Two Poems by Michael Grover

Confessions Of An american Outlaw #405
(Transmissions For KB)

People die unheard everyday
Let’s write their words on the stars
Poets die unheard every day
So let’s legalize levy
Writing police would find him
Put him back in his grave
& yes sometimes the law does get involved
Sometimes the nation gets involved
Mad people forgotten like ghosts
Dying a little more everyday
Dying from the mechanical noise
Dying from the chemicals
Dying from cancer we didn’t know we had
Dying a little more every day
As the big broom swoops down
To sweep us under the rug
Another dead poorman forgotten
Forgotten by the neon liquor store
Where he bought the vodka to calm his outrage
Another dead poorman forgotten
____________

Confessions Of An american Outlaw #393
(Transmissions For The Collingwood Arts Center #2)

Jim says he’s been drinking a lot of wine
I tell him I’ve been drinking vodka and smoking marijuana
His face lights up Oh yeah, marijuana too
I’m glad Jim was fucked up at the meeting
When they gave us our thirty days
He was screaming how cold & heartless they were
& the lady in the mink coat just kept looking more scared
This is how we celebrate the death of our home
Drunk & stoned isolation
We celebrate this like a sacred thing
& the spirits dance
& the music plays
Tonight we celebrate the magic that is dying

I WORE A CHARLES PLYMELL T-SHIRT By W.K. Stratton

I wore a Charles Plymell T-shirt –
Panik In Dodge City –
To the nursing home. The old man
Turned the color of raw shrimp.
He groaned and tottered an arm.
He feared window blinds.
No one else wore cowboy boots.
No one else wore ragged Levi’s.
No one else wore a Mexican belt.
I was the only one.
You don’t know how bad it is, he said.
The old man’s voice belonged
to someone else.
You ache like Texas, he said.
I can never make it to the kitchen, he said.
He closed his eyes. I walked outside.
I swallowed sunshine and rubbed
Wheat sky on my Charles Plymell t-shirt.
Every day is good for dying.
For a moment I slid off to harrowed fields
And bloodied dirt devils and Charley riding
In a tractor baby box. You still found
Open range in western Oklahoma
back then.
You could ride a horse to Hollywood
And never fight highway or fence.
Those times invented the old man
But never totaled anything for him.
He came up lost.
You don’t crane in boots and Mexican belt
For too long in land now foreign to you.
I peered down the nursing home ridge
Then took off in a blue automobile
praying to saddle and bridle.
I wore a Charles Plymell t-shirt.
It kept me breathing.

WHAT IS A CATHEDRAL TO A STAR? by Charles Plymell

the church is all we get
a shield, a blanket of memory
put our slippers down in the universe
and forget where we put them
the night is a container of faith
to rot like a can of beans in the cupboard
maggots crawl from under things
like warriors of the carcasses
the shooters of lost souls
that mothers cry to disown
flesh and blood that found faith
no longer cowards to themselves
another hour on this watch brings darkness

Poetry, Status Quo, & Baseball by Doug Draime

doing this for nothing,
like the rest of you
but i get
waylaid for not
writing like
the status quo …
fuck the status quo

i can’t buy a can
of beans
with this poem

as i listen to the
world series
on the radio
because it’s
no longer on non cable
TV

you got to be able
to afford to watch
america’s favorite
pastime

In the Desert of Iraq by Donal Mahoney

It took awhile to find Osama.
It will take awhile to find
the Briton with his knife
in the desert of Iraq.
They may bring him back
unless a verdict’s rendered
in the desert
enabling the Briton
to discover in a second
all the virgins
awaiting his arrival
unless he finds
he’s sitting with Osama
holding marshmallows
blackened on a stick.

Two Poems by David S. Pointer

Gum Based Good Times

The antique gumball
machine tech patted
his little globe dispenser
saying it was “the gum”
that really got each
baseball game started,
and helped a fastball
burn hot as a fireplace
front or brought out a
cartridge box boom
at the crack of a bat,
or helped the coach
keep up maintenance
on all our game gear
stored in that Nicaraguan
coffee gunny sack
season after season,
so in baseball’s brief
little league time line-
It’s the chewing gum
that may be going down
into history with the
chomping rest of us.

-Previously appeared in “Spitball”
____________

Land of Post Season Fever

Opposing flame thrower
high on circus bear bravado
atop dusty pitching mound
blowing code, sign language
to their ever crumpled catcher
found me remembering that
time in 67 when the Yardbirds
finished torching the radio and
the sports announcer came on
telling how owner Charles Finley
was taking the Kansas City As
out to Oakland in one of those
Brooklyn Dodger city betrayal
deals riding off on mismatched
reindeer turning us Royal blue

GARY’S TREE by Mather Schneider

For years Gary would park his cab
in the shade of the tree in the corner of the parking lot
behind the Wafflehouse
on 22nd Street
when it got hot in the afternoon
and it was slow and he was tired
of driving.

Gary’s 58
with a long white beard, one replaced
knee
and he walks with a cane, been
driving a cab for 18 years.
He can remember
when that tree behind the Wafflehouse
was small
and the Wafflehouse hadn’t even been built yet.

Yesterday he told us other cab drivers

“Some fuckhead cut my tree down!
Now I got no place to go.
I’d like to take an axe
to that son of a bitch!”

And there are people who will say
Gary needs more courage
to live a fuller life
and there are people who will say
Gary needs to find another job
and anyway
it wasn’t HIS tree,
it wasn’t his PRIVATE PROPERTY,
he had no RIGHTS when it came to this
tree.

I guess that’s true
but there aren’t that many trees
around here
and it gets hot in the summer
under that sun.

The thing is, Gary’s old, doesn’t have much
to live for anymore
and now he’s talking
about killing someone with
an axe

and there isn’t a cabby in the yard
who would stop him.

SMILE by Ag Synclair

at the diner counter
an old woman told me to smile
she wanted me to magically
copy a happy fucking grin
and paste it to my face.

my wiring does not allow empty smiles
or lies
told by the ugliest people I know
people with lawns
too many cars
and country club teeth

they don’t have a soul
a heart
a receptor of all things
dark
and damaged.

I’ll smile for you, old woman
I’ll smile when the ugliest among us can write
when they drop the cover
stop smiling
and show the world their bruises.

Words by Wolfgang Carstens Art by Janne Karlsson

for carolyn wearing the crown of pain by John Sweet

on the other side of the continent
in the wrong part of the year,
bleeding ice-cold sunlight and
thinking about st maria and last blurry
fucked up days of dennis wilson

waiting for the children to run away

waiting for judas and his
latest girlfriend and when he finally arrives
he brings a copy of exile on main st
and a bottle of wine

smiles and says the
brightest days are behind us

knows in his heart that there is no
end in this world to the list of
things not worth dying for