As it is very difficult to read because of the size of the writing, I’ll write out just the words:
1.
∞
by
Peter J. King
..
2.
henna or
antiope
..
full well
or
deeper
or
3.
she is a
fool
who
births
a prophet
..
zeus
and
…clouded justice
..
now
down
..
4.
twenty
seven
..
mars’
beast
..
..
satan
develops a taste
for serpent
for ever
The dead whisper to each other tied together by unseen strands of timeless wandering through the wilderness of pain, smeared like paint across the canvas of time, paint like blood, coagulated colors of frost and sweat in children’s screams over centuries of monsters squashing flesh into roads. Light breaks each morning revealing facades of long lost temples and mosques, of skyscrapers and houses, of bones piled high and peeling flesh. Sounds of mourning pierce like spears as corpses carried high make the journey down the river of insignificance. The wheel just turns and turns over days and months and years and decades and the grieving remains the same wherever its loudspeakers blare the voices of the weeping. The strand will break and we will all soon be scattered into dark black holes and spit out into the hinterlands of infinity.
..
BIO: Jay S Zimmerman is an artist, photographer, psychologist and social justice advocate. He has recently been published in Matryoshka Poetry, Three Line Poetry, I am not a silent poet, Curly Mind, and Flying Island, New Verse News, Quatrain.Fish and Rats Ass Review.
A zebra.
I want to write a zebra.
An array of upturned coffins keeling over an indigo road leads me to the border.
Maybe I should try to write a spine.
Quieted in that spine like melancholia, the sunrays still keep glinting. Cobwebs hover over the kingdoms of killings.
Sunshine yes.
But I would probably keep sunshine aside and thousands of its likelihoods, thinking of the ripples of weapons murmuring like a saline breeze around our best immediate interest.
Fingers, perhaps, growing sunflowers?
Fingers, not bloodied, smudging the pastel until a hallo appears lodged in the hollow songs freshly hatched out of the muskets.
Fingers wrap us in a musical of red poppies glimmering in the sun beneath the water with myriad skulls weighing down the long drowned boats.
The sea is known to be turbulent at times. Think of the firmament?
Yes, firmament! From under those naked skins it keeps gazing on the slalom of lives awaiting a starry Lych gate.
And with all the starlets dripping fireballs in mind, I open the lifespan of lullabies for the children of war.
Dreams only root out of dreams & their shambles roll across the rubbed pastel debris to shatter against your silhouette of folly, oh muse mine, what is there to write?
Sail on, doll head, sail on, the night is your wool of time, your doom, your womb of lilac, just go fetch a zebra.
(after Miguel Hernandez)
… that the borders of our memories are (always) shifting : Yeats
she knows
stay
just said
footfalls & wings
been broken kind
always undoing the hasp
tugging endless
tongues
that’d played & honeyed
loft sorrows
of silk
laid over blue nails
absence
absence
absence
borne away
in a scant light
rosewood beads
around the neck
around nothing
molting
the tang of longing
she knows
nest hollowed out
and nails hammered into
the hatchlings
always blind & naked
what a moist evening
branches beneath
rattling
before
always lopsided roads
tossed to
her incised map
to terraform
memories
clogged
between
blinds & baffles
and her
bath bubbles narrate satin in life
over the crust of bleeding
marauder in her womb
stars’ egress
sultry blubber
& biography
cracking up
she knows
brambles that hide her eyes
hide the sea in a fold
such old words
stay
said before
never before
blood
shifting borders
darkness abloom
the hackneyed strings of guitar
cry
tu vientre
tu vientre
menos tu vientre
* Link to the original poem with English translation : https://sites.google.com/site/nightingalesthatsing/40-poemas/menos-tu-vientre
Menos tu vientre by Joan Manuel Serrat on Youtube :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZi1Rkw4t3Y
They said he was on a good errand:
but what proof do you have of that.
He had good stories to tell –
filling the ears of a hundred servants
all invited to gather and to listen and feast
upon words, the noises – they came as before
and when he had finished declaiming
all who had heard, said he’d spoken well.
These listeners stayed there awhile
eyes fixed upon stars,
sitting at the outer edge of a circle,
these men of worth, sitting, as if they were great
and wealthy chieftains, little to do, little to say.
He explained it all in pleasing well-meant language,
words that count when nothing else will please .
On the third night, he set out for home,
bade them farewell with the firmest kind of oaths,
sailed his ship to the north of the glacier
then out into the shelter of the islands.
It may be that what he did was good but I expect that bad rather than good will come of it.
something? No
solipsism if you know the trick
you can do anything if you can stomach
nothing
nothing, you can stomach ……you can stomach society
then you can do nothing
And yet you do not.
It’s too much poetry too much long tall
Women who walk out the door to the tune
Of that bitch over there and the men who
Keep wanting them panting over till
She turns upside-down as red-red meat
Lamb do you understand how to diagram
Her in blank verse until she is just woman
But I do not have the kind of lips men want
To dislocate – and so I dream of woman
Soft&sharp&sweet and her body is as
Foreign to me than to any of those poets
Who jack-off only to her eyes the way
She walks. I want her cunt I do not know
How to see upside-down into me want
To turn her like a meat hook no wonder
They wanted this I do not wake up
Thinking of volcanoes, dicks are easy this
Is harder. The unseen spaces, all those nerves
On the inside. I think of circles dislocate myself to
An objectors lens. Woman woman woman
I want.
Librarian
Imbued with panic
Electric spirals
Blasted shots of vodka*
Frozen incentives
Ruinous apologies
Ambivalent shopping
Untrained crematorium staff
Missed limestone cavities
Indigenous coffee mugs**
Lazy milk bottles
Colourful air freshener***
We split the atom, the centre of everything, and in so doing we created chaos
Happy times
*Postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humour and the general concept of “play” (related to Derrida’s concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism.
**Following World War II, with the bombing of Japan, the cohesive centre disappeared for Americans. People began to move outward from the cities and into newly created suburbs. Women did not wish to return to the world of housekeeping after tasting the freedom of war-time employment.
***The practical magnetic fasteners allow easy access to the interior compartment.
and…
SOCIAL SERVICES CHILDREN’S ASSESSMENT
Name:
BABY
Referral:
VIA ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY; SUBJECT DROPPED ON HIS HEAD
Family Composition:
FATHER – PUNCHINELLO. UNEMPLOYED 400 YEAR OLD MAN. SEVERE PHYSICAL DEFORMITIES AND A SPEECH IMPEDIMENT.
MOTHER – JUDY.
PETS – CROCODILE AND TOBY THE DOG
Parental Capacity:
NEGLIGIBLE. FATHERS VOCABULARY LIMITED TO “THAT’S THE WAY TO DO IT”, EXHIBITS EXTREME VIOLENT TENDENCIES. BUTTERFINGERS. MOTHER APPEARS UNAWARE THAT FATHER UNABLE TO SAFEGUARD BABY.
Environmental Factors:
THE FAMILY ARE CONFINED TO A TINY ONE-ROOMED HOUSE WITH STEEP STAIRS. CREATES MARITAL TENSION WHICH DRAWS THE ATTENTION OF ONLOOKERS. POOR DIET CONSISTING ONLY OF SAUSAGES.
Developmental needs:
BOTH PARENTS HAVE SEVERE EDUCATIONAL AND SUPPORT NEEDS.
Risk factors:
ALL PREVIOUS VISITS BY DOCTOR, THE POLICE AND SOCIAL WORKERS RESULTED IN GETTING WALLOPED OVER THE HEAD WITH A CLUB. SEVERAL DEATHS HAVE BEEN INCURRED, ALTHOUGH NONE HAVE BEEN TERMINAL. PET CROCODILE EATS ALL THEIR FOOD.
Likely outcomes:
THE DEVIL HIMSELF COULDN’T SORT THIS MESS OUT.
the curly mind linguistically innovative poetry - weird & risky 