Breakfast News
Give me a break
The breaking news
Just comes in
It doesn’t shock me
Whoever is making the news
Has made it news
All is too apparent
Give me a break
Here’s some other news
It comes from another source
Making completely opposite
Sense. Give me a break
No more news to break
All becomes nonsense
Do I need first to know the
Source? Give me a break
Are we fed up with news or
Hungry for true news
Give me a break
There may never be any truth
Author: The Beatnik Cowboy
Kayla Randolph
I’ve Gotten Lucky I Haven’t Been Lucky
In a dorm room. In a hotel. In life, I suppose. In a bed of four-leaf clovers. At the end of a rainbow. Atop the contents of a pot of gold (Breaking Bad style). Never near a broken mirror. Never underneath a ladder. Never in front of a black cat witness. In the pile of shoulder-thrown salt. Near at least one rabbit's foot and at least a few ladybugs. By a horse with all four horseshoes. After breaking a wishbone. (I'm tired. I wished to not be so lucky.)
Tatianna Apodaca
THE HUMBLE POET
To be a poet.
Even the word,
“Poet.”
Grimy and self-important as it rolls off the tongue.
It’s the worst word to bring up in conversation and even worse to self-characterize as.
We go around the room in a circle answering one by one, name something you made recently.
I was near the midpoint, I had some time to think.
Others describe the garage cabinets, engagement plaques, and sentimental crochet for sick friends. I could say I like to bake, or do crafts, or tell the story of that one time I built a lopsided plant stand for my sister.
I could. But no.
I’m a poet.
I must “humbly” mention that I don't merely make, I create. Create things that are high above all their heads. I face birth and death and betrayal all in a day's work.
I could characterize myself as deep and brooding and “more than meets the eye” with the slip of that single word.
I nod and smile as a couple shares a story about how they met in college. I can safely tune this part out.
Poet.
In stating this, I admit defeat. There’s nothing humble about it. Humble is the cake I made last week, even if it was earl grey flavored and made from a vintage-passing tin.
Humble are the baby blankets I embroider for my friends when yet another announces they’re pregnant and the only story I have to follow up with is that I broke up with yet another in a long line of short-lived romances.
It’s closer to my turn.
I feel warm, the feeling I get when I have too much time to think, or make too much eye contact.
I have the chance to make a simple, sweet impression. Reveal to them my warmth and homemaking skills. Maybe one of them has a brother, or a son, or a tolerably handsome dentist to set me up with. But my ego itches, the need to impress practically spilling from my mouth.
It’s my turn.
When it all comes down to it, when the eyes are watching and I need something to offer, I can’t help myself.
I tell them I’m a poet.
Their response, “I thought you worked in marketing?”
Daniel S. Irwin
Life
Some have
Memories and dreams.
Some have
Scars and nightmares.
Me?
Just a hangover, a reputation,
And a crooked tattoo.
Luscious Blood
In life, she was a real lush.
Now a vampire, she only
Sucks the blood of alcoholics.
Fortunately for me, since I
Graduated rehab, I'm only
A pint a night man.
Ian Mullins
She’s The One
some people fall through cracks
and have no means to stop
tumbling; while others learn
to like it, if not love it:
but there are some who throw
themselves down,
knowing that stretching a hand
further than it wants to go
is the only way
Everests are climbed,
base camps abandoned: and if
you find yourself alone
in the clouds and no one knows
you’ve made it to the summit,
all the more reason to sing
the song of the climbers,
the tumblers, the dreamers
high on a ledge for so long
they no longer know climbing
from falling, acrobats
from clowns: tying themselves down
for another long night
dreaming of descent come morning
Bruce Mundhenke
In Plain Sight
The prophets have given their warnings,
And signs that the blind could see,
The muslims want to annihilate Israel,
The UN wants to rule the world,
Russia is warning the West,
The U.S. wants to retain world power,
But is rapidly losing its grip,
While the world is obsessed with the cares of this life,
Satan has taken the reins,
The Destroyer will be loosed from the abyss,
And begins his path of destruction,
That continues until he is stopped,
And a rod of iron will then keep the peace,
That had taken so to come.
A. Scott Buch
THE LOOK THAT SEVERS YOU IS NO GHOST
How can the firm
ground of wet grass,
dewy toes of the barefeet of liberty
be based on the wastes
of bourgeois abstraction,
like rulers invented god.
Out of the unconscious measurements
domination grew up building edifices
as a way of producing slaves
who we remain
believing our consciousness was unreal
compared to their reign.
What is the big bang to a subject in solitary,
on account of a soul wringing abstraction
bodies bow to in a hegemon’s wake,
their banners draping a creep of emptiness
along soft cheeks bashed repeatedly
by the fist of an idea.
Was night created before the day,
as the ghost of my freedom
dissolves into these alienated forms?
Samuel Louis Spencer
Sourdough #12
You called me. You called me and maybe
you ran out of bread, perhaps you need
another loaf left at your doorstep.
You called me and said you found more
of my belongings, said I should come and
get them. You called so I’m driving
over, loaf of bread resting in the backseat
like the child we never had.
Randall K. Rogers
Evil, Old and Ugly
I first saw her in the elevator. It was just her and I. It was hard to believe my eyes. She might have been a good person, I don’t know. But it didn’t look like it. She had a glazed-over look. Her eyes were cloudy. She wore an unfocused blank stare.
What’s more, she was horribly old. Furthermore, sorry to say, she was hideously ugly. She looked like she’d die any moment or was already dead. I nodded hello but there was no recognition. She had an angry cast to her leathery, much wrinkled face. She stood there, hovering over her walker. I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, yet.
There was no question: she was beyond evil.
The next time I saw her it was again in the elevator. This time there were other people. When people got on, the expressions on their faces, shock. There she stood, blank milky stare, looking like the wickedest, darndest, most vile, harridan, dead-looking witch ever.
We were all scared. Some shuddered. Right out of a horror movie, she was. Frizzled long unruly hair. Some, I thought I did well, for one, tried not to have a conniption. A moment of shock, but standing there, as the elevator moved, some could not recover, could not stop their staring. Others came into the elevator, gasped in shock. Some threw their arms out, jumped a bit, maybe juggled whatever they held, eventually calmed down.
The lady stood there, hunched over her walker. She appeared blind but she wasn’t. She stared straight ahead and was silent. When it was her floor, she got off, walked with her walker like a perfectly ordinary old person. She liked our terror, we surmised. Just evil, she was. Probably a too real apparition. Somebody ought to do something. Out of the elevator she walked, smug-like, down the hall toward her room.
She wore old clothes. A nineteen twenties or thirties dress, lacey in design. I didn’t get a whiff of the old girl, but after she exited the elevator, one woman said, “Does she have any family?” The rest of us geezers didn’t know. “Never seen her before yesterday,” I said.
It was uncanny. If she tried to, she couldn’t have frightened us more. She was a vision of terror. Was she trying to appear like that? Dead, a cadaver? Nobody knew. Nobody knew where she came from. She was frightening. We all were old, dying was something that regularly happened at the home, weekly if not daily. Looking at her, it was hard.
She looked dead. Unkempt. Washed or not we didn’t care. She didn’t respond to anyone’s entreaties. She scared us, she reminded us of the dead we’d soon be. I mean, she was scary. One woman, “Is she gonna die?” she asked. Nobody knew what to say. She reminded us of our own short future. And, oh Lord, dead, we’ll look like that!
Yet she was alive. She should have been hidden. Or hidden herself. Her appearance was horrible, ugly, and deathly. She had to know her effect on people. “That’s why her family abandoned her here,” the people said.
Nobody liked her. We feared for our lives. She was too ugly, too hideous, to live. Was she the living dead? She looked it. She didn’t respond like a human. I thought about the crones of old. How often their surliness, bolstered by their old ugliness, nose warts, for example, their supposedly lascivious bewitching of young men, often sealed an old woman’s fate.
I thought, wow, that might happen here. History repeating. Naw….
Nobody saw her. After those few days on the elevator, she seemed to vanish. Nobody appeared to know where she had gone. We breathed a sigh of relief. No one could find her. That night, however, a spontaneous bonfire appeared in the landscaped back area behind the home. Flames leaped among the stacked wood. Woodsmoke smell, screaming, crackling and cackling, was heard all night long.
“Don’t rub it in,” scoffed a longtime resident, watching the old woman burn.
Previously published by Mad Swirl
Howie Good
Down by the Bay
A gray-haired man I immediately recognized as a tourist by his gaudy new outfit took a last puff on his cigar and tossed the butt into the bay. Against all good sense, I went up to him. “Why would you do that?” I asked, my voice shaking with anger. “Fishermen fish in this water, kids swim in it.” He seemed surprised by my vehemence. “But it’s organic,” he said, meaning his cigar. The man was evidently a chemist in addition to being an asshole. I turned away from him to look for my boys. They were off in the distance, searching the shoreline for sand crabs that know to bury themselves deep.
The Beatnik Cowboy 