Saturday, October 27, 2012

Felino A. Soriano


from rhythm:s



in the frame of rhythm

                        picture:

the
                                                fingering of distance
                                    placed
positional
frictions

                                                                        heat from the forming of absolute
attraction:

                                                            noontime moon
awake in the experiment of haze’s

contradictory light
                                                                                    rolled
            in the internal
disposition of day’s
continuous
                                    ornate disposition

*** 

in the language of rhythm

connectivity                coined in the versus method of
in/out
                        ward
introspection

                                                post-(used in/as the easiness of attempting unclaimed
district)

-temporal reenactments follow the
fulfilling extractions of repetitious
modernity (the fooled believe in the culture of uncluttered exegesis)

modular though partial
            exacted as completed impulsion                     the yet encouraged percentages
unable to exist as the rendition of whole
mendacity

                                                                        gallant in the queried pardon of dim
denied in the rotational
back of
                                    culture’s analytical
                                                                                                            needing

*** 

in the witness of rhythm

            solved
            errors
                                    again against wooden angles
                        a
            neoteric version
                                                of onlooking engagements
altruistic
amendments
                                                            aimed into speech’s ascending
demonstration

                                                                                    watch
as with the child’s blurred becoming
eyed as though inflection
derives temporal temptation,

alive

*** 

in the idea of rhythm

replaced current
optimal clothing (worded sewn definitions, strewn…(arrives))

philosophy
created self in the object promotion of interactive
                                                            becoming
                        new
new
                                                pluralized accidents

freedom held whole fundamental being in the time of how’s

fulfilled achievement: interrelate

*** 

in the problem of rhythm

                                                                        as with/in/of
language
                                    tendency’s
            pragmatic
commonalities engage in the direct promissory premise of

diluted being                                       again the altered expectation of escaped
subjective connotations

unable to then reverberate
within the accidental following of unconscious                                 memories


***
***

Peter Ganick



fr. xylene pictures

***
***

Andrew Burke


Late Winter Night

The old dog is snoring. It’s a comforting sound late night in this empty house. The gas heater has warmed the furniture, walls, carpets and floorboards, and the dishwasher in the kitchen has filed away my sparse dishes for washing with tomorrow’s lot.
This poem has no birds in it, as Jack Spicer said some time off. I’ve been reading him, there’s nothing on TV. It is late in this dry winter and at last the earth here is wet with rain. Three ducks from the rising waters of the swamp across the road waddle for dinner across our overgrown and weed-filled lawn. They are silent and not in this poem.
I turn ABC Jazz off and the dog stops snoring. Is there any meaning in this? The day is interlaced with such relationships yet we drudge through our hours, aware of insignificance.  I often think of reality as a knitting pattern with multiple dimensions,  knit one, purl two. No pattern, just chaos and its resultant energy.
Her snoring returns as I rise to turn off the heater and go to bed. I stand beside her, looking down for a moment before she awakes, yawns, and looks at me questioningly. I don’t know, I tell her, I don’t know either.


***
***

Friday, October 26, 2012

Russ Golata


Persistence of Breeze

Living in a world without love
Is to arrive at a place with no sunshine
Where you are a stranger to yourself
Wind, freezing the sweat on your back

The one true wind knows your name
Feel it whispering in your ear
The music of future reassurances
Filling the night air with moon’s caress

When the wind calls you
There are no broken connections
A flash of lightening, dots the skyline
As kites of hope scatter like seagulls

Imagine this world without love
Surely, this is what limbo is like
On a cloud, in a waiting room
Sitting on an empty promise

Autumn breezes divine nirvana
Spraying the world with color...
Feeling it wash over your skin
A stream of fresh melted snow

Awaking the inner most wilderness
Contained in every breath of life
Wrapped in the solace of new ideas
Comfortably soaring into dreams

***
***

Sunday, October 21, 2012

rob mclennan


American Hybrid

          for Cole Swensen

               It’s intransitive and about space; or is space or shows
               itself to itself in it
                         --Susan Clark, as lit x: the syntax of adoration

1.

The mind, however weakened. States, foreclosure. Hurray, but for a single angle. Treasured.

Meant, to disturb. Thin balcony, stretch. To sound out, thinking. Misty. If I, prevented. A
great road, flats. It parcels. Beauty, as far out as a generation.

Radius, the highlands. What famous, cut.

Morning, unread. Some nights examined. Removed, forlorn. An island, crestfallen region.
Why is it, look. I dream. I paint a picture.

As if, writing. Sleek, and dark. Appending crystals. This dull, muddied stare.

2.

What a man can, do. Covers over, sex.

3.

Hungry, but. Look out, on horseback. Aesthetic, mountains. Higher, senses. Mottle.

Pedigree, view. A hand, assembled. Creates for me, a sphere. Better, domestic. Teeth. White
hair, and patch of, blue. Engaged. Within these, genealogies. Vary, stink. These disciplines.
Rule tens, all thumbs.

A latch-key shard. We dapple, days. Cranked-out.

Speaker, listener. Docile, in the heather. And your position, known. What happy, download.
Keen eye for effort. Unstable, sleep. Given. These words relate, themselves.

Can never, traverse. Only, sleeps on planes.

***
***

Jim Bennett



Exposition on a theme of Christchurch

some time ago long it was between
but who can dwell with the passing of time
unless clock face and bells interrupt the service
and people leave    gloves left lying on the chair
this was Christchurch not the dome but Abbey
well into Druit park green man and canvas
the grass slicked back like hair into the soil
wood chips from carvings  done with axe
and steam driver rips at concrete this is how
the town becomes

here the cinema an arts centre for the others
the poets sing and writers dance across pages
what are you doing in the summer sunlight
it is winter and spring follows before the autumn
leaves fall from the writers grasp and left lying
in the pram a baby silent as the graveyard
its bench chair stretching across the millennium

roads black with tyres the world bent into a curve
towards the car park  mattered with people rushing
each with their eyes set inward their mouths set
to their distant friends ear     a brush blur of movement
the water distorting the reflections as it always did
and never for this is flow from where the sky
bleeds into a distant stream  one last time

entertainers come go pass this way that
leave laughter hanging  in unremembered jokes
“did you see”   “do you recall”  “remember when”
no not really  only eyes to record now the rest
a flickering screen with black white     forgotten
wars     recalled on a cenotaph  a shop selling flowers
across a pavement  to encourage death
and mothers  who wait for their day to see if they are
remembered with each passing year
the face of town


*** 

Notebook entries on the way to Liverpool

PAGE1

a cabinet of curiosities

the glass cabinet was in
a small room off the kitchen
it stood in shadow against a wall
its contents hidden until you were close
enough to see    a skull    a stuffed bird   
a rock cracked open to show crystals
like a miniature red grotto

there were other things
a native American headdress    a Zulu shield
a gun

PAGE 2

from the mountain top
the footpath is clear
cut into the soil to expose the rock
like the broken crust on a pie
a stress line    broken    chipped away
along the ridge

PAGE 3

at the funeral the priest
called on everyone to think
about the big questions
life    death    God
he said it over several times until
the desperation  to save a soul
crackled in the air like lightening
waiting to discharge
in any soul       perhaps even his own

PAGE 4

the glass picks out the strands of light
braids it into coloured stripes
in the window it is Saint George
fighting a dragon with its fiery breath
across the chapel floor it falls like rain
in coloured pools
and like in the cinema I once knew
smoke    this time from incense not cigarettes
reveals itself  twisting in living shapes
trapped within the light beams

PAGE 5

the trip to Liverpool to meet with friends
hear their poems    read some of mine
is short for me  but
I see how far I wandered off the path
and now look to the stars
to guide me home

***
***

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett



***
***

Ziba Karbassi





When the blood-home is here, just here
When the blood-home has the smell of your body
Don’t pull me away from myself
                                    don’t take me anywhere away from myself
When the smell of my love’s body spreads through the air of the room
                                                and the room becomes drunk
And me and the memories and the shadows walk drunkenly
                                                            with each other
                                                                        and die a little
                                                                                    in each other


Dance crazily, dance, blood-home dance,
                                                blood   home   dance


Migrant memories will come back again
Piece by piece memory of the craziness of being apart comes back again
And the cold and the homelessness come to this room
                                                under this roof
                                                            to take me away again.

Memories of my grandfather, uncles and aunts
Me and my father doing the round loop of Shogholle
                                                                           and Golistan *

The tears of my always grieving mother in the afternoons of summer
That soft thyroid full of constricted sobbing & fingered by winter bones
Hey, Hey, Hey : all these
                                    vagrant memories!






Don’t take me from myself
                        don’t take me anywhere at all out of myself


When the smell of jasmine and pomegranate and grandmother, of vanilla and
quince and auntie and saffron, and tangerines and uncle and thin flakes of
nougat, thin flakes, come : it is the hug of my poem, baklava garden,
                                                Tabriz-heart, Shams-breath,
                                                            poem-embrace

When grandmother is dead, and auntie too, and uncle
                                                is dead,
and pieces of you are also dead inside me,
why do your chest and my breath still
        smell with life ?

Don’t let them take away my breathing
                                    don’t let them cut down my breath-line


And the hair on your chest which is soft
                                    and my head that always falls there

My always peaceful homeland, my always may-time meadow
Let me stay here
                        just here


Blood-land embrace, poetry-embrace, mother-embrace,
poetry-heart, dear love :
            don’t let me be pulled away from myself
                        don’t let me be pulled loose
          from here at all.

* Shogholle & Golistan, in this instance, are the names of
      parks in the poet’s northwestern birth-city of Tabriz.

[The above poem is below in Farsi. To hear, click on the English title above.]

زیبا کرباسی

-رقص «اَتن»*


وطن
وطن


وطن که همینجا باشد وطن

وقتی بوی تن تو داشته باشد وطن

مرا از خود نبرید

از خود به هیچ کجا نبرید

وقتی بوی تن معشوق بپیچد و مست کند اتاق

من و یادها و سایه ها تلوتلو چرخی بزنیم درهم و باهم

بمیریم کمی از هم

رقص بی قرار وطن کنیم وطن

و یادهای سرگردانی دوباره بیایند

یادهای تکه تکه از جنون جدایی دوباره بیایند

سرما و بی خانمانی بیاید در این اتاق زیر این سقف

تا مرا ببرد

یادهای پدربزرگ عمو دایی

من و بابا و چرخ و فلک بازی و «شاه گویلی» و «باغ گلستان»

گریه های مادر سوگوارم در عصرهای تابستان

هی اینهمه اینهمه اینهمه یادهای سرگردان

مرا از خود نبرید مرا از خود به هیچ کجا نه

وقتی بوی شب بو و انار دانه و مادربزرگ و به و ریواس و عمه و زعفران و نارنج و دایی و نقل نقل می دهد بغلت

شعر بغل جان

باغ باقلوا تبریز دل

شمس نفسم

وقتی مادربزرگ مرده باشد

عمه مرده باشد

دایی هم

و تکه هایی از تو نیز زنده مرده باشند در من

پس چرا بوی زندگی می دهد هنوز سینه ات

نفسم

نگذار ببُرند نفسم را

نگذار ببَرند

مرا نگذار معشوق

مرا از خود نگذار

و سینه ات این دشت اردیبهشت

که سرم سوی آن خم می شود

چه خوب است همینجا بمانم

وطن آغوش شعرآغوش مادروطن شعروطن معشوق شعر

نگذار مرا ببرند

نگذار مرا از تو به هیچ کجا ببرند.

--
* رقص «اَتن» رقص ملی افغانستان است
spring 2000 london

 

***

To Hell with It


The end of no ending
And from the inmost ache of the brain of a young inventor a stone jerks free
And the earth breaks up
                        in tiny pieces
                                    tiny tiny pieces
                                                as a voice shattering in its semiotic stricture
                                                             must in the mouth of language –
                                                                           become a poem!


And the shoulders of earth tighten in trauma
And the tree-monkeys hopscotch from this to that side of the dream
                                                                                    flying


The knees of the earth splinter
The shoulders are cracked apart
The ss-ss-sso of sob is snapped off from sobbing, and where are the shudders ?
The voice of hh-hhha’s hurled apart from laughter, and where are the shivers ?
And wingless flightless birds are flocked between the cracks and
the voices of weeping.


To hell with it !
Let the sky spit its stars on your face

To hell with it !
Let the sun turn its heat from you
                                                To hell with it !

And the mountains vomit intestines over you
                                                                   To hell with it !

To hell with it you bird hurled in the snow for hiding


                                                            To hell with it !

Leave this earth, this ripped-open woman, leave her,
            you-mother-fucker : you-oedipus-of-no-future

If I were a hug
If I were a hu-hug, 
                                    If I were a hug I would hold this wrapt
so tightly O

                                                Until all of it healed over …. If I
                                                                        were a hug …

Translated fr. Farsi by Stephen Watts and Ziba Karbassi

***
***