The Best of Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum : 11.24.12
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This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we snared a receding snake procession, the shuffle and slide o' death's dire dance; we probed beyond perfunctory punctuation to poetic perfection; we hailed from high heaven a venerated victim; we slogged a slew of vegetable stew, disguised in the wig of a poet's milieu; we severed the shanks of annual thanks to cover the core of giving; we lingered in liquored, post-holiday stupor, the quavering quiet before the storm; we wound it all up in consumerist shlup, the day after credit crunch norms. Xmas day approaches; spend away, spend away, spend away, all! ~ mh
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
The Anti-Social
A Mall Bench, Bitch
Stubbed toes from stared at cell phones, stitched struggling shoes,
a mixer of well-off wanderers and commoners off on Wednesday,
planning Black Friday blues, but not grandmothers wielding
baseball bats for canes to beat teenage girls like eggs to delights
in store: cotton confections--You know?
Frayed knot. A person is their shoes, their pace,
the smell of new shoes on old feet: wild grown nails,
telling themselves they're adorable in everything, including
a grave, including another line, tapping toes until another
coffee cup, standing how their husbands do at urinals.
This is what happens when one counts shoes, eight hundred pair,
journeying to stores like handless ships to fabric store shores.
Some clack, some shuffle, some struggle with high mileage strollers
towards chocolates or candied pee-cans, the bookstore, though,
is closed, making the mall as ridiculous as socks in flip-flops,
off-brand tapered jeans, truncated ankles, leading to expensive
stores with quick refund methods:
in minutes your money is back
in someone else's bank, but only after you're thanked in a
foreign dialect, elegant, but I hope they're regional rednecks from
a place that holds hands, prays thanks and that nothing changes.
- Tyler Malone
(1 poem added 11.24.12)
editor's note: The day after Thanksgiving we work off those calories by fueling the machine! It's good for the economy, good for the president-elect and good for the consumer price index. The day after that, we rest. World without end, amen! - mh
The Last Drop
Barroom misted Prussian blue,
toxic with smoke, substances
that are legal and those that are
not. Hate rock tunes on the juke,
full contact, no rules, Ultimate
Fighting machines on flat screen
TV’s, big money riding on the
outcome of the match between
body art model skinhead versus
the wild black man with dyed
purple/green Mohawked hair;
the kind of blood sport that leaves
splatters on the barroom wall,
barely visible on layered grime,
years of viscera, layered slime
already encrusted there. So densely
packed in here everyone is moving
standing still. Sweat stains the bar top
yellow and everyone is breathing
the same canned heat, released.
All the emergency doors are locked,
alarm bells muted as the ultimate
fight goes on. The room so tense
and tight, you wonder what will set
it off. You wonder when.
- Alan Catlin
(added 11.23.12)
editor's note: So far inside the blast radius, best to take it face-on and smiling! - mh
Steak Break
Joy is measured in calories, steam curls, dinner bells hollering
to bulls and dairy cows while snowmen remain in skies
as we see morning breathe out open mouth kisses, ready
for what comes out of open ovens. All are welcome, none are natives.
Before fences, we settled wherever hooves led, before we slept
for a time--dead for all time, supper to red stars, our herds grew large.
Don't be small, be big, gracefully, not as pointless as flightless
birds that won't escape my molars, or my thanks, that should
be as silent as suspicious children on mother's milk, in small chairs,
chewing small bites, devouring gratitude before salad and open legs
like open palms on both sides, thanking goodness in collected mass,
we bless messes, leftovers, what's missed when we close eyes
to graze near wolves.
Be kind to all kinds.
We're all dead meat after tomorrow.
- Tyler Malone
(3 poems added 11.22.12)
editor's note: "Thanks!", large or small, are based entirely upon our units of measure. Since it's better to eat than be eaten, eat kindly, all! Thanks to Mad Swirlers, everywhere. Happy Day! (Two more Thanksgiving yarns from Tyler on his page - we put them there to send you along on your tryptophan slumber, cuz they're good - check'em out!) - mh
Coiffure
I stand in the kitchen
stirring vegetables
for soup, imagining
I'm another person,
perhaps the hairdresser
there, in the corner
smoking between
hairdos, wondering
how the audible click
of scissors becomes
a poem if only in the head,
at least while red
potatoes, orange carrots
and naked leeks break
their firm texture and shape
into a thin, waxy moisture,
poured over the scalp.
- Francesca Castaño
(added 11.21.12)
editor's note: A potato, dreaming it is a hairdresser, dreaming she is a poet, slicing up words for soup. The ultimate scalp treatment. - mh
The Empyrean, Principality of Young Ages
Her hands are too small for
Reaching the typewriter return.
The toilet lever’s as impossible as
Those poker playing housewives
Winning twice; child of abuse, and
Alcohol’s strange moons,
She’s pure fire, that empyrean,
Principality of young ages.
- KJ Hannah Greenberg
(1 poem added 11.20.12)
editor's note: Inhabitants of the nose-bleed section, incapable of line feeds or flushes, expect we'll use our imaginations; if we really want to know. - mh
You're pretty
intelligent
from what I can tell.
You get words
so right
they write themselves.
The way you
get away
with meter,
it's murder.
Such structure.
You're really
adroit.
I don't want
you
misquoted.
Take my
temperature.
Your stanzas
get me weak
in the words.
You're very
astute.
Your vernacular
put me on
a stretcher.
Intercept message.
Your lexicon
ensorcells
my
blood pressure.
You're sweetest
w/ the timbre of
grammar. Your
alliteration quickens
my index.
The way you
reassemble
sentences. I receive
reinvented
sanguine.
You're especially
linguistic. The
way your
punctuation
waltzes.
It's your
forehead full
of contents
that really gets my
heart remixed.
- Craig Kurtz
(1 poem added 11.19.12)
editor's note: My lexicon of lustful linguistics is left in lassitude in the presence of her punctilious prowess. Poof! - mh
Early One Spring
A robin cooed – it meant that soon, I would
feel a church inside my wrist.
Another robin browsed among glow-worms
for Mr. Big Blue Sun had come on time
and mammals grazed and drank at old
streams looking like
angels remembering glory. Some
secret had been ambling toward us many days,
a stranger from the early 20th century with
bindle-stick and overalls,
shuffling feet, a chummy whistle modulating.
Men say death should be like that,
I can’t prove it isn’t. And at once I hear
a coulisse slide away like a part of my memory,
but our bed’s alive with rattlesnakes,
pythons, cobras, mambas and constrictors
slithering and sliding over one another in
a tangle of rustles and hisses.
the voice of Leonard Cohen keeping
them going while the sky’s top-secret
horse fills with rain.
- James Cushing
(added 11.18.12)
editor's note: The turns of seasons are barely noticed here in the herpetarium. It's a good thing Death can dance the shuffle to get our attention. - 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...
Unbridled,
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
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