A Letter from the Editors

Hello dear readers. This is the first missive from the redoubtable Beatnik Cowboy. We have been hibernating, in the Northern Pure Land, attempting to tame our Monkey Minds, by holding up in separate bear caves, with separate bear family friends. Fleas be damned. As editors, you know, we attempt not to play Yahweh. But when we see, read, and fully hear what those writers submitting really don’t want us to hear, we dance as silly-assed farmers, round-up ready. And we publish. Toiling long, short bright-dark maudlin-flippant sad-happy hours, channeling Gutenberg; we do the strenuous work of discovery. Mining dirt, pay dirt. For the talented poetess, pay dirt is what poetic fame, recognition, and fan worship is. Typhus, is a disease of dirt, just ask Napoleon when the new ones come around. But the dirt we fling, the sand we kick in the weaklings’ faces, truly creates the best warriors, those whose greatest strength is not to fight. To be humble, weak, lacking the confidence, the highest self-esteem, to irrevocably, to infinity and beyond, toot their horn. Like a jazz trumpeting Kirk Douglas, in black and white, we sing our bodies (and minds) electrocuted. Gas chamber dreams satiate us with the sound of grounded Concords taking off. We take off, achieve lift off, publishing the good, the ugly, but not much of the bad. At the most, that’s the idea. We will publish, follow, allow, create a space for your words, artwork, really great short fiction, its meaning and sound. We invite you to raise our rafters, to shiver our timbers, for in doing so your reach, through this blog-spot and the glorious hard-copy magazine, becomes the future past, through inevitably, the present. Remember everyday is a gift, and that is why it is called the Present.

 

But enough about the above, let’s get to the below. In our eyes darkness is light. The sound of one hand clapping is almost inaudible. And our faces before we were born, we finally gather, were more ugly than beatific. But let’s get down to it, what art is all about is transcendence and sex. And we, and you, as part of this publication whether writer, reader, or Dixie chicken, are about getting more of both. We hope women, men, hermaphrodites, intelligent chimps and signing apes, both gay, transgender, and lesbian, with dolphins, whales, clever insects, cats and man’s best friend, in one big ignore no one metaphysical, hermeneutical, post structural bareback eunuch orgasmatron. Though as has been said, such is life. Yet, also, remember, death, and getting close to it if you are aware, is as important, and more profound, than birth.

 

Most of all however, we are about feeling. The feeling one gets when things are going well, when that woman or women, or man or men, or German Shepard makes you feel an air hockey puck, floating on electric air. When you get so happy, small engine churning goodness inside, you know it won’t last, and you better not become too giddy, rise to the height of pure ecstasy, because you know, from experience, the highest highs, the hottest hot, the deepest love, proves shallower, despondent, saccharine, with familiarity breeding lack of interest and base contempt. To be steadfast, through it all, working, thinking, playing, producing, growing, grieving, laughing, celebrating, cooking, eating and drinking, while we, the Two editors of the revivified new Beatnik Cowboy, with a pleasant harsh charm beckon you to Avalon.

 

We hope to do our best to present you, dear readers and contributors, the most favorable opportunity for continued enlightened sustainable growth. May the new Renaissance begin.

 

Thank you for joining us on the Journey.

 

The Editors of the original Beatnik Cowboy

Stephen Jarrell Williams

Warning!

They’re coming down the street
A mob breaking into every house
Stealing
Raping
Killing

You weren’t prepared for this
Too many in the madness
Like a rolling tidal wave

You won’t run
This is your home
Your wife and kids hiding in the closet
Terrified
Crying
Praying

You only have a baseball bat
Ready to swing
When they break down your front door

You’re spitting blood you’re so angry
A rock bashing through the window
Footsteps swarming to your door

All those years preceding
Warning of this
And you didn’t believe
It could happen here.

 

Terror

Unbearable
Inaction at the sight of the scene
Those first seconds shocked

Ringing in the ears
Dry mouth

Someone’s blood spattered on your clothes
Then the screaming
Sirens
Faraway

Jerking into alertness
You begin to move to help

Later discovering you’re one of the dead.

Peter Magliocco

The Cyber Nude

Something in the face of catharsis
rivets me there, a docking phobia
in spaces of collective minds
while mine, a static electron,
circles some unknown nomenclature
to arrive at depictions of zero
What forces of truth could not reckon
your standing there, totally nude,
just a model for the first female
Sexpot-in-space?
All that the computer downloaded
while I slept,
configuring Eve’s tantalizing torso
for the cyber gods unknown.
How do I dematerialize
the corporeal hoax of myself
& enter into her naked proximity?
Forever violating it now
I feel her pixel breasts, Tech-master,
but my software has expired

 

Ross Vassilev

the skull and the rose

when the face
of the clock
shatters;
while
the flies
crawl
the walls
dreaming
of libertarian
socialism;
while
America
goes broke
from
endless
unwinnable
wars
in faraway
lands—
there’ll be
time enough
for
the skull
and the rose,
for
the raven
in the fire
of my endless
night.

 

another anarchist manifesto

in your democracy
of corporate jets
and homeless families living in shelters

in your republic
of killer cops
and nuclear bombs and drone strikes

there’s still a handful
of noble Marxists
that you’ve locked up in your
prison-industrial complex

or you’ve buried them six feet under
to fertilize your fields of Monsanto GM crops
somewhere out in Kansas

so long as the sheeple
keep paying their taxes and keep on
keeping their mouths shut

and you can kiss my fucking anarchist ass

while the ghost of Howard Zinn chuckles
as the empire smolders away into the ether
just like he said it would.