The Best of Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum : 02.11.12
“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” Anaïs Nin
Persistence (above) by artist, Joseph A. Garrison, one of over 20 artists currently coloring the virtual walls in Mad Swirl's eclectic electronic collective Mad Gallery. We know you'll wanna see mo' fo' sho' so move that mad mouse of yo's right over here and a-way you'll GO!
•••••••••••
This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we pondered the possibility of paradise lost with a luscious lick of forbidden fruit; we couldn't crack code in a wren-swarmed god-borne message from on high; we sought safety for our psyches from psychos, a moral martial-art; we witnessed creation and destruction in a day, secured comfort in expectation of a calm dawn and a clean slate; we reposed in a room to recall how life is rife with rented reality, we don't own a damn thing; (we dropped a stitch - seven, to be precise; seven days, seven wild sways of the time warped continuum; then came up laughing); we ranted in self-realized portraiture, painted a picture from pieces of everything, looked like nothing we've ever seen; lastly, a bit lost and lonely, we learned to our amazement the safest defense is an open door. Throw away your keys! - mh
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
KEYLESS
I’m a keyless entry
Don’t you see?
No key can get to the
Heart of me.
No locks, no bolts, no chains or hooks
Keeping you from
The heart of me.
The open heart
Needs no key.
It’s safe
In its own
Simplicity.
- Denise Lumley
(1 poem added 02.11.12)
editor's note: No lock, no looting; free access eliminates crime. The love police will have to look elsewhere. - mh
A Self-Portrait
"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.” Franz Kafka
Hiding behind the curtains, the moons afar
are swimming over mercurochrome nostalgia;
crippled, lame walking over the sandy dunes of Sahara.
Are my tears the traitors of Russia?
Are my tears Iodine tablets suffocating in open air?
Sublimating no memory, but flames of dignity.
Do I count my nickels at your feet?
Do I gasp like a maroon athlete?
Do I howl at Winston Churchill’s “Black Dog”?
Do I catapult a lovely gaze at your open yard?
I am here with my arms, jumping over quicksand to re-tell
My Experiment With Truth
I am born an insect, chirpy crepuscular slithering over the edges of your lips,
distinct with a head, thorax and abdomen.
My Jewish nose can smell your schizophrenic beauty of psychic holocaust,
and it makes me furious as a neo-Tsar.
All right, I made a goddamn fuming gaze with no shillings on it.
I did try a Mona Lisa gaze!
Instead a gaze of a scarecrow.
So was I born, free of all emotions,
with a permanent gesture of Ku Klux Klan,
a Charlie Chaplin gimmick.
But truth is: I am born a baby with no smiles in his head.
A subliminal neophyte cooperating desperately,
standing at the exact corner where he should have been buried.
I am born scandalous,
All I have is Van Gogh's ear of delusions,
and hatchet of neural bedlam.
All the White Noises you snoop,
All the Black Chimneys you inhale,
All the faint wails you eavesdrop,
All the lab fumes you gape,
Are they surreal or a metaphor?
Let your razor-sharp retort go!
Now I look at my funny side,
An abstract acme with worms in it,
worms to be steamed and devoured with chopsticks.
Folks swallow them as sweet-bitter lousy talk in a city bar,
With the guns they slay for brotherhood,
They throw stones,
Paint their half-face black and sun-bathe on the equator.
Last time I found, blowing high up in the sky to be exploded
as a tear-gas capsule,
a Tupac Sakur song.
a dream from my mother.
a Crime and Punishment.
in-between have and have-not,
in-between war and peace,
in-between existence and memory,
Played like a sax,
Dropped like water,
Smoked like an Indian pipe,
Read like the bible,
An end like the beginning of an epic,
and a self-portrait of narrow escape,
About to crumble off seismic waves
like the Berlin Wall
like the crispy notes of Wall Street
Might be a chaotic butterfly flapping its wing
Might be a mannequin with her arms
A nothing self, surrendering to nothing absurd with nothing to win or lose,
A ramshackle poem of Sylvia Plath
A negativity of times, paramount of times and the nastiest of all times,
You name me the names:
A narrow escape,
A werewolf,
A mere euphemism,
Or a self-portrait of the emotional half of two legs.
- Nirmal Acharya
(added 02.10.12)
editor's note: This mirror is melting! My reflection looks like this poet, looks like you, looks like Wiley Coyote. Kafka would laugh if he didn't think it all so normal. - mh
RENTED ROOMS
I go home and I’m all alone
No one to greet me or tell me that they love me
My entire adult life has been like this
I spent all that time flitting from one room to another
And evidently they are all the same
Rented rooms
Acrid surfaces that haven’t been cleaned
Dirty carpets that are plain obscene
A lousy bed that I can’t get out of
An overloaded ashtray that says I haven’t got long
No space to feel at home
In rented rooms
Rented rooms are all the same
Whether you’re in New York, Frisco or even London town
They all seem designed for that lonely insecure man
Who has been driven slowly insane by the idea that he will never escape
A life in rented rooms
- Bradford Middleton
(1 poem added 02.02.12)
editor's note: I think my body is mine, owned outright; but one day the landlord will evict. Might as well let the ashtrays overflow. (Let's welcome Bradford to our crazy confab of Contributing Poets! See his other poems on his new page.) - mh
A PAD OF HIS OWN
Beneath the old pier, a hand scrapes
Wet sand into sketches, carving artistry from
Within him, pulling the crowd, who watch
Over the rail and throw into his bucket
Their coined applause. A metallic clap for this
Still life, culled from a husk of the sea.
A hulk of a man, never showing his face,
Bent over his work, he oscillates
From boot to boot. From hip to head,
A woolly thick knitted spine suddenly collects
Its wages and then with meticulous timing,
Vanishes, just before the ocean spawns;
A shifting glaze, through which
The artist’s visuals can still be observed.
His London Skyline becomes
The Underwater City, its muffled churches
Stifled by a pulsating angelus of waves.
The etched mane of horses and the wet fur
Of dogs, cats: these drown quietly
Under bubbling ripples.
And then surging from the deep, thick
Opaque slices, slabs obliterating
Each deliberate line. Mouths and deeply gouged
Eyes shut forever by the shapeless being
Lunging at the beach. Ordinarily incredible,
Hard to imagine, this liquid body being dragged
By its tail, thrown back in a heap.
Yet this is the way of it.
When the quiet industry of a beaten surf
Rolls out its shores of yesterday, as if...
As if there had never been, mistakes, fools
And foolish dreams, you could
Almost believe that this, then, is life:
A smooth unending slate – wiped clean.
- Derrick Gaskin
(2 poems added 02.01.12)
editor's note: Each day we start tabula rasa. The rising of the sun lights an empty page; yesterday's scrawl wiped clean by the waves. (See another one from Derrick on his page - it's a jungle out there.) - mh
Absent
The story of your life begins right now.
The components of this tale are missing.
Its characters got lost in the confusion of my style.
I await the perfect morning with a picture perfect sky
to start writing the story of my life.
I'm right here right now waiting for the temperature to go down.
Holding on to my dreams with nothing but insecure hopes.
Dried up tears from the day before remind me that love fades away
just like the beauty you hold in your youth.
Sarcastically I ask for your forgiveness and you accept my apology.
I disguise my hatred with impure pity.
I hold you close to my heart but very far from my soul.
I salute your lies and embrace the confidence you possess.
- Michelle Camacho
(added 01.31.12)
editor's note: Your life and this tale are at odds; yours started, this other arrested. It's a survival manual for dreamers in a totalitarian state; friends close, enemies closer. - mh
Birds
They all came from everywhere
A-flying high up through the air
They landed on my little tree
And whistled to the world we’re free
Never could I express with words
The sight I saw, a thousand birds
They flew into the parking lot
All landing there in a small plot
Then back into the sky again
A mighty cloud of flying wrens
Then around the yard they all took flight
And vanished mysteriously from sight
- Eileen McNeal
(added 01.30.12)
editor's note: The amorphous moving shapes they make are some kind of cosmic code; god talking to himself and laughing. - mh
Paradise Tasted
True partners-in-crime
Let’s take the honey and run!
Making Love rhyme all the time…
Coupled together with a tantric, hypnotic blaze
Tested in this fire, we certainly have been
So deserving of our wonderfully chaotic daze…
Never having a moment wasted
While sharing our wasted moments
A kiss from you is paradise tasted.
- Michael R. King
(1 poem added 01.29.12)
editor's note: Now, that's lip-smackin', soul-whackin' goodness. Think I'll take another bite. - mh
•••••••••••
The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come keeps on keepin' on... now... now... NOW! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade, every every EVERY there is! Wanna join in the poetic conversations going on in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum? Then stop by whenever the mood strikes! We'll be here...
Lovin' It,
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
Persistence (above) by artist, Joseph A. Garrison, one of over 20 artists currently coloring the virtual walls in Mad Swirl's eclectic electronic collective Mad Gallery. We know you'll wanna see mo' fo' sho' so move that mad mouse of yo's right over here and a-way you'll GO!
•••••••••••
This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we pondered the possibility of paradise lost with a luscious lick of forbidden fruit; we couldn't crack code in a wren-swarmed god-borne message from on high; we sought safety for our psyches from psychos, a moral martial-art; we witnessed creation and destruction in a day, secured comfort in expectation of a calm dawn and a clean slate; we reposed in a room to recall how life is rife with rented reality, we don't own a damn thing; (we dropped a stitch - seven, to be precise; seven days, seven wild sways of the time warped continuum; then came up laughing); we ranted in self-realized portraiture, painted a picture from pieces of everything, looked like nothing we've ever seen; lastly, a bit lost and lonely, we learned to our amazement the safest defense is an open door. Throw away your keys! - mh
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
KEYLESS
I’m a keyless entry
Don’t you see?
No key can get to the
Heart of me.
No locks, no bolts, no chains or hooks
Keeping you from
The heart of me.
The open heart
Needs no key.
It’s safe
In its own
Simplicity.
- Denise Lumley
(1 poem added 02.11.12)
editor's note: No lock, no looting; free access eliminates crime. The love police will have to look elsewhere. - mh
A Self-Portrait
"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.” Franz Kafka
Hiding behind the curtains, the moons afar
are swimming over mercurochrome nostalgia;
crippled, lame walking over the sandy dunes of Sahara.
Are my tears the traitors of Russia?
Are my tears Iodine tablets suffocating in open air?
Sublimating no memory, but flames of dignity.
Do I count my nickels at your feet?
Do I gasp like a maroon athlete?
Do I howl at Winston Churchill’s “Black Dog”?
Do I catapult a lovely gaze at your open yard?
I am here with my arms, jumping over quicksand to re-tell
My Experiment With Truth
I am born an insect, chirpy crepuscular slithering over the edges of your lips,
distinct with a head, thorax and abdomen.
My Jewish nose can smell your schizophrenic beauty of psychic holocaust,
and it makes me furious as a neo-Tsar.
All right, I made a goddamn fuming gaze with no shillings on it.
I did try a Mona Lisa gaze!
Instead a gaze of a scarecrow.
So was I born, free of all emotions,
with a permanent gesture of Ku Klux Klan,
a Charlie Chaplin gimmick.
But truth is: I am born a baby with no smiles in his head.
A subliminal neophyte cooperating desperately,
standing at the exact corner where he should have been buried.
I am born scandalous,
All I have is Van Gogh's ear of delusions,
and hatchet of neural bedlam.
All the White Noises you snoop,
All the Black Chimneys you inhale,
All the faint wails you eavesdrop,
All the lab fumes you gape,
Are they surreal or a metaphor?
Let your razor-sharp retort go!
Now I look at my funny side,
An abstract acme with worms in it,
worms to be steamed and devoured with chopsticks.
Folks swallow them as sweet-bitter lousy talk in a city bar,
With the guns they slay for brotherhood,
They throw stones,
Paint their half-face black and sun-bathe on the equator.
Last time I found, blowing high up in the sky to be exploded
as a tear-gas capsule,
a Tupac Sakur song.
a dream from my mother.
a Crime and Punishment.
in-between have and have-not,
in-between war and peace,
in-between existence and memory,
Played like a sax,
Dropped like water,
Smoked like an Indian pipe,
Read like the bible,
An end like the beginning of an epic,
and a self-portrait of narrow escape,
About to crumble off seismic waves
like the Berlin Wall
like the crispy notes of Wall Street
Might be a chaotic butterfly flapping its wing
Might be a mannequin with her arms
A nothing self, surrendering to nothing absurd with nothing to win or lose,
A ramshackle poem of Sylvia Plath
A negativity of times, paramount of times and the nastiest of all times,
You name me the names:
A narrow escape,
A werewolf,
A mere euphemism,
Or a self-portrait of the emotional half of two legs.
- Nirmal Acharya
(added 02.10.12)
editor's note: This mirror is melting! My reflection looks like this poet, looks like you, looks like Wiley Coyote. Kafka would laugh if he didn't think it all so normal. - mh
RENTED ROOMS
I go home and I’m all alone
No one to greet me or tell me that they love me
My entire adult life has been like this
I spent all that time flitting from one room to another
And evidently they are all the same
Rented rooms
Acrid surfaces that haven’t been cleaned
Dirty carpets that are plain obscene
A lousy bed that I can’t get out of
An overloaded ashtray that says I haven’t got long
No space to feel at home
In rented rooms
Rented rooms are all the same
Whether you’re in New York, Frisco or even London town
They all seem designed for that lonely insecure man
Who has been driven slowly insane by the idea that he will never escape
A life in rented rooms
- Bradford Middleton
(1 poem added 02.02.12)
editor's note: I think my body is mine, owned outright; but one day the landlord will evict. Might as well let the ashtrays overflow. (Let's welcome Bradford to our crazy confab of Contributing Poets! See his other poems on his new page.) - mh
A PAD OF HIS OWN
Beneath the old pier, a hand scrapes
Wet sand into sketches, carving artistry from
Within him, pulling the crowd, who watch
Over the rail and throw into his bucket
Their coined applause. A metallic clap for this
Still life, culled from a husk of the sea.
A hulk of a man, never showing his face,
Bent over his work, he oscillates
From boot to boot. From hip to head,
A woolly thick knitted spine suddenly collects
Its wages and then with meticulous timing,
Vanishes, just before the ocean spawns;
A shifting glaze, through which
The artist’s visuals can still be observed.
His London Skyline becomes
The Underwater City, its muffled churches
Stifled by a pulsating angelus of waves.
The etched mane of horses and the wet fur
Of dogs, cats: these drown quietly
Under bubbling ripples.
And then surging from the deep, thick
Opaque slices, slabs obliterating
Each deliberate line. Mouths and deeply gouged
Eyes shut forever by the shapeless being
Lunging at the beach. Ordinarily incredible,
Hard to imagine, this liquid body being dragged
By its tail, thrown back in a heap.
Yet this is the way of it.
When the quiet industry of a beaten surf
Rolls out its shores of yesterday, as if...
As if there had never been, mistakes, fools
And foolish dreams, you could
Almost believe that this, then, is life:
A smooth unending slate – wiped clean.
- Derrick Gaskin
(2 poems added 02.01.12)
editor's note: Each day we start tabula rasa. The rising of the sun lights an empty page; yesterday's scrawl wiped clean by the waves. (See another one from Derrick on his page - it's a jungle out there.) - mh
Absent
The story of your life begins right now.
The components of this tale are missing.
Its characters got lost in the confusion of my style.
I await the perfect morning with a picture perfect sky
to start writing the story of my life.
I'm right here right now waiting for the temperature to go down.
Holding on to my dreams with nothing but insecure hopes.
Dried up tears from the day before remind me that love fades away
just like the beauty you hold in your youth.
Sarcastically I ask for your forgiveness and you accept my apology.
I disguise my hatred with impure pity.
I hold you close to my heart but very far from my soul.
I salute your lies and embrace the confidence you possess.
- Michelle Camacho
(added 01.31.12)
editor's note: Your life and this tale are at odds; yours started, this other arrested. It's a survival manual for dreamers in a totalitarian state; friends close, enemies closer. - mh
Birds
They all came from everywhere
A-flying high up through the air
They landed on my little tree
And whistled to the world we’re free
Never could I express with words
The sight I saw, a thousand birds
They flew into the parking lot
All landing there in a small plot
Then back into the sky again
A mighty cloud of flying wrens
Then around the yard they all took flight
And vanished mysteriously from sight
- Eileen McNeal
(added 01.30.12)
editor's note: The amorphous moving shapes they make are some kind of cosmic code; god talking to himself and laughing. - mh
Paradise Tasted
True partners-in-crime
Let’s take the honey and run!
Making Love rhyme all the time…
Coupled together with a tantric, hypnotic blaze
Tested in this fire, we certainly have been
So deserving of our wonderfully chaotic daze…
Never having a moment wasted
While sharing our wasted moments
A kiss from you is paradise tasted.
- Michael R. King
(1 poem added 01.29.12)
editor's note: Now, that's lip-smackin', soul-whackin' goodness. Think I'll take another bite. - mh
•••••••••••
The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come keeps on keepin' on... now... now... NOW! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade, every every EVERY there is! Wanna join in the poetic conversations going on in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum? Then stop by whenever the mood strikes! We'll be here...
Lovin' It,
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
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