The Best of Mad Swirl : 12.13.14
"Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence." Emily Carr
••• The Mad Gallery •••
“Dinged yet unperturbed. Well, maybe just a bit” (above) by featured artist Gerard Bendiks. To see more Mad works from Gerard, and our other contributing artists, please visit our Mad Gallery.
Allow us to introduce you to Mad Swirl's newest featured visual artist is the ever-talented Dallas-based Gerard Bendiks. Gerard's photography is self-classified as 'never outside the box' - but that isn't to say it doesn't almost give you the means to escape the box yourself! Bendiks takes otherwise ordinary imagery, close-ups of mundane everyday things and swirls them around in the gloriously mad mind that anyone who knows this artist, knows he has! When he spews 'em right back out (figuratively, of course), they've almost got a new energy, a voice and a light of their very own. You feel like you've discovered the little bit of magic all by yourself when you look at it. But alas, we here at the Swirl headquarters have a hunch that was probably Bendiks' goal all along. But who are we to be hunching for you? We'll leave the hunching up to you to see what we mean. Ready? Set... GO! - Madelyn Olson
••• The Poetry Forum •••
This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we beheld the hole in a beggars bowl; we entered the dream of a dreamer, a coward stranger, phantom bleeder; we investigated the ins and outs of a back and forth; we gave a hard answer to a gentleman dancer; we experienced one ecstatic afternoon; we fought and fornicated, all fire with no cuddle after; we got some backseat spoonin' from a chance reunion. ~ MH Clay
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
Running into old lovers
She almost didn’t know who I was,
‘Tony!’ she exclaimed!
Yes.
She couldn’t believe it was me.
“Your hair!” she mourned ruefully
“Yes, I know, it’s going!”
We're so old now, she says,
Yes…
I follow her and her friends to a bar,
Off Lower Greenville,
We stay outside and smoke and catch up,
She can’t take her eyes off my head.
“Does it look that bad?” I ask.
“No!” she’s embarrassed, “I just…
Your hair was so perfect”
We talk about life,
She’s done with school,
Berates me for never going back,
She almost had a kid,
It was a miscarriage,
She feels it was for the best, but
It does hurt some days,
We talk of our times together,
The day we got into a fight because I
Didn’t know how to change a tire.
Alongside an empty back road
On our way home from San Antonio,
Which led to us fucking in the back seat
When a highway patrol car pulled up,
I got a ticket,
You laughed.
You said it was because the old man was jealous.
Me, mad that I was charged for lewd behavior and
You weren’t.
You initiated it.
You had the better job and could pay your ticket.
I eventually had to go sit mine out.
She laughs,
Her friends come back out,
To check on us,
I don’t think they like the fact she talking to a man,
But what do they know, they have no inkling
Of our past together, unless she told them,
When I wasn’t looking,
It all happened so fast, us running into each other,
Last I heard she was moving to Seattle
To work at a radio station.
We talked for so long, her friends had to leave
And I offer to take her home.
She agrees after some protest,
She’s staying back at her mom’s,
Her mom loved me,
We’re not in the car for long,
Before were up to our old tricks again,
Spontaneous love making is the best kind of love making,
It keeps you on your toes,
It lets you know you’re alive and still
Can rise to the occasion.
At a moment’s notice.
You still got it, I tell myself,
She rubs her fingers through my thinning hair
And whispers, "You were my Alexander"
Long ago,
We would stand naked in her bathroom
And admire one another in the mirror,
And she’d whisper those same words in my ear
Without the were, but you are,
"You are my Alexander,"
And I’d say back,
"You are my Cleopatra,"
I kiss her neck after she’s finished
And that’s when I see it
The lights in the back windshield and
A police officer approaching the car,
Flashlight in hand.
And we laugh.
- R.A. Hernandez
(1 poem added 12.13.14)
editor’s note: Alexander and Cleopatra; an epic tale with the full complicity of law enforcement (after the fines were paid). - mh
love is a four letter word
jodido.
estamos jodido.
she would say that
when she thought
that the stars might wink out one by one or
that her geriatric corolla would burst into flames or
that the liquor store was closed or
that i wasn’t able to come or
that she wasn’t.
once we were fighting at a party
because i was flirting with a girl who lived in the house
she got back at me by pushing my friend down on the couch
and blowing him
in front of everyone.
my friend looked at me and shrugged
so i flicked cigarette ash in his eyes
and he screamed
but she didn’t let him get up
because she wasn’t done yet.
afterwards we went home together
jodido.
estamos jodido, she said
when i parked the car
i said, no,
solo tú.
she got out and
i reached over and slammed the door and
i drove that death trap over the parking lot and
through the six-foot hedge
that separated it from the river and
the plunge of my dreams.
- Leeroy Berlin
(added 12.12.14)
editor’s note: After the altercation; tow trucks and mouthwash. Love will renew... - mh
An Afternoon
You got 80’s Caribbean fruit twist cigarettes
Green golden hair pink suit flowerbeds
Cucumber afternoons
In orange juice pale blue
Antique spoofs and cooking detectives
Green curtain dishcloths and buttery ham laxatives
Your style is Cav House lippy tile pigeon lips
Cross dressing jitterbugger and fungi kissy tits
Dark chocolate sofa spanking art house Viennetta
Vientiane Brussels sprout bugle loving cum taster
It makes my afternoon just to be with you.
It makes my afternoon
Just to be with you.
- James Cornish
(added 12.11.14)
editor’s note: It makes our afternoon just to read this. A "dark chocolate sofa spanking," please. - mh
Singles Dance at the Union Hall
A skirt too tight on Carol Ann
summoned forth a handsome man
who said he had a foolproof plan
to help her get that skirt off
once the dance was over but
she'd have to take him home.
He couldn't help her now
and interrupt the band.
Carol Ann had often heard
better lines from men and so
she told him she had criteria
to qualify a man who sought
to verify her assets.
First, he had to be a gentleman,
obtain the blessing of her father,
and flash a rock with many facets.
Only then might such a man
have a chance to say "I do."
- Donal Mahoney
(1 poem added 12.10.14)
editor’s note: There's no pick up line for the long haul; pick up nothing or pick up all. - mh
Pacing
Back
Forth
Back
Forth
“Do you have
To pace like that?”
Asks my Mom,
“You make me
Nervous when you pace
Like that.”
I sit down
But she doesn’t understand
I pace because
Movement of the body
Better facilitates
Movement of the mind
I pace because
I’m too excited
To sit still
I get an idea
I need to walk it
In order to find
Out whether
It has legs
To stand on
And when I’ve sat back down
I have my answer
- Euphrates Moss
(added 12.09.14)
editor’s note: Sometimes, the poetic process won't pace itself. It's full on or hard stop. - mh
I Once Appeared to William Blake in a Dream
I once appeared to
William Blake in a dream,
I was in mourning,
for daylight had passed into night,
I was a shadow lurking
and he called out
to a vision of me,
through me,
it was raining outside my window,
there were long streaks and
gray streets, obscured,
I could not make out his cry,
it was muffled by oozing time,
by corporeal pain, by loosened screw,
I tasted stale wine on my tongue,
he retched at the smell
and I saw in that moment
I was but a phantom stretching out,
bleeding into void,
I was the nothingness sent to take him,
I was the coward stranger,
the burning savior,
I once appeared to
William Blake in a dream.
- Tom Pescatore
(added 12.08.14)
editor’s note: One man's vision is another man's dream? What's the difference? - mh
Tearful Life
Standing out-and-out,
She looks around with a hopeful sight,
Uncaring for her kids around,
But caring for the passerby,
She hopes to get a coin,
Into her grounded silver bowl,
Muddy site full of monkeys’ shrieks,
She turns to a baby, who cries for her breast,
Still some coins are yet to be dropped in,
She tends to cover an inadvertent uncovered modesty,
Alas! She gets stillness upon her brood,
With emptied bellies for uncounted days,
A monkey drops a banana skin from a tree,
She picks it up and squeezes,
Hoping to get its juice into the mouth of babies,
Now the weather changes,
She also gets threatened by it,
Drizzle turns out to be stormy,
Clutching her idle babies,
She shelters under a tree,
Unjust…unjust, her rags are taken off.
Oh God! You materialize for tearful life, you do, do you?
Hoping…praying…pleading,
She beholds her bowl in the same abyss.
- Chiranjibi Niroula
(1 poem added 12.07.14)
editor’s note: Some see life from abundance, others from lack. What's in your bowl? - mh
••• Short Stories •••
Need-a-Read? Then come here and we’ll share a fine tale with you. Come close. Come “Closer”! Yes, and that’s the name of this week’s featured short-short by Simon Pilbrow!
Here is what Short Story Editor Tyler Malone had to say about this pick-of-the-week tale: "Attached at the hip, the abolishment of the individual, the joining to two souls, it all doesn’t require science, just sacrifice and a word: love—the daily needle poking through the skin and sewing us together, making us not perverts and monsters, but lovers—beasts with two backs."
Here's a more close-up look at “Closer”:
He had been deeply in love, but love had stretched and thinned and wandered in three years. She wasn’t as into him, either. And that gave him panic attacks as he questioned his mortality, his relevance. Three years ago she climbed on him in the back of a taxi heading home. With real animal aggression, she didn’t give him a choice. Those were sublime days. They passed in a beautiful, unhealthy, sleazy fog.
After years, love had become such a routine, logical ordeal that he had had to get out: the claustrophobia or its rational equivalent, was unbearable. Three weeks of cowardice and self-abuse, and he ended it, and the worst thing was that she looked so surprised despite the way he had acted. He felt abysmal for months.
He met some new girls and did the same thing five or six times in a row, but for diminishing duration and for diminishing returns. One always popped up when he was out, only to fall into the gaps made by the last. After each, the anxiety got worse and episodes more frequent. It was a repeating nightmare, the anhedonia and hopelessness had him considering the easiest way to check out.
Get even more up close and personal with this story right 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...
Disorderin’ Order,
Johnny O
Chief Editor
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
Tyler Malone
Short Story Editor
Madelyn Olson
Visual Editor
••• The Mad Gallery •••
Allow us to introduce you to Mad Swirl's newest featured visual artist is the ever-talented Dallas-based Gerard Bendiks. Gerard's photography is self-classified as 'never outside the box' - but that isn't to say it doesn't almost give you the means to escape the box yourself! Bendiks takes otherwise ordinary imagery, close-ups of mundane everyday things and swirls them around in the gloriously mad mind that anyone who knows this artist, knows he has! When he spews 'em right back out (figuratively, of course), they've almost got a new energy, a voice and a light of their very own. You feel like you've discovered the little bit of magic all by yourself when you look at it. But alas, we here at the Swirl headquarters have a hunch that was probably Bendiks' goal all along. But who are we to be hunching for you? We'll leave the hunching up to you to see what we mean. Ready? Set... GO! - Madelyn Olson
••• The Poetry Forum •••
This last week in Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum... we beheld the hole in a beggars bowl; we entered the dream of a dreamer, a coward stranger, phantom bleeder; we investigated the ins and outs of a back and forth; we gave a hard answer to a gentleman dancer; we experienced one ecstatic afternoon; we fought and fornicated, all fire with no cuddle after; we got some backseat spoonin' from a chance reunion. ~ MH Clay
Just in case you missed it, here's a taste...
Running into old lovers
She almost didn’t know who I was,
‘Tony!’ she exclaimed!
Yes.
She couldn’t believe it was me.
“Your hair!” she mourned ruefully
“Yes, I know, it’s going!”
We're so old now, she says,
Yes…
I follow her and her friends to a bar,
Off Lower Greenville,
We stay outside and smoke and catch up,
She can’t take her eyes off my head.
“Does it look that bad?” I ask.
“No!” she’s embarrassed, “I just…
Your hair was so perfect”
We talk about life,
She’s done with school,
Berates me for never going back,
She almost had a kid,
It was a miscarriage,
She feels it was for the best, but
It does hurt some days,
We talk of our times together,
The day we got into a fight because I
Didn’t know how to change a tire.
Alongside an empty back road
On our way home from San Antonio,
Which led to us fucking in the back seat
When a highway patrol car pulled up,
I got a ticket,
You laughed.
You said it was because the old man was jealous.
Me, mad that I was charged for lewd behavior and
You weren’t.
You initiated it.
You had the better job and could pay your ticket.
I eventually had to go sit mine out.
She laughs,
Her friends come back out,
To check on us,
I don’t think they like the fact she talking to a man,
But what do they know, they have no inkling
Of our past together, unless she told them,
When I wasn’t looking,
It all happened so fast, us running into each other,
Last I heard she was moving to Seattle
To work at a radio station.
We talked for so long, her friends had to leave
And I offer to take her home.
She agrees after some protest,
She’s staying back at her mom’s,
Her mom loved me,
We’re not in the car for long,
Before were up to our old tricks again,
Spontaneous love making is the best kind of love making,
It keeps you on your toes,
It lets you know you’re alive and still
Can rise to the occasion.
At a moment’s notice.
You still got it, I tell myself,
She rubs her fingers through my thinning hair
And whispers, "You were my Alexander"
Long ago,
We would stand naked in her bathroom
And admire one another in the mirror,
And she’d whisper those same words in my ear
Without the were, but you are,
"You are my Alexander,"
And I’d say back,
"You are my Cleopatra,"
I kiss her neck after she’s finished
And that’s when I see it
The lights in the back windshield and
A police officer approaching the car,
Flashlight in hand.
And we laugh.
- R.A. Hernandez
(1 poem added 12.13.14)
editor’s note: Alexander and Cleopatra; an epic tale with the full complicity of law enforcement (after the fines were paid). - mh
love is a four letter word
jodido.
estamos jodido.
she would say that
when she thought
that the stars might wink out one by one or
that her geriatric corolla would burst into flames or
that the liquor store was closed or
that i wasn’t able to come or
that she wasn’t.
once we were fighting at a party
because i was flirting with a girl who lived in the house
she got back at me by pushing my friend down on the couch
and blowing him
in front of everyone.
my friend looked at me and shrugged
so i flicked cigarette ash in his eyes
and he screamed
but she didn’t let him get up
because she wasn’t done yet.
afterwards we went home together
jodido.
estamos jodido, she said
when i parked the car
i said, no,
solo tú.
she got out and
i reached over and slammed the door and
i drove that death trap over the parking lot and
through the six-foot hedge
that separated it from the river and
the plunge of my dreams.
- Leeroy Berlin
(added 12.12.14)
editor’s note: After the altercation; tow trucks and mouthwash. Love will renew... - mh
An Afternoon
You got 80’s Caribbean fruit twist cigarettes
Green golden hair pink suit flowerbeds
Cucumber afternoons
In orange juice pale blue
Antique spoofs and cooking detectives
Green curtain dishcloths and buttery ham laxatives
Your style is Cav House lippy tile pigeon lips
Cross dressing jitterbugger and fungi kissy tits
Dark chocolate sofa spanking art house Viennetta
Vientiane Brussels sprout bugle loving cum taster
It makes my afternoon just to be with you.
It makes my afternoon
Just to be with you.
- James Cornish
(added 12.11.14)
editor’s note: It makes our afternoon just to read this. A "dark chocolate sofa spanking," please. - mh
Singles Dance at the Union Hall
A skirt too tight on Carol Ann
summoned forth a handsome man
who said he had a foolproof plan
to help her get that skirt off
once the dance was over but
she'd have to take him home.
He couldn't help her now
and interrupt the band.
Carol Ann had often heard
better lines from men and so
she told him she had criteria
to qualify a man who sought
to verify her assets.
First, he had to be a gentleman,
obtain the blessing of her father,
and flash a rock with many facets.
Only then might such a man
have a chance to say "I do."
- Donal Mahoney
(1 poem added 12.10.14)
editor’s note: There's no pick up line for the long haul; pick up nothing or pick up all. - mh
Pacing
Back
Forth
Back
Forth
“Do you have
To pace like that?”
Asks my Mom,
“You make me
Nervous when you pace
Like that.”
I sit down
But she doesn’t understand
I pace because
Movement of the body
Better facilitates
Movement of the mind
I pace because
I’m too excited
To sit still
I get an idea
I need to walk it
In order to find
Out whether
It has legs
To stand on
And when I’ve sat back down
I have my answer
- Euphrates Moss
(added 12.09.14)
editor’s note: Sometimes, the poetic process won't pace itself. It's full on or hard stop. - mh
I Once Appeared to William Blake in a Dream
I once appeared to
William Blake in a dream,
I was in mourning,
for daylight had passed into night,
I was a shadow lurking
and he called out
to a vision of me,
through me,
it was raining outside my window,
there were long streaks and
gray streets, obscured,
I could not make out his cry,
it was muffled by oozing time,
by corporeal pain, by loosened screw,
I tasted stale wine on my tongue,
he retched at the smell
and I saw in that moment
I was but a phantom stretching out,
bleeding into void,
I was the nothingness sent to take him,
I was the coward stranger,
the burning savior,
I once appeared to
William Blake in a dream.
- Tom Pescatore
(added 12.08.14)
editor’s note: One man's vision is another man's dream? What's the difference? - mh
Tearful Life
Standing out-and-out,
She looks around with a hopeful sight,
Uncaring for her kids around,
But caring for the passerby,
She hopes to get a coin,
Into her grounded silver bowl,
Muddy site full of monkeys’ shrieks,
She turns to a baby, who cries for her breast,
Still some coins are yet to be dropped in,
She tends to cover an inadvertent uncovered modesty,
Alas! She gets stillness upon her brood,
With emptied bellies for uncounted days,
A monkey drops a banana skin from a tree,
She picks it up and squeezes,
Hoping to get its juice into the mouth of babies,
Now the weather changes,
She also gets threatened by it,
Drizzle turns out to be stormy,
Clutching her idle babies,
She shelters under a tree,
Unjust…unjust, her rags are taken off.
Oh God! You materialize for tearful life, you do, do you?
Hoping…praying…pleading,
She beholds her bowl in the same abyss.
- Chiranjibi Niroula
(1 poem added 12.07.14)
editor’s note: Some see life from abundance, others from lack. What's in your bowl? - mh
••• Short Stories •••
Need-a-Read? Then come here and we’ll share a fine tale with you. Come close. Come “Closer”! Yes, and that’s the name of this week’s featured short-short by Simon Pilbrow!
Here is what Short Story Editor Tyler Malone had to say about this pick-of-the-week tale: "Attached at the hip, the abolishment of the individual, the joining to two souls, it all doesn’t require science, just sacrifice and a word: love—the daily needle poking through the skin and sewing us together, making us not perverts and monsters, but lovers—beasts with two backs."
Here's a more close-up look at “Closer”:
He had been deeply in love, but love had stretched and thinned and wandered in three years. She wasn’t as into him, either. And that gave him panic attacks as he questioned his mortality, his relevance. Three years ago she climbed on him in the back of a taxi heading home. With real animal aggression, she didn’t give him a choice. Those were sublime days. They passed in a beautiful, unhealthy, sleazy fog.
After years, love had become such a routine, logical ordeal that he had had to get out: the claustrophobia or its rational equivalent, was unbearable. Three weeks of cowardice and self-abuse, and he ended it, and the worst thing was that she looked so surprised despite the way he had acted. He felt abysmal for months.
He met some new girls and did the same thing five or six times in a row, but for diminishing duration and for diminishing returns. One always popped up when he was out, only to fall into the gaps made by the last. After each, the anxiety got worse and episodes more frequent. It was a repeating nightmare, the anhedonia and hopelessness had him considering the easiest way to check out.
Get even more up close and personal with this story right 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...
Disorderin’ Order,
Johnny O
Chief Editor
MH Clay
Poetry Editor
Tyler Malone
Short Story Editor
Madelyn Olson
Visual Editor
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