: Just say nothing. SungYeon: But it leaves something when he says nothing. ChongHee: Does it? Then make him draw a breath. SungYeon: Breath! ChongHee: A long long Breath. SungYeon: That's it.

Actor 1 : This man is already dead. Actor 2 : I can't believe that, that he is dead. Hey, hey, get up. please. shaking his body, and crying, I said. Actor 3 : I drew a long breath.

113 Actor 4 : I played a role of dead man. As I was a good actor, I tried to be a good dead body. I didn't breathe. It was painful. But I am a good actor. I must show an absolutely dramatic performance. It is my pride and my everything. So I did not breathe and soon had a fit and fell down. Actor 1 : This man is already dead. Forget him. He thought of Actor 2 until the last moment of his life. Forget him and stop mourning. Dry your tear, Actor 2. You have to face with the reality that Actor 4 is dead. Please accept the reality. Actor 2 : I did not stop to shake Actor 4's body. Crying. Actor 1 : Patting Actor 2 on the shoulder, I soothed him. Hey, Actor 2, It won't bring Actor 4 back. This dead body won't wake up again. As Actor 4 is a good actor. Actor 2 : Would it make a difference if I caress him? Still crying, I said. Actor 1 : No. he won't be awake. I have never seen such a good actor like him. Actor 2 : Okay, Now I will caress him. I said, rubbing his sole with a hair. Oops! I said with a suprising voice. I said, making my lips round. Oops! He seems to be really dead. Actor 1 : He can be. He was really a good actor. Let's report to the 911 at once.

Hello, Nice to meet you. I dropped by, from the hope of get a meal if look it at. Have a nice day.

How many people does your party consist?

Aren't you the kidnapper?

Would you be accompanied by me?

Where are we going?

Don't touch me by my ankle.

I will walk on my delicious life.

I witnessed you on the scene of the crime.

Don't run away.

Yesterday, I loved you. Today, I don't.

I like the sound of an organ. Once I fell in love with the sound of an organ…Don't ask me about it. It hurts when I try to recall the memory. The sound of an organ and I…It's really hard to say. Sorry. And you.

The rain is just a drop of water. How hard I lick him, It is not sweet, It is not hot, either.

I tell Mr. Jukebox the Fantastic:

I was crazy and the crazy raindrops kept falling and falling and it melt me down so I turned to nothing more than a few drops of water. If I press my chest hard, t is hard to breath, and If a shout hard, it is hard to live. I was crazy and so were you. When you look up the sky, you said : 'The sky is covered with raindrops' You were seized with

114 fear. Sorry, I am so sorry. I was really crazy and the crazy snowflakes fell down and messed the whole world up.

SungYeon : When I was young, I was impressed by the sentence of 'Hello' printed in the textbook. HongYeon : I appreciate of what you have done. SungYeon : You're welcome. HongYeon : My mom urged me to write "Hello" again and again. And every time I wrote "Herro", she hit me twice. One hit for the miswriting of R instead L, and another for the missing out of question mark. I wasn't used to question marks and quotation marks or exclamation marks at that time. And at that time I really liked the bi(R)ds.

Princess : It is said that there is a long staircase on the mountain. So long that reachs to the sky. However, It is said that when go up the long flight of the stair, one's desire to fly grows up and up and he cannot help but jump down. It is said that there are small organs hovering and playing sad love songs in the sky. It is said that there is a dwarf who mimics all the words he heard backwards. And it is said that he murmurs 'My feet are two my hands are two my tongue is one' when he is alone. It is said that you can feel the rust breeze when you jump down from the last step. And it is said that the dwarf tries to make a conversation with a person who jumps down and do away with his fear. Of course, it's wouldn't be more than just mimicking his words backwards. It is said that when you are on the last stair which touches the sky, the angelworms which are smaller than the shoes make a circle around you and the organs start to play a tragic love song behind you. (And it is said that the lyric of the song goes : It never rains here, It is so cold here, It never rains here, It never get deserted, the place where the breathes are stop, where the life is full, where you have to laugh all the time…) It is said that at the end of the song, the angelworms started to climb up on you like climbing the most tough mountain. And it is said that the man on the stair started to laugh and laugh and when he is not able to stand the delight anymore he starts to cry.

One thing that left is the sound

One thing that left is the corpse.

Run straight and you will see a huge castle. When you go inside, you would be served with delicious meal. Smile. They would give one more piece of bread. Don't ask them for the food left. Don't

As they will shout and they will turn over the corpse.

Run straight and you will see a huge castle. Run more and you'll see a barrow of rabbit and if you run more, you'll see a crocodile's ditch. The rabbit is so small that crocodile never devour. But the rabbit is afraid of the crocodile. There aren't any mountain. The mountain is flat. The rabbit is afraid of the crocodile.

Don't ask them for the food left. As they will be about to cry. They will blame you. Don't ask them for the food left. They wouldn't be able to say a word. They would already be a corpse. Don't shout. If you shout if you shout it will rain, Though it rain the ground wouldn't get wet.

115 Rabbit : There lives a princess in the castle and I have met her once. Her footprint is fragrant. Her sleepy eyes are about to close. She has a habbit of placing her hand on her back or on her stomach.

Long ago, long long ago, I have met someone lived in the castle. Just once. Sometimes I wondered if it had happened just in my dream.

Rabbit : Inside the castle it's always noisy. With the sound of clinking glasses, sound of villainous string instruments, sound of men's boasting laugh…. Under the mountain

Under the mountain, there runs underground water which has a refreshing sound of strings. Over the mountain, there runs a river which is unexplainable. Beside the river there are unexplainable trees and unexplainable flowers, And in the river there are unexplainable pebble and earthworm and the larval dragonfly. Seldom, Seldom I

Flower-Deer : I lost my words. I have nothing to say more. I have flower prints over my body. My horns are the shape of flower. I can't run fast but I can walk faster. My foot is the shape of flower. My hometown has lots of flowers in the spring. The human children who can't stand hunger

Flower-Deer : I lost my words. Old deers loses their flower prints. The horns turn into a wicked shape. Deers has a dream which he wants it to be real disregarding the danger to burn his skin up, but when he gets old the dream becomes just a poor memory. It's a rule of getting old. When get old, they can't stand hunger and eat children up. They throw them in a pan and cook. It's a rule of getting old. When get old, their mouth become round and it says disdainfully 'Ho-Ho-Ho-Ho'. The wrinkle are becoming wicked and the flower prints disappears. And they are dare to say : 'Life goes on and you will see', 'Count the grasses I 'Experience is the mother of wisdom.'

Sometimes I do cud-chewing. Especially the day I overeat. I have poor memory and cannot remember what I've eaten. When cud-chewing, things that go against are things that are not completely digested. Especially when I didn't chew up a ladybug stick to grasses, a perfect body of ladybug goes up. And if the ladybug twists its body, I am seized with fear. Covering my ear with my hands, I shout and threw up the bug. But when I realize that it is nothing but a ladybug, I pick it up again and chew it all up.

This is my first visit to this place. This is my twelfth visit to this place.

When my father is drunk, his way of making footprints becomes different. And he drops his neck, sings unfamiliar songs and grates his teeth. When he gets drunk, his appetite gets hearty. I can't stand seeing him munching. He had been forbore his hunger for oranges for fear of being diabetic, but one day he got drunk again and began to munch oranges. I could not tell apart,. whether he was eating orange or was eating his tongue. munching, munching.

HongYeon : I learned Korean in the middle school. In my korean textbook there were sentences like 'An-nyung', 'An-nyung-ha-se-yo' and they couldn't give me impression. Of course, I couldn't get impression from 'Jal-Ga'. Neither from 'Na-jung-e-boa'.

116 SungYeon : I learned French in the highschool. In my french textbook there were sentences like 'Bonjour', 'Enchante' and they couldn't give me impression. Of course, I couldn't get impression from 'Au revoir', either. HongYeon : When my father came home, I greet him : Hello? Good bye. But one day my father said 'An-Nyung'. I got an impression. Yes, a great impression! SungYeon : You are good mannered. Nice to meet you.

I have been here for lots of times. This place is familiar to me.

Tramped to meet the Text. I saw prostitutes beckoning. Now I can recollect every hands of the prostitutes.

The prostitute on a red apron had a blue-painted nails and she got a small crack on her little finger. I remember the hand which was waving the blue cardigan. It was wicked one, so if she would not hide it, I might feel nausea when having sex with her. On the way. Although it was not a way for me, was just a clammy desert, I had to keep tramping and tramping to meet the Text. I could recollect my mom, and I could recollect my dad's gloomy face. I wanted to go back. I did not want to go back. Until I meet the Text...

Tramped to meet the Text. I tried to make another idea. I tried to make another attempt. A strawberry fell down from an apple tree. I swallowed it and felt the taste of an apple. Was that likewise a pear tree? I had to mortify myself as I felt a strong taste of sour apple. 'Why should I go to see the Text? Why doesn't it came to see me?'

Tramped to meet the Text. I could hear a sound. Darting my tongue in and out, I heard the tiny little scraps of the sound. I wetted my tongue to get enough of the sound. My teeth were cold. It began to rain. When the raindrops fell on the tree, the tree fell down to earth. I said : Spiritless trees doesn't have the right to be alive. Then the rain stopped. The rain bowed to the tree. Showing his cowardice, the tree ran away. Look, I was tramping to meet the Text.

I took of my shoes, took of my socks, took of my skin. And I looked down the exhausted skin of mine. Well, well, I was a fool to took of the skin... I hustled to put on the socks, but, well, well, I was a fool to put on the socks before I put on the skin... I hustled to put on the shoes, and, well, well, I was a fool to put on the shoes before I put of the skin... But it was such an irksome work and I threw my sole skin to squirrels and kept tramping. I had to meet the Text.

Hello, How are you? Are you the text himself? No. I am his grandfather. Then, when can I see him? The text left and never to return. Well, well, then I should also leave far away, never to return. Right, You have to leave for somewhere far away. The text made me tell a lie to make you leave for somewhere far away.

Yesterday I stripped someone's face off and put it on my foot. How gracious it is, that my shoes do not have to feel pain anymore. Tramped to meet the Text. Crept to meet the Text. Tumbled to meet the Text. Twisted to meet the Text.

A wounded mirror come to me and said:

117 "It's you. I used to show yourself, as I am honest." I was terrified and threw him away and broke him to pieces. But the broken one looked better than the wounded one. So I made a gentle smile and refreshed, and tramped to meet the Text.

Hello, dear squirrel? would you guide me to the Text, please? Well, well, you are the bad guy threw me a dirty sole skin! Well, well, did you throw that away? Well, well, don't tell me you just threw it away! Well, well, it was too good to throw away, so I gave that to the flying squirrel. Well, well, I hate the flying squirrel! Well, well, the flying squirrels are delicious.

Hello, dear flying squirrel, would you please guide me to the Text, please? No way!

Tremped to meet the Text. On the way I could see the bronze image of prostitude, a prostitude hiding her blue underwear inside her pocket. I sat down on the head of the bronze. I could see so many bronze statues as I was looking down from high above. Bronze grave, bronze grave, bronze grave… Hello, Nice to meet you. I didn't come here to see the graves. You are solid, aren't you? So gorgeous, so delicious… In a bliking of an eye, I ate all the bronze graves up. It gave me a power. I think now I would be able to run to the Text. Then the flying squirrel hovered around and spit the teeth on me. This unpleasantness could be compared to which I felt when I was having lunch with a dish made of my teeth. I couldn't stand it. I ran. Faster than the flying squirrel. The flying squirrel flew. I ran faster, not being myself. The flying squirrel couldn't beat me, as I am full of the bronze graves. The Flying squirrel's eyes got bigger. It is from the fear caused by me, I guessed. The eyes exploded. It stopped to fly and shrieked. Without teeth! Poor flying squirrel… I spanked the flying squirrel. It didn't even cry. Then I realized that I was so angry. The bronze graves were completely digested. I looked around and seized by the feeling of self-torment. The hands with blue nails and the hands wrapped in a blue cardigan were waving in the air. I was back at the very point where are started to tremp to meet the Text. I just went into the room of prostitude. And Surprisingly, I found out the Text. Ah… Now I see, This juvenile story is an advertising page of the prostitute quarter. Come to this prostitute quarter. You'll find out everything you wanted to meet!

This place is full of life. People are panting everyday. All the people here always share greet in joy. They call each other in a loud voice. They live, with their eyes wide open. They love each other. They runs so quickly. They greet each other so quickly. They greet so loudly and quickly. When come across a welcome guest, they run quickly and hug him tight. They shed quickly. They greet 'Long time no see, are you okay?' so quickly. They say 'See you' and exchange each other's address to contact quickly and begin to run up and down quickly. People are panting everyday.

I have been here. I have been here for the seventh time.

118 I have been here for several times. You hurt me.

Princess : There lives a rabbit outside the castle. I have touched the rabbit once.

Lutus in a crap's eye : I was sitting in my literature teacher whom I felt my first love is Lutus in a crap's eye : When I saw her family picture I felt 'Cien anos de soledad'...... SungYeon : Don't cry Lutus in a crap's eye : And I went to wash my orange juice cup SungYeon : Oh...... Lutus in a crap's eye : I felt acid taste of orange SungYeon : Oh...... Lutus in a crap's eye : On my way home I could still feel the taste SungYeon : Oh......

The crocodile shouts when he runs, and numbers of his legs are increased. He expands his tongue like lizards and coils himself with it. On the back of the crocodile the acute burs grows up, and sometimes they pierce through his tongue. Then the crocodile can run no more, and the rabbit passing by starts to eat his severed tongue. The severed tongue still moves for some time after separated. So the rabbit misjudge that it must be a prey. In the meantime, the crocodile would be crawling farther and farther.

I am a footprint of Crocodile, and I am printed on a mud mixed with angel's tears. I am formed with tiny and wild particles. This kind of footprints are born when the crocodile is chased by the rabbit. Because the place where the trace of claws has to be is empty…

It seems the flower is going to bloom

It seems the flower is blooming

It seems the flower blooms

It seems the flower is going to fade

I made a grave for the flower. I brought a fist-shaped coffin. I brought a fist-sized grain of sand and made his grave with the shape of fist. When Spring comes, every knuckle of the finger-shape grave gives out a red-colored sound. The flower made a grave for me. He buried my fist with his heart. He brought some petals and covered my grave with a shape of flower. When spring comes, I will hold up my fist again and catch the red sound.

Don't open the door to anyone but me. To take good look at the fist and see if it has pollen, is the best way to recognize whether it is me or not. Tenderly, I said.

There lives a bone of writer in the basement of the castle. When the bone still had flash, he wrote a beautiful story of love. A love that is so beautiful that one would shed tears just holding hand in hand. He made up a beautiful story of love. Everyday he touched the paper. Everyday he touched the ink. Slowly he forgot that he was just making up a story. He was deep into the love story. Deep into the beautiful love story between a princess and a beggar. He gave a charming hair to the princess. Gave her a dress that is suitable to everyone. An aromatic lips and the ears that is so beautiful that one can want to bite them. He wrote the eyes that are deep like a pond. Cute feet and Cute shoes.

119 He gave an awkward beggar and the princess pure heart only designed for the beggar. There lived a writer in the basement of the castle. Slowly he was into his own story. He soon forgot that he was just making up a story. He nursed jealousy against the beggar. The princess was so beautiful that no one would deny to love her. He killed the beggar. He wanted to love the princess. Then He realized himself in a basement. He saw the pen held in his right hand. He was keeping papers down with his left hand. He afflicted. He knew there wasn't any princess. There lives a bone of writer in the basement of the castle. I am writing now. This story is a fiction which I just made up. I am sorrowful now.

Bury me in a basement room of a mountain, a mountain which is so hight that no one can look down the see from the top. So that I could tell my friend of the next world, that I have the greatest grave in the world, with a boastful look.

I never have seen such a chatterbox like you

A train which has numberless legs like a sort of Myriapoda whirls around the castle. There are people inside. They are having lunch. This is lunchtime. The castle isn't that grace. It has nothing gorgeous to see. The people are shouting : 'Now we are not hungry at all. We want to see a new castle." But the train is designed to just whirl and whirl around the castle. I am not sad. I told them about the town behind the town. There is a great centipede. It has numberless legs and it eats men up. What it likes best are baldheaded old men without a wig. I said it blinking my eyes. In fact, I like baldheaded old men too. … Of course, I don't eat men up. The centipede wears a hat which is the same size of its face. It sleeps easily. I have met the centipede just once and I held it tight. It has many cutting hairs on its chest and they passed through my heart. But I just held it more tightly. He shed tears and cried. My heart cried too. I said taking off my shirts and showing the bruise I have : They have been here for 15 times.

I had loved you long ago, right?

You

You have met me long ago, right?

I have a very big mouth, right? have you ever loved me? I mean, long ago, long long ago. Right. I said brushing by her face. Bringing back my old memories, I held her hand. Her hand soon slipped out of mine like a caterpillar. Hello. I can remember you. I can remember the loving memories of you. That are all I have. You are the Rabbit. I can remember your breast down. I, I can remember you out of lots of lines, of lots of, confusing, unrefined scenes. I have loved you long ago. I am unrefined. I said brushing by her face. I said following after her hand.

There was a baby among the crowd. I like tasting the babies. The old they get, The tasteless they are. I went to the baby and took off its candy. I licked it up and gave back to the baby. The baby swirling dissappeared into the ground.

Go straight and you'll see a corner. Go up. There won't be a ladder. Go up for so long time and you won't be able to know going up from going down. Then, just call me. I won't be there to help you. Good bye.

The mountain over there is one of those buildings that had been built when I was 19, but it was destroyed yesterday as it rained heavily yesterday : Name 1

120 Now I can say that it looks more like a flat field : Name 1 I was sleeping and millions of people came in at the same time. I started to have sex with millions of people : Name 1 I don't like sex : Name 1 You are a vomit : Name 1 I feel like vomiting at you : The mountain over there is one of those buildings that had been built when I was 19, but it was destroyed yesterday as it rained heavily yesterday.

In a room of green wallpapers, I was bent. I thought it was a little strange, and I saw a rectangular-shape of gray outline. I went to it and asked : Is it the door? I asked knocking the green wallpapers. Is it the door? I was surrounded by the wall of green wallpapers. I was bent and asked the gray outline. The gray outline was twisting like a caterpillar and reflecting echos. Striking my chest, I shouted : Is it the door? I was craved. And I was bent severely. And bent. I was crumpled. I said with a pitiful face.

I brought a long shelf. I placed a green parrot and light green puppy and emerald chicken. I started to play music by hitting their heads : Re-Do-Do-La-Do-La

And all of the above sentences were THE LINES PRESENTED. And this sentence plays a role of the boundary line.

All things presented above happened at the same time. For those who do not have a splendid memory, I will make mention on the things stated-above. (Scenes presented, Characteristics presented, Sounds presented, Things presented that act or don't act, Main subjects of the language presented, Sentences presented, etc.,) Everything happened at the same time. You should take the sentence which says 'Happened at the same time' Seriously. No sequence, No time. This is a really serious sentence. And the title of this part is: TIMELESS AGE.

121

A short bio :

My name is Sungyon, Hong, and Ak-Uh is my pen name. I am a twenty years old boy in Korea. I am in the Peking university preparatory course and will enroll in June next year.

About Experimental poems

I am interested in intellectual inventions at powerful imagination rather than linguistic aesthetics of poems. I don't think that the beutiful flow of texts at linguistic level is the unique mean to poets. Composition at idea level is also an important axe of poem. That is the reason why peoply say that mathematics is also an poem of formal language. I want to find a suitable combination of idea and word.

The below are some examples that I was trying to solve when I decided to be a poet.

1 Writing continuous texts( removing the discreteness of literatures)

2 Theoretical construction of new sensory organ and new arts that can be enjoyed through that organ 3Poem and Music in a high dimensional time space

122 Randy Prunty

Flat Spots

Happy Hounds Kennel and Fine Art Barn

Whistlestop Bail Bond and Gift Shoppe

Gunderson’s B n B and Video Rental

I Buy Houses and Surgi-Center

Jeff Burke, Arborist and Emissions Testing

Corporate Executive Park and Homeless Habitat

County Line Massage and Bible Outlet

Sweets R Us and Boiled Peanuts Too

Greatland Dentistry and Tool Rental

Colonel Berg’s Security Services and Beanery

Mountain Valley Gym and Taxi Service

Bertalanfy Courier and Sudz

The Mattress Warehouse and Marina

Nick’s Knife & Scissor Sharpening and Wedding Photos

AA Pre-Owned Auto Expo and Adult Day Care

Two Brothers Computer Solutions and Balloon Rides

Twin Lakes Vacuum Repair and Taxidermy

J.W.’s Copy Shop and Stump Removal

123 Miss Margaret’s School of Ballet and Exotic Pets

Sunshine Adult Kiosk and Travel Agency

Smarty’s Wrecker and Child Care

Juanita’s Catfish Shack and Memorial Gardens

Big Bob’s ‘Touchless‘ Car Wash and Recording Studio

Fidelity Credit Union and Dog Shampoo

Ewert & Sons Plumbing and Tanning Salon

Hometown Florist and Old Fashioned Tattoo

Lazy Pig BBQ and Spa

PeeDad’s House of Prayer and Free Dirt

Thrifty Drugs and Corn Dogs

Kristi’s House of Beauty and Bait Shop

Blairsville One-Stop Gun Shop and Financial Services

McNelloms’ Tire Kingdom and Bakery

Rug Mart and [Coming Soon]

Wide Shoe Warehouse and Salad Bar

McMinnville Camper Tops and Silk Screen

Upstate Satellite Dish and Boots Bazaar

Mauldin Chamber of Commerce and Topiarium

Valu Biscuit and Quilts-a-Million

MyracleEar and Heli-Pad

Breakfast Works and Upholstery Shed

Shiny RV and Sod-a-Lot

124 Sky’s the Limit Flooring and Saloon

Xtreme Waffle and Youth Hostel

Last Chance Cigarettes and Kiddie Kastle

Paradise Lingerie and Sans-a-Belt Barn

Raper’s Flowers and Jellies

Exit 29 Pottery and English as a Second Language Classes

Daddy’s Family Restaurant and Mommy’s Extra Specials

U Call I Haul and Scenic Overlook

Custom Radon Testing and Free Kittens (and Ferrets)

Ten Commandments CAr Was and Ceremonial Swords

It’s All Good Recycling and Allgood’s Event Hall

Alexanderville Typewriter Repair and Pager Srvc

Love Wig and Golden Horseshoe Galleria

Marta’s Beanie Babies and Scrapbooking Supply

Crotty’s Ditch Witch and Any Flag

Home Sweet Home Recliners and Flite School

Midtown Hobby and HotWings

Paula’s Piano and Limestone College Alumni Center Polk County Chapter

Jasper’s Christmas Store and Cable Installation

Swimming Pool Showroom and Natural Healers

Barry’s Bush Hogging and Pet Med

Frick’s Wedding Chapel and Kiddy Klub

Badcock Drill & Pump and DAR Museum

125 Cool Corner Shaved Ice and Turnip Festival Kiosk

Sav-a-Buc Gutter and Surveillance

All-Safe Climbing Park and Crane Rental

YardMax and The Garage Store

Western Apparel Barn and Every Other Fri Gospel Sing

Teach Them Right Scholastics and Heritage Tutoring

Intown Fish-n-Fun and Chainsaw Superstore

Ringold DUI School and Mr. Big Volume Limo Service

Go-Lazer Hair Removal and Future Home of Duffy’s

Blessed Day Thrift Shop and Naomi’s Notions

Digby & Digby Tank Cleaning and Digby & Digby Hay

Hog Hut and Choppers

The Paternity Clinic and Trophies by Champ

North Tupelo Honey and Boy Scout Camp

The South’s Largest Terrarium and Arachnid Store

McEachern Dredging and Decorative Outhouses & Cupolas

Acworth Tack-n-Feed and MulePro Obedience School

Noodle Nosh and Koi Rental

The Paint Bucket and U-Betcha Propane

Women & Children FirstCare and Can-Do Counseling

The Dixie Company and Gord’s Odor Control

SureSeal O Ring & Gasket and Hospital Shuttle

L&C Headquarters and OmniServ

126 NeverStop Catering and Mrs. Plumber, Inc.

Affordable Salvage and Varmint Removal

Big Oompah Muzik and Holiday Hattery

Timber For Life and Hot Tubs To You

Eternity Self Storage and Portable Pods

Race Fan-Tasy Shop and Outdoor Grill Equipment

Medical Wholesalers and Electric Beds

Cavender Creek Sand & Topsoil and Diamond Cleaning Service

PurePewter Fixture and ShurFlush Porcelain

Things For Love-n-Grudge and Onus's Glamour Shots

AAAAA Sanitation and Website Design

Plush-Plush Furniture and Appalachian Caving Tours

American Rubber and Blemish Outlet

Chen's Karate and Biergarten

House of House and Tri-State Doll Emporium

3rd Shift Tot Care and All Nerf Enclave

Justice N Such Attorneys at Law and The Merry Accountant

Tuck’s Pizza n Gas and The Pink Weasel

Things for Everyone Including You and My Favorite Rims

Mama Hambone's Kuntry Kookin and Jocasta's Molasses

The Crafty Broad and Totally Big

Break of Dawn Dawgy Diner and The Tootin Toddler Train Shop

Sheri's Poultices and Makeovers

127 Scream Town and Buy Me Balloons

The Lonely Camper Store and Fixings

A Bigger Hammer and Kyle’s Place

Able Mabel’s Tables and Patio Wicker

Make Me Do It Adventure Supplies and The Chore Store

Home or Away Uniforms and Kreative Koaching

Lazlo's Cruelty-free Jewelry and Magic Shop

Mr. Onario's Globes and Phast-Photo

Fop's Batting Cage and Croquet

Vegas Meats and The Dirty Bird Lounge

Mr. Used and Oh No Pawn Shop

Knick Knack Patty Whack and Two-Dollar Doo Dads

Good Dog Invisible Fencing and Lawn Irrigation

The Crock Pot and Life’s a Picnic Boutique

Pugmire Alpine Slide and Clean Rest Rooms

The Redneck Store and Dent Doctor

The Honking Jesus and Plasma Den

Mashburn’s Nu Video and GWTW Accents

Spawn Fertility Center and Bingo

No Mountain High Enough Outfitters and Walnuts of Dalton

We Cut Grass and The Mulch Man

The Caffeinated Lapidarian and Ice Carvings by Von Dijk

Simply Suthern Fireworks and GoKart Showroom

128 The Bunker Store and Survivalist Library

Chalmers’ Blacksmith and Scooter Store

Nine Lives Blood Bank and Essential Oils

Shiggle’s Pneumatics and EZ Up

Doc’s Pain Relief Center and Metamucil Warehouse

His Exteriors and Her Interiors

World Comics and Cacti Imports

Clutter Time and Pot Luck Pottery

Romancing the Plow and Mushroom Goodness

Major Maid and Closet Rescue

Cedar Hearts Rehab House and Putt Putt with Purpose

The Proper Trollop and Huh? Productions

Euro Eye Candy and Consumer Biome

Ur Retreat Center and Black Hole Sensorium

Wisteria Mystery Dinner Theatre and Just A Bar

OrthoFlex and Senior Watersport

Clinging Booger Lounge and Checks Cashed

RealStrong Protection Services and Geeks On Call

Nighty-Night Bookstore and Emergent Learner Arena

Scientists For Hire and Endocrine Boosters

Sweeney’s Roadside Flea and Firewood (Pineless)

Zoë Haney Colon Clinic and Artesian Sluice Arts

Skink Creek Drive Thru and 2 For A Dollar Socks

129 ManureAbility and The Shinola Shop

Airport Pedicure and Long Term Parking

MicroBurgers Grill and Finicky Foods To Go

Spurley’s Showcase and Kute Kuts

Oink N Moo Diner and The Salt Shaker

Dothan Bragg, Auction Man and Square Dance Caller

Tsu’s Dead Chikens You Eat and Tsu’s Live Eggs

Fondue on the River and Jackpots

Digital Fingers Chiropractic and Real Smoothies

The Luddite Lounge and Anti-Internet Reading Room

Diet By God and Loving Force Pilates

Buncombe Mountain Cabins and Zen Amenities

Bev’s Beverages and Avon Avenue

Hoyt’s Stand Alone Carports and Banjo Lessons

SiteFinders and Property Liquidators

Turnkey Wilderness Trips and Spousal Guides

Stop Scratching Hypnotherapy and Smoke Stoppers

Gaffney Blind & Shade and The Ruffle Room

Make Do Yourself and The Barter Store

Media Marvels and The Barney Fife Collection

Dillardville Fire/Rescue and The Safety Store

Grandma’s Attractions and Genuine Doilies

SoyTech and Future Greens

130 R. Jurkovic Cisterns and Rodeo Rob’s Birthday Rental

Chestatee Cove Jet Ski and Yuppies-At-The-Lake Cheesecake Cafe

Gaia Farms and Love Is A Verb Community

Common Scents and Moss Magic

Say Ahh SwabStiks and Peachtree City Oral Health

ProSysCo and ProCoSys

Lower Bills Laboratory and Fur For Men

Bird, Bat, & Butterfly and See Rock City Weathervanes

Pete’s Cabinetry and Whittling Lessons

No Job Too Whatever and Will Work For Money

Trust Me Diving and Live-Aboard Sailing

WaterPhobe Basement Waterproofing and Roof Waterproofing

Look It! and WiFi It!

24/7 Onion Rings and Notary

New & Used Golf Gifts and Applause Direct

PowerPlaques and The Ren & Stimpy Foundation

Rappin R Ranch and Teach A Teen To Gee Haw

Family Reunion Key Chains and Pink Plastic, Inc

This Lousy T-Shirt Company and The Victorious American Tourist

Yonder Hollow Slag & Shale and Midwifery Almanacs

The Mortgage Zoo and Itchless Insulation Installation

The Knoll Group and GPS Club

One Stop Stop-n-Shop and Brain-Based Game Room

131 Baby’s First Things and We Bronze Everything

The Legroom Institute and Alternative Fuel Teepee

The Grape Escape and Mugs N Hugs

Wee Sing Kiddie Khoir and Sunny Day Lofts

Hahira Columns and Feng Shui Chandeliers

Mountjoy's Liquid Lunches and Footlong Breakfasts

Beattie’s Ford Rd Tortillas and Culottes

Terrell County Pea Gravel and Polo

Lights over Lilburn and The Romantic Period

Cuthbert Barber Shop and Lake Monangahangana Relics

Eufala Doorknobs and Curios

1 800 GET RICH and Life Yachts

Retro-FX and Freaknik Supplies

We Buy Ugly Blouses and Associated Costume

Tao Jones Construction and Demolition

Bandana Unlimited and Fruit Shooters

S-Type Mating and Organic Sparks

Lipschitz's Cosmetics and 4U2NV

Captain Jack’s Eye Ear Nose & Throat and Sleep Aids

Dupree’s School of Mortuary and Planetarium

Knock Knock Custom Pet Doors and Who’s There Chimes

Salmon Patty’s and Upstream Ice Cream

Funweiser's Button Barn and Useless Kitsch

132 Concept 21 and Vine-Ripened U-PICK

Smokey’s Motel and Tobacconist

Suburban Stanchions and Moats

Scheppin’s Emu Tenders and Free-Range Fowl Farm

Intelli-Potti and House of Crib

IIII VisionCare and Lanyards Oh Yeah

Linoleum One and The Newel Nook

Widdle Ones Gymboree and Sam I Am Action Figures

Nanna’s No Gluten Cakes and Sassafras Muffins

Shop Shop Shop and Just Buy It

Tofu Wing and The Water Store

Amen Acres and Pause-N-Pray Picnic Area

Walter “Bud” Walters, Chimney Sweep and 3rd Generation Master Spackler

Angel Kisses Pet Grooming and Puppy Nappies

Tad’s Pin Stripes and Fridge Magnets

Delta Citronella and Bog Togs

Titan Toll Booths and Can’t Miss Coin Catchers

Sweet Sound Muffler and Personalized Car Horns

Budget Distribution and Super Duper Drive Thru

Crystal’s Crystals and SETI Lounge

Deals on Wheels and Trucks For Bucks

Infection Protection and Hypoallergenic Togas

Lingerfelter’s Lodge and Gristle Bar

133 Yes But No Statistical and Patsy Trump-Hogg, CPA

Just Lamps and Etc

Randy, a Bio is the easiest thing in the world to write. You can include things like your course work at GSU, the school you work at, where and what you coach, your cycling, your love for the arts, your writings and publishing or venues you recited at and of course your foot fetish. [you forgot to mention: I’m part of the Atlanta Poets Group.]

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