Phillip A Ellis - 15 August 2009

15 August 2009

Over lands, seas, and oceans, the stars rise
steadily, into night and the dark sky
unmarked by any moon. When the stars fade
from the heights, scratched as it is by streets' lamps,
houses, other buildings, then no eye knows
what was once seen, in the open night sky:
seasons, directions, legends, and fair lamps
hung from the heavens, and from a dark vault.

But the night is still young, younger than time,
younger than the lands over which it's hung
like a veil of unseeing, emptiness
kept at bay as by gossamer star-veils,
clusters of flaming gas, fields of burning,
fragile wards facing entropy, heat death.


Phillip A Ellis
http://phillipellis.f-snet.com/

Jeff Klooger - A Brief History Of Getting Smashed

A Brief History Of Getting Smashed

Emotion is chemistry, and alcohol
is love ― here especially, or anywhere tropical.
Tonight we will get drunk like scientists, our heads bursting
with untested theories, facts
whizzing past our eyes
and into the sunset.

We don’t care. Without fear or forethought,
we gaze into the magic heart of things. Reality
is what we see when we close our eyes,
sure as physics, sucking us in
like gravity. If you lie flat out
and stare straight up at the stars, you will get dizzy,
but all that whirling still makes sense somehow.

God is a dry martini, shaken not stirred.
Proof is a toothpick
piercing the olive of the world.
Einstein understood: the faster you go
the heavier you get.
Intoxication is a formula
that escapes to infinity.

Jeff Klooger
http://walleahpress.com.au/FR37Klooger.html

Michael Lee Johnson - Charley Plays a Tune

Charley Plays a Tune

Crippled, in Chicago,
with arthritis
and Alzheimer's,
in a dark rented room,
Charley plays
melancholic melodies
on a dust-filled
harmonica he
found abandoned
on a playground of sand
years ago by a handful of children
playing on monkey bars.
He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,
relieving himself takes forever; he feeds the cat when
he doesn't forget where the food is stashed.
He hears bedlam when he buys fish at the local market
and the skeleton bones of the fish show through.
He lies on his back, riddled with pain,
pine cones fill his pillows and mattress;
praying to Jesus and rubbing his rosary beads
Charley blows tunes out his
celestial instrument
notes float through the open window
touch the nose of summer clouds.
Charley overtakes himself with grief
and is ecstatically alone.
Charley plays a solo tune.

Michael Lee Johnson
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000058168