The Best of Mad Swirl : 11.16.13
"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else." Georgia O'Keeffe
••• The Mad Gallery •••
Another School Shooting (above) by this month's featured artist, Pd Lietz.
••• The Poetry Forum •••
This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we weighed words as weapons to find them wanting, wielded words of welcome, instead; we retold the biggest fish story ever heard, ambivalent prophet from a place beyond words; we endeavored to erase one dream, imprint another, unable to elevate o'er the monochrome drone; we did the dance macabre, a corpse among the whole, commingling with the mob in search of a glimmer of soul; we tried to take on tourist's trappings , new sights, novel places, couldn't find the app for that; we marched along with great aplomb through buzz of bee and drop of bomb; we slaughtered youth, sliced up hope, served starved regrets from memory's kitchen. Look back to learn, live like you mean it! ~ MH Clay
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
Vietnam #4
(for Tim Page)
There are long lines of sweaty men in olive drab
Moving through a low land forest
Hear the heartbeats, the minds drift away
Angry at girlfriends wiggling on some other boy’s lap
Thirsty for beers opened with church keys
Hungry for Grandmother’s favorite recipe
Sitting in memory’s kitchen eating
Slow light, bite by bite.
They are coming past me now
Detonation wires, helmets, holy boots
The click of wedding rings on M-16 stock
The bandages stark white
Now blood red like smoke grenades
Waving into the moment as the radio calls
The static of the radio, incoming rounds
The slogging in leech water
To come to this pulling of the trigger
The burnt gun powder refuse, flames
The song of the shell casings landing in a pile of little bells
The heart is out of control, the eyes are everywhere
The breath a blacksmith’s bellows
The movements of this chaos, the battlefield of man
Killing man killing man killing man
The long distance display of the portrait of the faces behind gun barrels
Lit up with fires, Michael Herr says,
"Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."
The mechanics of the clouds, the brown rivers, the land plowed by bombs
Coughing M-79 grenade launchers burp and burn the woods
They lob explosives into your life
Where brothers in arms carry you, feet dragging
Sips of water, blood wet bandages over your eyes
Over legs torn, mangled bits of a self
Faces point with fingers up the Glory Hill
Daggers of smoke
The soft sharp thud, a brutal helicopter
Auto-rotating in from the clouds
Some of these bodies
Will leave skeletons where they fall.
It is a rock’n’roll flash on a pole as women in pink dresses flash peace signs
And part their legs, soldiers dream of pussy waving before their eyes
The cooing choir of soft voices, what the women allow
Arms in the air, drunk for a moment with a cigarette
Nicotine stains gooey on the fingers, breathy fumes of hard alcohol and weed
Flip flops help dry the jungle rot,
Standing on a thousand crates of ammunition
Look down the street
In the air
The roar of the crash
And the suffering
The little yellow mother cradling emaciated crying
Children dusting the bodies with lime
Nuns wailing beyond praying
- Chris Zimmerly
(1 poem added 11.16.13)
editor's note: We send'em young with unlined faces; same chaos, different places. Then, we pray for them? (Thanks, Chris, for this real and reverent remembrance.) - mh
Marching in the Summer Sun
From Mount Sulphur to Mount Cyanide
we watched, we waited along the Rhine,
along that spine!
A bird, a bee, a bombing spree – above
below a swarm of doves
a herd of doe!
And where we've been is where we be
Hurray, Hurrah! So goes the patriotic
song.
And then the little ants went passing
right along.
We watched we waited, for them
to continue on,
in and out of order they marched
in that summer sun.
Then it rained, the damnedest thing
– the ants never stopped.
- Michael Atreides Lair
(1 poem added 11.15.13)
editor's note: Can't let weather deter progress or stop growth of the complex (mayhem is money). - mh
Electronic Man
Here we are in Boston the oldest most historic city
in the country bursting with unique art and architecture:
“Which way to the bar where they filmed Cheers?”
You can see the entire city from up here
a panoramic view everything from The State House
and Symphony Hall to Harvard and MIT:
“I need to take a picture of the airport with my iPhone.”
There is so much to see along the Freedom Trail
and in the Public Gardens and through Boston Common
the oldest city park in the country – statues lakes bridges
exotic plants street performers the Swan Boats:
“Hold on I can find some great tours on YouTube.”
The Aquarium divers are introducing some new species
and feeding 85-year old Myrtle the Turtle right in front of us:
“Oh look you can see it on the big screens along the wall.”
We can stroll along Hanover Street in the Italian North End
find a nice little place for a genuine Italian cappuccino:
“I’ll Google a place using my iPhone more efficient that way.”
Electronic Man knows it all won’t miss a thing
on this his first visit to Boston except for Boston itself.
- Michael Estabrook
(1 poem added 11.14.13)
editor's note: Our eyes, screens; our memories, recorded; our experiences, validated through playback. All now is meant for later... - mh
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE, I DANCE ALL NIGHT IN THE MAKE-BELIEVE BALLROOM
After the Apocalypse, I dance all night in the Make-Believe Ballroom. The vast dance floor is a swirling vortex of almonds, and as I spin around the Circle of Thanatos, I clutch my chimerical dance partners, gaze into their empty ebony eyes, and search for a glimmer of soul.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. I rock ‘n roll and do the Stroll in front of our black-and-white TV, whirling and swirling to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. I’m a kid again and free in the Make-Believe Ballroom until I see the grotesquerie.
Exotically hot and sizzling like Nathan’s french fries but cooling off in Coney Island waters, I become a cold corpse with a raw chilling rigor mortis, passing and slithering through merciless metamorphoses.
After the end, around the bend, I discover a baroque ballroom. I trudge across a seething threshold of deep snow and ice and enter.
Now, I peer through the thousand masks of my false self. “Hello,” I whisper as I whirl around Eternity. The susurrations of my real self murmur “Goodbye.”
After the Apocalypse, I dance all night in the Make-Believe Ballroom, caressing illusion, kissing Chimera, a nonbeing, swirling in nowhere, a once-upon-a-time genuine member of the species homo sapiens, transmogrified into a true-blue corpse, and perhaps, a meandering ghost sailing across Eternity’s dance floor searching for a glimmer of soul.
- Mel Waldman
(1 poem added 11.13.13)
editor's note: Apocalypse when? Could be always, if still looking for that glimmer and in your dancing shoes. - mh
stunned
your shoes are 8 track
recordings in rubberized tectonic plates
the stage, your destination
play that song like no one's listening
like the audience died waiting
for your message to erase their dreams
or perhaps NPR is your wavelength
and you're down with monochromatic drone noises
very well then, set your frequency to stun
and you will be
when the halogen nightmare creases your skull
and you can only muster a brown sigh
to offer the stragglers hanging on to
your useless soliloquy
- Rob Dyer
(added 11.12.13)
editor's note: It's all about bandwidth anymore; no need to have something to say. Keep it brown, brother. - mh
Jonah: After
Jonah doesn't follow me around.
There he is, under the bush.
He isn't sulking.
He isn't talking.
He sits.
Heat rises off him.
Hum and glow halo him.
You can approach, or you can go back,
It's all the same to Jonah.
Under the bush, eyes to the distance,
What he sees is not what you see,
Or maybe it is. Who can tell?
Jonah will not talk,
At least not to you.
Jonah is in a place
Beyond words.
Words must be found
When questions are asked,
But it is a long way back
From a place beyond words.
- Ann B-D
(2 poems added 11.11.13)
editor's note: What comes after provocation of a proud people to rampant repentance? A pale-pated, under-appreciated, pissed off prophet. No question... (To see what comes before, check out the extra poem on Ann's new page. We welcome her, with this submission, to our crazy conclave of Contributing Poets. Congrats, Ann!) - mh
Words
Words uttered
or inked, breathe, live,
long after their echoes die
or the page is turned.
Words slice,
deeper than a butcher’s knife,
prying open wounds healed
to fester in the searing heat.
Words atomize, when surmised,
implode to explode
like a Claymore mine,
strategically placed in ambush
at chest height.
Words ignite like dynamite
or stink till eternity
when like shit;
they are flung up
to hit the fan.
Words frozen,
numb the blood
kill the pulse.
Words gestured
in pantomime,
unmask and shock
long after
the Charade departs.
Words nurtured,
pregnant to be delivered
or words stifled,
aborted or stillborn,
snuff out hope
in the bud.
Words venomous,
shame the viper in their bite.
Words sting,
break skin like wasp’s stings
and the deeper ones hurt
akin to scorpion bites.
Words imprison,
manacle the victim,
down to the dungeons
of purgatory.
Words kill,
drop dead bird in flight,
when hurled as missiles.
Long after they are spilled,
words smudge, when fudged.
Words destruct,
when weaponized
and then there is
the Trojan horse
that surreptitiously breaks into defenses.
And then there are words,
words out of the world,
words that do not define,
words that do not confine.
Words like a child’s hug,
words like the kissing breeze,
without prejudice,
words that flow like a string-less kite,
Won’t you get me some of these,
When you come and see me?
- Shyam Shaurya Chakra
(added 11.10.13)
editor's note: Wisely chosen, warmly given; best received. Surest way to guarantee a happy, hostly plea of, "Come again, won't you? Please?" - mh
••• Short Stories •••
Need a read? Of course you do! Here's what Short Story Editor Tyler Malone has to say about this pick-of-the-week short story, "The Las Vegas Hangover Cure for a Poet" by Brenton Booth: "What's missing about most people? They don't know the taste of ink or blood. Poets know both." Here's a taste to tempt you...
(photo by Tyler Malone)
I was hungover and alone on a Thursday morning in a Las Vegas hotel room and decided to go to a cage fighting gym and do some training. I took a taxi to 4055 West Sunset Road. The gym was full of guys I’d been watching on pay per view and dodgy pirated DVDs.
I looked at the schedule and signed up for a grappling class. Truth is my wrestling is terrible, though my jiu jitsu is okay.
I was immediately paired with Peter, a nineteen year old from Denver that trained at this gym every day and wanted to get into the U.F.C. Shit, didn’t they know I was a thirty-one-year-old poet! I honestly hadn’t even trained properly since my jiu jitsu coach returned to Brazil two years earlier. And even without the hangover, I was way out of shape
You wanna keep readin'? Of course you wanna! Get the rest of your wanna on here!
•••••••
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 mad conversations going on in Mad Swirl's World? Then stop by whenever the mood strikes! We'll be here...
Lookin’ at it,
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
Tyler Malone
Short Story Editor
Madelyn Olson
Visual Editor
••• The Mad Gallery •••
Another School Shooting (above) by this month's featured artist, Pd Lietz.
••• The Poetry Forum •••
This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we weighed words as weapons to find them wanting, wielded words of welcome, instead; we retold the biggest fish story ever heard, ambivalent prophet from a place beyond words; we endeavored to erase one dream, imprint another, unable to elevate o'er the monochrome drone; we did the dance macabre, a corpse among the whole, commingling with the mob in search of a glimmer of soul; we tried to take on tourist's trappings , new sights, novel places, couldn't find the app for that; we marched along with great aplomb through buzz of bee and drop of bomb; we slaughtered youth, sliced up hope, served starved regrets from memory's kitchen. Look back to learn, live like you mean it! ~ MH Clay
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
Vietnam #4
(for Tim Page)
There are long lines of sweaty men in olive drab
Moving through a low land forest
Hear the heartbeats, the minds drift away
Angry at girlfriends wiggling on some other boy’s lap
Thirsty for beers opened with church keys
Hungry for Grandmother’s favorite recipe
Sitting in memory’s kitchen eating
Slow light, bite by bite.
They are coming past me now
Detonation wires, helmets, holy boots
The click of wedding rings on M-16 stock
The bandages stark white
Now blood red like smoke grenades
Waving into the moment as the radio calls
The static of the radio, incoming rounds
The slogging in leech water
To come to this pulling of the trigger
The burnt gun powder refuse, flames
The song of the shell casings landing in a pile of little bells
The heart is out of control, the eyes are everywhere
The breath a blacksmith’s bellows
The movements of this chaos, the battlefield of man
Killing man killing man killing man
The long distance display of the portrait of the faces behind gun barrels
Lit up with fires, Michael Herr says,
"Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods."
The mechanics of the clouds, the brown rivers, the land plowed by bombs
Coughing M-79 grenade launchers burp and burn the woods
They lob explosives into your life
Where brothers in arms carry you, feet dragging
Sips of water, blood wet bandages over your eyes
Over legs torn, mangled bits of a self
Faces point with fingers up the Glory Hill
Daggers of smoke
The soft sharp thud, a brutal helicopter
Auto-rotating in from the clouds
Some of these bodies
Will leave skeletons where they fall.
It is a rock’n’roll flash on a pole as women in pink dresses flash peace signs
And part their legs, soldiers dream of pussy waving before their eyes
The cooing choir of soft voices, what the women allow
Arms in the air, drunk for a moment with a cigarette
Nicotine stains gooey on the fingers, breathy fumes of hard alcohol and weed
Flip flops help dry the jungle rot,
Standing on a thousand crates of ammunition
Look down the street
In the air
The roar of the crash
And the suffering
The little yellow mother cradling emaciated crying
Children dusting the bodies with lime
Nuns wailing beyond praying
- Chris Zimmerly
(1 poem added 11.16.13)
editor's note: We send'em young with unlined faces; same chaos, different places. Then, we pray for them? (Thanks, Chris, for this real and reverent remembrance.) - mh
Marching in the Summer Sun
From Mount Sulphur to Mount Cyanide
we watched, we waited along the Rhine,
along that spine!
A bird, a bee, a bombing spree – above
below a swarm of doves
a herd of doe!
And where we've been is where we be
Hurray, Hurrah! So goes the patriotic
song.
And then the little ants went passing
right along.
We watched we waited, for them
to continue on,
in and out of order they marched
in that summer sun.
Then it rained, the damnedest thing
– the ants never stopped.
- Michael Atreides Lair
(1 poem added 11.15.13)
editor's note: Can't let weather deter progress or stop growth of the complex (mayhem is money). - mh
Electronic Man
Here we are in Boston the oldest most historic city
in the country bursting with unique art and architecture:
“Which way to the bar where they filmed Cheers?”
You can see the entire city from up here
a panoramic view everything from The State House
and Symphony Hall to Harvard and MIT:
“I need to take a picture of the airport with my iPhone.”
There is so much to see along the Freedom Trail
and in the Public Gardens and through Boston Common
the oldest city park in the country – statues lakes bridges
exotic plants street performers the Swan Boats:
“Hold on I can find some great tours on YouTube.”
The Aquarium divers are introducing some new species
and feeding 85-year old Myrtle the Turtle right in front of us:
“Oh look you can see it on the big screens along the wall.”
We can stroll along Hanover Street in the Italian North End
find a nice little place for a genuine Italian cappuccino:
“I’ll Google a place using my iPhone more efficient that way.”
Electronic Man knows it all won’t miss a thing
on this his first visit to Boston except for Boston itself.
- Michael Estabrook
(1 poem added 11.14.13)
editor's note: Our eyes, screens; our memories, recorded; our experiences, validated through playback. All now is meant for later... - mh
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE, I DANCE ALL NIGHT IN THE MAKE-BELIEVE BALLROOM
After the Apocalypse, I dance all night in the Make-Believe Ballroom. The vast dance floor is a swirling vortex of almonds, and as I spin around the Circle of Thanatos, I clutch my chimerical dance partners, gaze into their empty ebony eyes, and search for a glimmer of soul.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. I rock ‘n roll and do the Stroll in front of our black-and-white TV, whirling and swirling to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. I’m a kid again and free in the Make-Believe Ballroom until I see the grotesquerie.
Exotically hot and sizzling like Nathan’s french fries but cooling off in Coney Island waters, I become a cold corpse with a raw chilling rigor mortis, passing and slithering through merciless metamorphoses.
After the end, around the bend, I discover a baroque ballroom. I trudge across a seething threshold of deep snow and ice and enter.
Now, I peer through the thousand masks of my false self. “Hello,” I whisper as I whirl around Eternity. The susurrations of my real self murmur “Goodbye.”
After the Apocalypse, I dance all night in the Make-Believe Ballroom, caressing illusion, kissing Chimera, a nonbeing, swirling in nowhere, a once-upon-a-time genuine member of the species homo sapiens, transmogrified into a true-blue corpse, and perhaps, a meandering ghost sailing across Eternity’s dance floor searching for a glimmer of soul.
- Mel Waldman
(1 poem added 11.13.13)
editor's note: Apocalypse when? Could be always, if still looking for that glimmer and in your dancing shoes. - mh
stunned
your shoes are 8 track
recordings in rubberized tectonic plates
the stage, your destination
play that song like no one's listening
like the audience died waiting
for your message to erase their dreams
or perhaps NPR is your wavelength
and you're down with monochromatic drone noises
very well then, set your frequency to stun
and you will be
when the halogen nightmare creases your skull
and you can only muster a brown sigh
to offer the stragglers hanging on to
your useless soliloquy
- Rob Dyer
(added 11.12.13)
editor's note: It's all about bandwidth anymore; no need to have something to say. Keep it brown, brother. - mh
Jonah: After
Jonah doesn't follow me around.
There he is, under the bush.
He isn't sulking.
He isn't talking.
He sits.
Heat rises off him.
Hum and glow halo him.
You can approach, or you can go back,
It's all the same to Jonah.
Under the bush, eyes to the distance,
What he sees is not what you see,
Or maybe it is. Who can tell?
Jonah will not talk,
At least not to you.
Jonah is in a place
Beyond words.
Words must be found
When questions are asked,
But it is a long way back
From a place beyond words.
- Ann B-D
(2 poems added 11.11.13)
editor's note: What comes after provocation of a proud people to rampant repentance? A pale-pated, under-appreciated, pissed off prophet. No question... (To see what comes before, check out the extra poem on Ann's new page. We welcome her, with this submission, to our crazy conclave of Contributing Poets. Congrats, Ann!) - mh
Words
Words uttered
or inked, breathe, live,
long after their echoes die
or the page is turned.
Words slice,
deeper than a butcher’s knife,
prying open wounds healed
to fester in the searing heat.
Words atomize, when surmised,
implode to explode
like a Claymore mine,
strategically placed in ambush
at chest height.
Words ignite like dynamite
or stink till eternity
when like shit;
they are flung up
to hit the fan.
Words frozen,
numb the blood
kill the pulse.
Words gestured
in pantomime,
unmask and shock
long after
the Charade departs.
Words nurtured,
pregnant to be delivered
or words stifled,
aborted or stillborn,
snuff out hope
in the bud.
Words venomous,
shame the viper in their bite.
Words sting,
break skin like wasp’s stings
and the deeper ones hurt
akin to scorpion bites.
Words imprison,
manacle the victim,
down to the dungeons
of purgatory.
Words kill,
drop dead bird in flight,
when hurled as missiles.
Long after they are spilled,
words smudge, when fudged.
Words destruct,
when weaponized
and then there is
the Trojan horse
that surreptitiously breaks into defenses.
And then there are words,
words out of the world,
words that do not define,
words that do not confine.
Words like a child’s hug,
words like the kissing breeze,
without prejudice,
words that flow like a string-less kite,
Won’t you get me some of these,
When you come and see me?
- Shyam Shaurya Chakra
(added 11.10.13)
editor's note: Wisely chosen, warmly given; best received. Surest way to guarantee a happy, hostly plea of, "Come again, won't you? Please?" - mh
••• Short Stories •••
Need a read? Of course you do! Here's what Short Story Editor Tyler Malone has to say about this pick-of-the-week short story, "The Las Vegas Hangover Cure for a Poet" by Brenton Booth: "What's missing about most people? They don't know the taste of ink or blood. Poets know both." Here's a taste to tempt you...
I was hungover and alone on a Thursday morning in a Las Vegas hotel room and decided to go to a cage fighting gym and do some training. I took a taxi to 4055 West Sunset Road. The gym was full of guys I’d been watching on pay per view and dodgy pirated DVDs.
I looked at the schedule and signed up for a grappling class. Truth is my wrestling is terrible, though my jiu jitsu is okay.
I was immediately paired with Peter, a nineteen year old from Denver that trained at this gym every day and wanted to get into the U.F.C. Shit, didn’t they know I was a thirty-one-year-old poet! I honestly hadn’t even trained properly since my jiu jitsu coach returned to Brazil two years earlier. And even without the hangover, I was way out of shape
You wanna keep readin'? Of course you wanna! Get the rest of your wanna on here!
•••••••
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 mad conversations going on in Mad Swirl's World? Then stop by whenever the mood strikes! We'll be here...
Lookin’ at it,
Johnny O
Editor-in-chief
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
Tyler Malone
Short Story Editor
Madelyn Olson
Visual Editor
Comments