later amigo

all i can say is a lot of good people write poetry…thank you all…when you come over that  next hill I’ll be waiting–

hey where ya been?

scot

So I had to go offline… by Sissy Buckles

it’s that whole jean-paul sartre existential
being & nothingness thing – La Nausée,
or freedom from a more modern opiate
and don’t you ever just get sick of yourself?
The only reason I had that account
anyway was to talk to Lorna,
and she’s gone now
and my sis in Texas, but now it’s official
they’re coming home to Cali
just in time to party with the Lifters cc
King of Clubs drags at Barona,
pub-crawl the annual Adams Ave. Street Fair in the fall,
and sip Gin Rickey’s with Kathie and Adam
at the Riviera Supper Club and Turquoise Room
and of course there’s Kerouac
always looking hopefully to the mad future…
“I envisioned wild complexities with Dean and Marylou
and everybody – a season, a new season….”

I’m That House by Cassandra Dallett

I’m That House

we bought
when I was ten
the rotten one
no floors to speak of
snakes in the clapboard
raccoon skat and remnants
of squatting Hari Krishnas
deciples of the blue bodied boy
in an abandoned farmhouse
we were not the first hippies
to touch down
on that moon soil
we changed everything
but
the overall
decay
Dad felt comfortable in funkiness
left me always trying to put things in their places
these days I don’t trust my own decisions
I’m running out of stories
ready to fall back in love
he pulls away
I’m confused
enough to follow
these woods are dark
with I told you so.

13 Ways of Places by Scott Owens

1
The first place I remember —
a wide chair, 2 babies
in the seat, my brother and I
astride each arm.

2
A place we came back to
year after year, every time
a man left or hit us,
7-acre farm full of chickens,
corn, cows, tomatoes,
2 boys in 2 single beds.

3
On Phoenix Street, behind the KFC,
I learned to ride a bike,
and when the trash can
caught on fire,
I was beaten for lying
until it blew up.

4
My mother’s nose is bloodied,
my brother saved by not
being able to reach the gun,
every night punctuated by trains
going anywhere but here.

5
What could be better
than a bedroom of my own,
window onto a wide front porch,
until a lovesick neighbor
knocked on the door at night,
pulled a gun
and emptied his stomach before me.

6
No doubt the worst place
we ever lived,
downhill from everywhere,
a place for runoff to collect.

7
The streets here breathe
with overarching steam.
Night and day
the rumbling of machinery
causes voices to rise.

8
This close to history, to other,
I had to teach myself the language,
find ways to venture down the Rhine,
south to mountains
without my family’s help.

9
Little wonder I got out early.
What does it say of a marriage
to remember nothing that matters
of the places it lived?

10
Who could use a house
with 7 bedrooms, 5 baths?
Who could keep it clean,
living on campus
in the Headmaster’s house,
myself master of nothing.

11
I always wanted to write
poems of place,
but having lived
in 14 cities, 34 houses,
I never knew
which place to write about.

12
Nearing 48,
the seventh year in this house,
the longest I’ve ever lived
in one place, I undertake
the permanence of a treehouse,
the only structure I’ve ever made.

13
Even as a child I knew,
left alone, I would walk out
in Cade’s Cove and lie down
and wait for deer to consume
my body turned to grass.

Amy Winehouse is dead and my dog is gone by Harry Calhoun

The best keep leaving us: Janis, Jimi, Jim, Kurt
and now Amy, all gone at 27. My Alex,
at a comparable age in dog years,

must be put to sleep. Because of an odd hybrid
of moth to an irresistible flame
and werewolf bitten and snarling

far outside of its genes. The tragedy
of addiction, of aggression, that rushes
like a wild river spilling predictably

to the sea of its predetermined end.
The way you walked was thorny,
my sons and daughters. It pains me

to see how you sought
or were brought
peace for eternity.

It Runs On – What Really Matters by Winnie Star

I think I am a genius sometimes with the way I write and how I feel so deeply about things, but I know I’m not because I don’t know everything I’m supposed to know, and I didn’t read the classics in school or understand all about math, nor was I extremely good at playing the flute or piano, but I was a great dancer and found out later that I had good meter so I could play drums and keep a beat with a band with real musicians, but music may not always count for what makes a genius and maybe I was meant to feel that being more intellectual and less creative was the path to perfection so I tried, no, did, go to college and then graduate school, and worked real hard at being a nurse so I could prove to myself that I really was a genius, mind over matter; now I could continue to write in this vein, but what does it matter if I prove to be a genius or not for who in the end will really care, except me?

RATHER by Craig Scott

I’d rather
memorize your skin
than remember the dead

eat your words
than speak

be punished
than explain myself

Three poems by Tyrel Kessinger

My Left Hand

I wish
even half the things Bukowski said
were true.
It’d be nice to know
that passion
doesn’t evacuate the body
at the first sign of creased skin,
a wrecked liver
and bloody bowel movements.

I wish
my memories were more like
commemorative half-dollars
treasured by collectors
and not just any old goddamn penny
settled on the sea-floor
of the mall’s centerpiece fountain.

I wish
my dog had never seen fit
to quit being a pup.
As an unreasoning beast,
I’m sure he never had
this thought himself.
If he did, then we just buried
the world’s most philosophical canine.

I wish
my Mom had kept
the reality of magic
to her own damn self.
Want in the right hand
and shit in the left,
she said.
See which fills up faster.

I wish
I didn’t wish
nearly so much.
____________
Possum Meat

After high school
I worked at a hospital
With this guy
A janitor
Named Frank
Older man
Salt and peppered black beard
Squirrelly eyes
Some sort of strange toughness
Like he was half made of stardust
And half ground coffee
Always asking me if I knew he played the trumpet
Then farting and laughing with a cigarette cackle
But I saw underneath his withered smile
He gave me from time to time
How the scalpel of life
Had carved out a layer
Once, he told me
Why he never wore seatbelts
Something to do
With his dead daughter
He didn’t cotton to the hospital director
Called him an ass
Said that just because he cleaned up shit
Didn’t mean he’d take it
In the heart of that merciless summer
I saw him plant a bloated possum carcass
Under the seat of a car
Parked where important people parked
I knew whose it was
He put his finger to his lips and winked
Telling me how
A little bit of possum meat never hurt no one
And while I had my doubts
I kept them to myself

____________
Take Your Time & Dance With Me

there are two sides to every story but always just the one ending
sure, your eyes are open more than closed
but you still lose something in the ballpark of 1/3 of your life to sleep
brush teeth, rinse and spit
a cycle like so many other things
walk the dog while as you’re dying then go to bed
a thing like so many other cycles
joan jett says she loves rock and roll fourteen times
in “i love rock ‘n’ roll”
jesus
i think we get the point
when i was eight
i fell from a churning merry-go-round & bled out
blood black as night
when I just assumed it’d be red
symbolically speaking, what’s the difference?
round & round we go
round & round i went
put another dime
in the jukebox baby