::: A Taste of Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum: 04.03.09 :::

Fell On Black Days by Jimmy Ovadia, one of our mad swirling resident artists in the Mad Gallery)

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth / There is no happiness like mine / I have been eating poetry" Mark Strand

Happy National Poetry Month! Welcome to a weekly taste of the Mad Swirl Poetry Forum. We have collected poetry from the maddest poets from the maddest corners of the world and have showcased them here in the Forum just for you. The Poetry Forum is in flux, living and breathing, evolving and changing constantly...so please come and come often for the latest additions and submissions!

The Coil of Tesla

I bet if I say you can’t leave
You won’t even ask why
You will just succumb to a module
Inside a box that was perforated
Long before you were ever born

Tesla proved out a lot of things
That subordinates refuse to provide proof of today
No academics in fields so specialized
They forgot to crush the rust
Of a symbiosis soul not confined
Looking into the hole of another dimension
Where the wind settles for a feather to fold into

Seeing very clearly!
More clearly then we will see
Come the next one hundred eighteen years

Sleeping while conducting experiments
Elaborate precision cellular molecules bend
Wake up and wonder about liver spirituality
Every other person must be experiencing something similar
In some form of fusion melting into a river of liquid silver

Never fall foot inline outside the wonder of any moment
Never be deceived
Don’t ever call yourself the message of salvation
Even if you know you are
Even if you have saved yourself

They will spend large sums of money
Keeping a truthful man from running his mouth
Especially if he opts to give his reward back to humanity
Never even considers counting change
Knowing beyond reason that is being locked in the cage
They want to understand that
They just can’t understand that!
And they vehemently get venomous
It’s the nature of the coiling snake

No! god’s men do not like concepts
Don’t like theories
No! not god’s men

Everything broken needs a fix with a fee affixed to it
It’s never over with them trudging off to the bank
Withdrawing a sum total of nothing but the weight of the paper
Or a long stream of one’s and zero’s
All for them
Nothing for you

You could be saving yourself
But you spend your time caught up in yourself
The coil of Tesla is uncoiling now
All you have to do is get free and you will see
What he saw every minute of every day
You could be living Utopia

- Glen Still

(1 poem added 04.03.09)

Poetry

What is it?

Who composes it?

Undoubtedly
someone
or a cadre
craft words,
rhythms,
rhymes,
allowing us
and forcing
me
to reconsider the images
beyond the text
the graphic
and interpret
the dark from the light
the evil from the good
the mundane to the sublime
whether it is written in old style feathered pens
or scrawled in blunted pencils
on the pink padded walls of the asylum?

Days, weeks, or years later
their insane raving
or common sense notions
eventually hit me
right between the eyes
because
I
seldom hear
the sudden impact
of the chords of a fruitful melody
that once were scrambled egg thoughts
transcribed into parsed emotions
left for dead on filthy bus stop benches
by the bards of our times,
the ones in each of our
hearts.

- Joseph D. DiLella

(3 poems added 04.02.09)

Carapace

Skittering across the kitchen floor;
a Kafka dream come true.
Was it something I’d said,
or something I’d done
in a sordid past life
to be rudely made one
of the hated majority
of carapaced vermin?

I had become
just a bug on the wall
a brown spot,
un-noticed
who sees more of humans
than any would care to know;
the careless fumblings
and drunken rumblings
of two lost souls
tumbling
across a roach slept bed.

Secrets I’ve been told
when I had been so bold
to venture near breath holes
of unrepentant sinners
never bothering with confessions.
Never knowing that I
was their cardinal listener
antennae glistening
with dust from their dinners.

I remember being told
once in another life
when exo was worn
inside vibrant skin;
“Be kind to all living things.”
Murdering one would bring
swift retribution
a final solution
of heel against fragile head;
waking in Armageddon
to find all the world
was dead.

And I, the last, lone survivor
punished for things I’d said;
never the one to dread,
now a believer.

- Rose Morales

(3 poems added 04.01.09)

REFLECTIONS ON TIME

What is time? I asked a beggar:
It’s the change of sun and moon, he said.
What is time? I asked a gentleman:
It’s the change of fortune, he said.
What is time? I asked a writer:
It’s the change of thoughts he said.
What is time? I asked a philosopher:
And received some mumbo jumbo instead.

Then I asked myself: what is time?
There is time by the span of existence.
There is time by the measure of distance.
There is time by the watch and by the sun.
There is time according to the fancies of one.

I asked myself: is there any other time?
And as I lay thinking, on a flat bedded rock,
I realized that time is not just by the clock.
I saw the threads of time woven through a thousand
Yesterdays, and moving towards the many tomorrows.

I felt time, and saw the linear progressive movement,
As memory, as hope, as becoming, as self improvement.
Putting aside all abstractions, and the ideas of surreal,
I looked around at facts and let the fallacies reveal.
The inward time I saw, the constantly turning wheel -
The continuity from yesterday to tomorrow I could feel.

I had got it at last - the truth that none could steal.
For many an hour I had been sitting lost in thought,
This I realized suddenly, as I glanced at my watch,
Finally, I had overcome that in which I had been caught.
I looked at the sky and saw that the moon had come up,
Picking up my jacket, I walked away from my lonely spot.

- Ashutosh Ghildiyal

(1 poem added 03.31.09)

Home Alterations

You hear anything
in the woods
right beyond that fence?

No, but the dog is barking
in the direction of the field.
That dominant bark,
sounding like a million coffee grinders going on at once.

There are purple lights slicing through blue clouds in our blue sky.
It is autumn and everyone gathers outside for the light show.
Alive as everything is dying

This afternoon I buried myself in the woods
and black snakes slid through
developing spider webs between
my fingers.

I heard the crushing bruise of silence
sting underground and then make way
for a million jazz horns; a racket of freight trains
disturbing my own private lot of dirt.

and Mom’s dog is digging another hole

- Adam Chesler

(3 poems added 03.30.09)

Tea With Reza

Little glasses warmed by steam
Posing ballerinas pirouetting in silver holders
Glassy eyes too from steaming tears in
Tea-colored eyes
The kettle whistled Reza said, like
The train whizzing past his little
Iranian township that sang
Khoshbakhtam, khoshbakhtam!
Where poplars grew tall, very tall
Reza’s arms ceramic and
Bent bow-like from his time in jail
In a dark cell where he wasn’t given
Books to read or
Newspapers but just lashes and blows
Now and then for reading Marx
At the university
His tealeaf eyelids brimming up
With that memory…
He handed us glasses on silver holders
Held them tender, candles during prayer
The Revolution was not for my
Heart and soul, Reza cried
O my dear comrades, O my friends…
I came to be with you for freedom
And manifestos and democracy
Talks showering morning’s calm
On poplars I loved, my friends loved
Friends who were lost and gone
For singing The Internationale
Their arms bent too, cracked ceramic
Backs scarred, resting in unknown graves
Sometimes letters from prison came
Once a year, till they stopped, mentioning
The smell of tea freshly brewed
Just like this, verses of aroma
Coiling over us during our tea
With Reza one nineties evening…
He still waits in exile.

- Nabina Das

(3 poems added 03.29.09)

God Told Me to Tell You to Cut Your Hair

(for a friend who suffers from sexual compulsivity)

God told me to tell you to go get a haircut.
And he brandished a flaming syllogism:

Long hair is a sign of defiance.
Long hair is a sign of androgyny.
Long hair is a sign of childhood.

Samson had long hair,
but he was proud and he lost it
and had to go from pillar to post to reclaim it.

Jesus had long hair
And you’re not him.

Your sign is the promise of the Leatherneck.
Get a Marine-cut, down to the nub.

Signal subtly to everyone who meets you
that you are a different guy from this moment.
No longer windblown and endlessly complex
but simple as black stubble on your scalp.

Then, be that guy. In three and a half weeks,
go get another haircut.
Don’t let it grow back ever again.

If people ask you, sneer and say,
‘I'm on a holy mission from God.'
Every time you look in the mirror, think:

“I am a Marine. I do the dirty work.
I do what I'm told. I don't have a brain.
I have given everything away,
and I don’t ask for anything back.”

Shame is for sissies and you
Are a killer!

- Mike Finley

(added on 03.28.09)

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