::: A Taste of Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum 10.02.09 :::
“Though this be madness, yet there is method” William Shakespeare
Turmoil (above) by our featured artist Jon Marquette, one of over 20 resident artists displayed in Mad Swirl's Mad Gallery.
In case you missed it, here's is a listen to the poetic conversation in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum this week...
Ground Control
We glided in guided by floated I love yous posted there by a soon-to-be-passed-out angel who was feeling each heart beat with heated feelings to the core of her being...or at least until the drugs, ecstasy we suspected...stopped working.
We met our hosts who promptly asked us burning questions like, what's your burner name? and what's your burning game? and...and...it was all so weird and trippy and wacky until finally we got to feeling just fine as the hand-slapped ecstasy kind of kicked in. We rolled down the windows of our souls just to see if we could fit in with this crew of wacked out party people.
Androgynous men and glittered girls, fire-eaters and glowstick twirls, rolling thru the twighlight hours, clenched jaws, bugged-out eyes, just ain't so funny when time's flown by and look at that, it's 4:00 a.m. and the night is oh-so-old and everything we could have said has done been told, we got burned out on these wacked out party people.
We said good night and bid farewells, broken was their burning spells...the party favors had run their course and in it's place came dawn's remorse, we said (or did we?) we'd be back for more and made our way to the door. Thanks for having us in your steeple all you wacked out party people.
Gianni Sacco
(1 poem added 10.02.09)
I Got Me
Look at you.
Coming in, ever so gently while I sleep.
Look at you.
Profilin'.
Not at all realizin
that I know you're lyin.
Look at you.
Always wantin' to play when for you it's convenient
not knowin that I'm not here for your amusement.
When, still you lay
you probably say
that on me you'll impose your will
and send to me an evil chill.
You always creep in my head when I'm vulnerable and least expect it
telling me all kinds of lies, fibs, and bullshit.
Like "You can't do this." "You can't do that."
"Here's what you you need to do." "This is what you're good at."
"You're not smart enough to have an intellectual conversation,
since you don't have a high-brow, formal education."
I sought comfort in you but you weren't there.
I guess I shouldn't have put that expectation in the air.
When you said that you were tellin the truth and not lyin,
you did so as I was sufferin and cryin.
And the more people try and tell me what you mean,
the more I tell them "That's not what I've seen."
But I tell you this my dear:
I've been striped down to the core of my mangled soul
and swam by myself in the big fishbowl.
I've cried my last cry for you, so don't even try
to say that you can change in the blink of an eye.
I know who you are now
so you'd better let go.
I don't wantcha around anymore cause
you don't allow me to grow
I'm out. I'm open. I'm here.
and it's you whom I no longer fear
and to have true happiness,
I must cast you back into nothingness.
Sure, you can scream and make a scene
but I'm here to tell you that this mind is lean.
I take responsibility for my thoughts, words, deeds.
And for that I don't need to say a dogmatic creed.
I won't act as if you don't exist
because I know what I resists persists.
Instead, I'll look you in the eye and acknowledge your existence
and boldy tell you that you no longer have my allegience.
If you have a second before you go,
I'd like to tell you somethin' incredible
and hearing what you just heard
you might think improbable.
If it weren't you, I wouldn't have black, then I wouldn't have white
and the experiences of dark that give me light.
I'd like thank you for being in my life
cause if it weren't for you I wouldn't have the decades of strife.
I've come full circle now and got nothing left to say
except that we all make choices in life and in who we pay.
I no longer feel the need to repent
so I guess this it.
Don't ask who I'll lean on if I don't use you as a tree,
cause In the end you got you, and I got me.
Randal Scott
(added 10.01.09)
adorable grotesque
since having the best:
gears in ice...
traveling west
of a pavement night...
sleeping a ditch in the dew
shoveling buckets of you
into a light
across the border.
sampling pregnancy
awkward and kicking
through walls
into oceans
under stars.
Matthew Dickens
(added 09.30.09)
At Selam's
for TO
Might have been a jar
of butterflies the way
my heart fluttered
at the thought of saying
those three words. We were
in a club below U Street dancing
to Afro beats. You painted your face
with white dots along your nose
and forehead. All I knew of you then
could fit inside the head of a flame.
And I might have been a lantern
glowing with what I wanted to tell you.
But those words were lost
in the roll of your hips,
when you lifted your hem to the side
as if what pulsed from speakers
bared its horns before charging at us.
They were lost amongst silhouettes
knocked this way and that by the rhythm;
lost in a room of dumb bodies
the DJ jerked like a puppet master.
That night, you grinded my back side
into the brick wall, and took my tongue
the way a tsunami overtakes a small boat.
But I was haunted by worst case
scenarios – a needle scratching
the vinyl record, its waxy silence,
you pulling away.
Alan King
(added 09.29.09)
11
Words expire,
turn flat, crispless.
Compost remaining
letters, use them
to fertilize
new words, grow
a healthy concept
whose flowering
mouths thirst
for rain to impregnate
them with fruit.
Michael Constantine McConnell
(3 poems added 09.28.09)
THIS IS AMERICA
Where wheat meets oiled white skins
Rough rubber balls twang their metal counterparts
On pinball machines
Where stale rye is the musk of old women
Who singe fake blond hair, and miss caramel lips
But hit pearl front teeth, to make ‘em red
The squirrely kids get high under dripping sky
Smattering their empty heads with empty love
‘cuz they’ve got blue too much too often
(amidst tires chirping and stray-dog banter
in the stale frame of the family,
saluting the flaccid flag there at school)
A scribbled note lies on a post-it,
stapled three times
To a telephone pole:
The Kids these days have lost their way
though the old ones wish they were young
and America’s problem isn’t a problem at all
it’s a fact. THIS IS AMERICA
Somewhere in America:
A drunken hobo slips on a condom
Looks up and reads this
then chokes on his chewing tobacco
Dying successfully in the gutter
Next to three aborted babies wearing
diapers in RED, WHITE, AND BLUE—
Somewhere in America:
When I am out of the room
A nubile boy enters dropping his pants
To the floor and Googles boobs
He looks at the 10,000 dots of light
And shoots off his Beebee gun losing an eye
Ever since the Nubile Young Boy Act was passed
Nubile Young Boys could legally beat their meat
As long as they referred to it as
polishing a Beebee gun
Suddenly his mother enters the room
and smacks him with a Bible
snapping his Woody-thin neck
His dead body somersaults into the gutter like
A tumbleweed from a Western Movie settling
next to the hobo and the three aborted babies wearing
RED, WHITE and BLUE---
(somewhere along the line it is revealed that I am the writer to the first part of this poem. The snappy, overindulgent part at the beginning. I learn that there is no place for me or writing like mine. I crumple the first overindulgent part into a ball in tears, then realizing I am too prideful uncrumple it. I decide to burn myself at a funeral pyre and have the hope that my heavy words will be more popular in England. I send my ashes in a paper plane made of my folded poem over the LARGE OCEAN to Europe. A European man of mottled ancestry reluctantly catches my poem and ashes in the bristles of his large ambiguously European mustache, with a sigh he brushes sweat from the day’s milking from his brow, readying himself for another long day’s work. He bears my burden of misguided American words on his back like a tortoise, and climbs the tallest European mountain in his mountain village, passing nondescript mountain goats, wolves, and castles, until he reaches the summit. There he lays the work of a thousand American poets within a single BARBIE lunchbox. I await my final resting place tremulously, almost forgetting I am dead. The man looks up to the sky and remembers that he is in Europe, places my airplane in the box, then he pushes all that remains of me and my work and the work of so many American writers over the edge. He goes back to his mountain wife, remembers that he is in Europe and not America, smiles, and decides to never write anything ever.)
Adam Miller
(added 09.27.09)
On the inside looking out
Did you ever feel like you just dont really belong here on planet earth? Like there isn't even one other single soul who really understands you? So much stuff you got built up inside: regrets, guilt, confusion, questions, fears, desires...
Life certainly is the single most unpredictable thing. You think you know something. It's solid. Certain. In the bag. Then the next thing you know ~ in the blink of an eye: everything changes. Your whole world is rocked. All of your securities are now to be questioned. Your gut turns inside out. Your peace becomes turmoil. You ask: how did this happen? who is responsible? what do I do now? where do I go? to whom can I turn? And maybe just maybe...you secretly wanted it to happen. Maybe deep deep down it was there all along. Now its time for part 2:
The craziest part:
There are times now and then when you don't even know your own self. Times when you can't even predict what you're capable of. When you can't predict how you'll handle things that come your way.
When you wonder who am I anyhow?
Living life in this great big world. Existing to live, living to exist. Trying to help whenever there's a need. Trying to cope as you face each day. Wondering if the unknown holds secrets of great bliiss or trenches of sorrow. It's scary. It's fascinating. It's explosive. It's hard. And then...whether you stand alone or you stand in a crowd. It's you, its your thoughts, its your heart~
on the inside looking out.
Mary Fraser Pulli
(added 09.26.09)
The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come keeps on beginning... now... now... and now! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every every EVERY there is! Join in the poetic conversations going on in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum whenever the mood strikes. We'll leave a light on fer ya'.
Keep On Swirlin’ On!
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness” Christopher Morley
Hey DFW...Mad Swirl continues doing the poetic & musical open mic voodoo that what we do do on 10:07:09. Join us for a mad-gical night of magic and poetry featuring Merlin the Magical One. After Merlin blows our minds it's on to open mic madness as we gather together all ye mad ones to do what ye do! Click here for more information. Abra-mad-abra!
Turmoil (above) by our featured artist Jon Marquette, one of over 20 resident artists displayed in Mad Swirl's Mad Gallery.
In case you missed it, here's is a listen to the poetic conversation in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum this week...
Ground Control
We glided in guided by floated I love yous posted there by a soon-to-be-passed-out angel who was feeling each heart beat with heated feelings to the core of her being...or at least until the drugs, ecstasy we suspected...stopped working.
We met our hosts who promptly asked us burning questions like, what's your burner name? and what's your burning game? and...and...it was all so weird and trippy and wacky until finally we got to feeling just fine as the hand-slapped ecstasy kind of kicked in. We rolled down the windows of our souls just to see if we could fit in with this crew of wacked out party people.
Androgynous men and glittered girls, fire-eaters and glowstick twirls, rolling thru the twighlight hours, clenched jaws, bugged-out eyes, just ain't so funny when time's flown by and look at that, it's 4:00 a.m. and the night is oh-so-old and everything we could have said has done been told, we got burned out on these wacked out party people.
We said good night and bid farewells, broken was their burning spells...the party favors had run their course and in it's place came dawn's remorse, we said (or did we?) we'd be back for more and made our way to the door. Thanks for having us in your steeple all you wacked out party people.
Gianni Sacco
(1 poem added 10.02.09)
I Got Me
Look at you.
Coming in, ever so gently while I sleep.
Look at you.
Profilin'.
Not at all realizin
that I know you're lyin.
Look at you.
Always wantin' to play when for you it's convenient
not knowin that I'm not here for your amusement.
When, still you lay
you probably say
that on me you'll impose your will
and send to me an evil chill.
You always creep in my head when I'm vulnerable and least expect it
telling me all kinds of lies, fibs, and bullshit.
Like "You can't do this." "You can't do that."
"Here's what you you need to do." "This is what you're good at."
"You're not smart enough to have an intellectual conversation,
since you don't have a high-brow, formal education."
I sought comfort in you but you weren't there.
I guess I shouldn't have put that expectation in the air.
When you said that you were tellin the truth and not lyin,
you did so as I was sufferin and cryin.
And the more people try and tell me what you mean,
the more I tell them "That's not what I've seen."
But I tell you this my dear:
I've been striped down to the core of my mangled soul
and swam by myself in the big fishbowl.
I've cried my last cry for you, so don't even try
to say that you can change in the blink of an eye.
I know who you are now
so you'd better let go.
I don't wantcha around anymore cause
you don't allow me to grow
I'm out. I'm open. I'm here.
and it's you whom I no longer fear
and to have true happiness,
I must cast you back into nothingness.
Sure, you can scream and make a scene
but I'm here to tell you that this mind is lean.
I take responsibility for my thoughts, words, deeds.
And for that I don't need to say a dogmatic creed.
I won't act as if you don't exist
because I know what I resists persists.
Instead, I'll look you in the eye and acknowledge your existence
and boldy tell you that you no longer have my allegience.
If you have a second before you go,
I'd like to tell you somethin' incredible
and hearing what you just heard
you might think improbable.
If it weren't you, I wouldn't have black, then I wouldn't have white
and the experiences of dark that give me light.
I'd like thank you for being in my life
cause if it weren't for you I wouldn't have the decades of strife.
I've come full circle now and got nothing left to say
except that we all make choices in life and in who we pay.
I no longer feel the need to repent
so I guess this it.
Don't ask who I'll lean on if I don't use you as a tree,
cause In the end you got you, and I got me.
Randal Scott
(added 10.01.09)
adorable grotesque
since having the best:
gears in ice...
traveling west
of a pavement night...
sleeping a ditch in the dew
shoveling buckets of you
into a light
across the border.
sampling pregnancy
awkward and kicking
through walls
into oceans
under stars.
Matthew Dickens
(added 09.30.09)
At Selam's
for TO
Might have been a jar
of butterflies the way
my heart fluttered
at the thought of saying
those three words. We were
in a club below U Street dancing
to Afro beats. You painted your face
with white dots along your nose
and forehead. All I knew of you then
could fit inside the head of a flame.
And I might have been a lantern
glowing with what I wanted to tell you.
But those words were lost
in the roll of your hips,
when you lifted your hem to the side
as if what pulsed from speakers
bared its horns before charging at us.
They were lost amongst silhouettes
knocked this way and that by the rhythm;
lost in a room of dumb bodies
the DJ jerked like a puppet master.
That night, you grinded my back side
into the brick wall, and took my tongue
the way a tsunami overtakes a small boat.
But I was haunted by worst case
scenarios – a needle scratching
the vinyl record, its waxy silence,
you pulling away.
Alan King
(added 09.29.09)
11
Words expire,
turn flat, crispless.
Compost remaining
letters, use them
to fertilize
new words, grow
a healthy concept
whose flowering
mouths thirst
for rain to impregnate
them with fruit.
Michael Constantine McConnell
(3 poems added 09.28.09)
THIS IS AMERICA
Where wheat meets oiled white skins
Rough rubber balls twang their metal counterparts
On pinball machines
Where stale rye is the musk of old women
Who singe fake blond hair, and miss caramel lips
But hit pearl front teeth, to make ‘em red
The squirrely kids get high under dripping sky
Smattering their empty heads with empty love
‘cuz they’ve got blue too much too often
(amidst tires chirping and stray-dog banter
in the stale frame of the family,
saluting the flaccid flag there at school)
A scribbled note lies on a post-it,
stapled three times
To a telephone pole:
The Kids these days have lost their way
though the old ones wish they were young
and America’s problem isn’t a problem at all
it’s a fact. THIS IS AMERICA
Somewhere in America:
A drunken hobo slips on a condom
Looks up and reads this
then chokes on his chewing tobacco
Dying successfully in the gutter
Next to three aborted babies wearing
diapers in RED, WHITE, AND BLUE—
Somewhere in America:
When I am out of the room
A nubile boy enters dropping his pants
To the floor and Googles boobs
He looks at the 10,000 dots of light
And shoots off his Beebee gun losing an eye
Ever since the Nubile Young Boy Act was passed
Nubile Young Boys could legally beat their meat
As long as they referred to it as
polishing a Beebee gun
Suddenly his mother enters the room
and smacks him with a Bible
snapping his Woody-thin neck
His dead body somersaults into the gutter like
A tumbleweed from a Western Movie settling
next to the hobo and the three aborted babies wearing
RED, WHITE and BLUE---
(somewhere along the line it is revealed that I am the writer to the first part of this poem. The snappy, overindulgent part at the beginning. I learn that there is no place for me or writing like mine. I crumple the first overindulgent part into a ball in tears, then realizing I am too prideful uncrumple it. I decide to burn myself at a funeral pyre and have the hope that my heavy words will be more popular in England. I send my ashes in a paper plane made of my folded poem over the LARGE OCEAN to Europe. A European man of mottled ancestry reluctantly catches my poem and ashes in the bristles of his large ambiguously European mustache, with a sigh he brushes sweat from the day’s milking from his brow, readying himself for another long day’s work. He bears my burden of misguided American words on his back like a tortoise, and climbs the tallest European mountain in his mountain village, passing nondescript mountain goats, wolves, and castles, until he reaches the summit. There he lays the work of a thousand American poets within a single BARBIE lunchbox. I await my final resting place tremulously, almost forgetting I am dead. The man looks up to the sky and remembers that he is in Europe, places my airplane in the box, then he pushes all that remains of me and my work and the work of so many American writers over the edge. He goes back to his mountain wife, remembers that he is in Europe and not America, smiles, and decides to never write anything ever.)
Adam Miller
(added 09.27.09)
On the inside looking out
Did you ever feel like you just dont really belong here on planet earth? Like there isn't even one other single soul who really understands you? So much stuff you got built up inside: regrets, guilt, confusion, questions, fears, desires...
Life certainly is the single most unpredictable thing. You think you know something. It's solid. Certain. In the bag. Then the next thing you know ~ in the blink of an eye: everything changes. Your whole world is rocked. All of your securities are now to be questioned. Your gut turns inside out. Your peace becomes turmoil. You ask: how did this happen? who is responsible? what do I do now? where do I go? to whom can I turn? And maybe just maybe...you secretly wanted it to happen. Maybe deep deep down it was there all along. Now its time for part 2:
The craziest part:
There are times now and then when you don't even know your own self. Times when you can't even predict what you're capable of. When you can't predict how you'll handle things that come your way.
When you wonder who am I anyhow?
Living life in this great big world. Existing to live, living to exist. Trying to help whenever there's a need. Trying to cope as you face each day. Wondering if the unknown holds secrets of great bliiss or trenches of sorrow. It's scary. It's fascinating. It's explosive. It's hard. And then...whether you stand alone or you stand in a crowd. It's you, its your thoughts, its your heart~
on the inside looking out.
Mary Fraser Pulli
(added 09.26.09)
The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come keeps on beginning... now... now... and now! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every every EVERY there is! Join in the poetic conversations going on in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum whenever the mood strikes. We'll leave a light on fer ya'.
Keep On Swirlin’ On!
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness” Christopher Morley
Hey DFW...Mad Swirl continues doing the poetic & musical open mic voodoo that what we do do on 10:07:09. Join us for a mad-gical night of magic and poetry featuring Merlin the Magical One. After Merlin blows our minds it's on to open mic madness as we gather together all ye mad ones to do what ye do! Click here for more information. Abra-mad-abra!
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