The Best of Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum : 09.29.12

“So come and walk awhile with me and share / the twisting trails and wonderous worlds I've known. / But this bridge will only take you halfway there. / The last few steps you have to take alone.” Shel Silverstein

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This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we shared some naked and honest days. We bowed our heads, our gonad grasps toward our auspiciously ordained idol, our idyll; we posed our proclamation, our proscribed purvue, our refuge from fear; we indulged shameless avoidance with a Rite-Aid rebound; we wangled by wing, through water, a wound, brought and bound by the kiss of a knife; we constructed caterpillar condolences from unconsidered conversation; we briefly abided in "the abysmal dark of the dead moment" to determine the distance 'tween dawn and dying; lastly, gripping garrulous guts, we conspired to keep in that chancrous clamor, to quiet our querulous kidnapped confidence. Yes; naked and honest, therefore clothed and comforted. What a week! ~ mh

Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...

And the word inside gnawed Out

I sat down to write a poem
to all our most terrible things

One word came out One word alone
Like a cataract in blindness and deluge

and a poet who has nothing
Nothing left but clear and bad intentions

Snuffed out
in the blink of an attention span

And the word inside was
Failure

And the word inside gnawed
Out

- Paul Koniecki

(2 poems added 09.29.12)

editor's note: It is what comes out which defiles; write those words on flash paper. (Another great poem from Paul on his new poetry page; we dare you not to read it. Welcome Paul to our Contributing Poets.) - mh

Bone-Grindings

They must have sent me back out into the world,
waking from dreams within dreams
where the raindrops fall like glittering jewels.
For years, I maundered the Florida swamps
of silicone and jizz, with a Dunhill
tucked behind my ear. I used spit
for lubricant and lived on borrowed time
in barrooms populated by laconic nonentities
because I trusted only alcoholics
with aquiline noses and took to heart
the gravelly words of Californian junkies.
Mesmerized by the mauve stage lighting,
the centrifugal force of a spinning pole dancer,
dewdrops of sweat swelling on my brow,
she paused to say philosophically
“He did everything to make life miserable”
and resumed a perfunctory blowjob.
Those imponderable stars were nothing
but body glitter. Thus begin the slurred
lamentations for the unrecapturable past.
I congratulate myself on having endured the filth
like a pig. I will not apologize.

Like Gloucester, I was blind. Until my eyes
were blessed by the DEA’s pepper spray
in Pittsburgh where I staggered sidelong,
witnessing endless streetlamps, reflected
like holy fires burning on the broken
waters of an obsidian river,
and I contemplated the nature of drowning
until I walked windward with bloodied knuckles
to my apartment, my vomitorium,
the walls flaking like dead skin after sunburn.
I met a girl at an amusement park,
an abused redhead with genital warts.
She shot heroin as I sucked her toes.
Nodding off in a parked car in the South Side,
our pale faces adumbrated by the sickle
of the moon, we were vaguely aware of
the cobalt blue snow swirling all around us.
What did I expect to find
in those drowsing, drug-deadened eyes?
We roamed the wasteland forty thousand years
until hand in hand, we paused at the precipice
of an enormous crack in the sidewalk.
For weeks afterwards, I couldn’t come
and then I came like a fucking avalanche.
I never saw her again.

That summer the heat drove us to cannibalism,
and with crooked yellow teeth we tore
the flesh from the bones of the homeless.
My mother died. My father died.
The vultures gyred in the smoke-colored sky.
I ached with want as the sad churchgoing girls,
their faces smeared with graveyard earth,
wept fierce tears at the altar, falling
for the prestidigitation of a Catholic priest.
O Lord, my thoughts are not your thoughts.
Why me? And yet, why not me?
They found me starving, hysterical, naked
beneath the swaddle of a mildewed towel.
After this, I sauntered the corridors
of psych wards, no less stultifying
than the halls of academia.
They strapped me to a sterile hospital bed
where I pledged my allegiance to serial killers,
my intestines writhing like a nest of snakes,
and pleaded with the beatific nurses
for their intravenous succor, tortured
by the blood sacrifice of a broken home.
My gorge rises. Bwwwaagggghhhh…
“Anybody need some vomit?”

I had no misgivings about prayers,
so long as they were muttered into a toilet bowl.
Wasted to gristle and bone, a visionary
angel with hollow burned-out eyes,
an Argonaut in search of a loving God,
I returned home to attend 12-step meetings
and stared blankly with a broken lower lip.
“O Lord, make me sober,” I prayed, “but not yet.”
In an all-night diner I drank coffee,
and mulled over Kierkegaard’s leap
of faith and the Book of Job, but
in the abysmal dark of the dead moment
before dawn I learned nothing save this:
There is no one in this world worth dying for.

- Robert Bailey

(added 09.28.12)

editor's note: Add these grindings to your cortex compost to sprout beat flowers for your epic addiction. - mh

How to Go On
For Hank

As he tells us about how his son
died in front of him, I think about
the caterpillar my daughter left
in a bucket, in the sun, earlier today,
and listen to the wipers whoosh

against my conscience and the
windshield. Without consideration,
I say oh my god, I am so sorry
then have a sudden compulsion to
take back my response. Surely the
caterpillar won't survive and even

though the rain stopped, the wipers
still move back and forth in lieu
of conversation. Did you know
caterpillars are boneless, but have
over a thousand muscles? Oh god,
I am so sorry, so so sorry, I am.

- Rebecca Schumejda

(added 09.27.12)

editor's note: Rehearsed responses and mental distractions are how we go on. - mh

Making Marks

Having history
Feels like peeling a green apple
With a small knife
Carving tally marks into the pulpy flesh
The fruit drooling
Across cupped palm
Clear juice trickling to the elbow.

Now, I’m as vulnerable as
The robin, newly hatched
At the peak of a long spring
Begging uselessy for a worm
In an empty nest.
Living the infantile season,
I’m the only one who’s fallen
You've plucked the feathers
What useless, boomerang wings.

Now I'm as vulnerable as
A drowning child
Dancing reluctantly with the smooth tiled walls
The soft under current is strips of flowing cloth
That has circled my kicking feet.
Oxygen in my chest begging to be set off
Like a firecracker
Like an unsettled argument
In my mouth, behind my pebble teeth
Are directions to break the surface.

Now I’m as vulnerable as
An unsutured wound
Bring your lips close
On the back of your tongue
Can you taste apple?
One more time

Kiss me with your knife
And peel me back
To an unquestioning moment.
I'm frightened
Paralyzed by the sticky fruit.

- Sarah Velez

(added 09.26.12)

editor's note: As for many, so for one; an unavoidable history, penned from the peel of a purloined pomme. - mh

Coffee and Advil

you wake up
your head hurts
you think whose bed is this
and then it hits you

you dress awkwardly in the dark
pants – check – shirt – check
shoes – check – boxers and socks – gone

you cross your fingers
and pray she does not wake up
you tiptoe through the maze
like a lab rat and find your
reward through the back door

you squint in the morning light
and walk into a Rite-Aid
you find the Advil and exit
you have never been
so happy to see a Starbucks

you sit and drink your coffee and take
two Advil and you swear this is the last time
but you know that she is not coming
back – and rebound girls of all
shapes and sizes are your life now

- Mike Lafontaine

(added 09.25.12)

editor's note: Coffee to heighten awareness, Advil to dull the pain; adapting to the new routine. - mh

eastward
(excerpt from “a verbal collage”)

I turn eastward
to allow the radiance of the sun
to light my way.

And I allow the moon
to descend without grace
from Heaven’s warmth
and peaceful embrace.

My hopes have been liberated
from the chains that were made
to bind them.

And I bask in the knowledge
that I have been victorious
over all of the pain and suffering
that I have chosen to leave
far behind.

© November 2006

- Laura J. Minning

(added 09.24.12)

editor's note: Unchained hopes; freedom in all things. - mh

Dear Poetry

Dear Poetry,
I sacrificed myself for the art.
I came and then stayed.
Unwelcome, I give up myself to you.
For you look at me with paper thin eyes
Hoping to get more out of me.
A rhyme, a degree, to show.
I pushed aside my lengthy paragraphs
For short squares that are forced to impress.
Leaving you stunned by its immaculate taste.

Words alone aren’t enough.
All I need is a pen of somewhere.
And a surface that can stand
This blood shot, this gunshot of literature.
You tell me to stay traditional
Like a man saluting to a golden statue
Which he must obey because he has no will
And no power to fight against that force
That should be as a free sky but is a solid ground instead.
I will write whatever. You will judge whenever.
But whatever I give will be pure.
For this is what poetry is made of.

- Joshua Burton

(added 09.23.12)

editor's note: A pure sacrifice to a capricious god. Poetry consumes all offerings but judges "whenever." - mh

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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...

Walkin',

Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor