Richard Brotbeck
IS NOTHING SACRED
Open your books,
let’s begin,
here at the Church of the N,
NOTHING is said,
from beginning to end,
as long lists of NOTHING are read,
again,
Sing along.
Sing the long, slow songs.
Hear the words,
hear NOTHING, hear N,
again and again,
rejoicing in NOTHING,
join N,
Bow to the alter of N,
as old gray men,
reach the N,
praying for NOTHING,
pray again,
NOTHING is sacred,
amen.
Ross Vassilev
crank
the bar looks really long
when your head is resting on it
the Asian barmaid just went
to the bathroom
there’s a scratch on the bar
shaped like Elvis
I remember Bill Keckler’s poem
where he wrote
“the opposite of whiskey
is not God”
well, the opposite of hell
is not people
as I’ve sure found out
our universe is inside
a black hole
a black hole is a singularity
and the singularity is me
lost in time
and lost in meaning
(maybe).
Edward Lee
BOOM
Boom, boom, boom,
comes the noise
from the wrong side of my ear,
echoing and bouncing
across the jagged contours
of my cranium,
roughing the bone,
scraping, scratching,
cracking.
Boom, boom, boom,
is all I know now,
tonight,
as I feel the black oil
coat my brain,
feel it seep into my mood,
into my mind,
my heart,
my soul.
The whites of my eyes
are darkening now,
my nostrils bubbling,
my mouth filling,
while this insomnia dented night
stretches before me,
behind me,
over me,
falling back onto itself,
echoing
boom, boom,
boom.
THE DOUBTER DOUBTS HIS DOUBT
I am searching for a light,
though I know there is
no light.
I know,
and yet, yet,
I do not know,
or I wish not to know.
I wish to be wrong.
I hope
to be.
I want there to be…
something,
When I know there is nothing.
I want, I
want
to not know
what I know.
I wait,
as open as I can be,
for a light
to shine
where no light has ever shone
before,
where no light will shine,
I know.
John Blandly
Heavy Metal Narcissist
I invented narcissism.
I majored in narcissism.
Narcissism is me!
All smart politicians, artists and poets are narcissists.
Was Emily Dickenson a narcissist?
Joan of Arc?
Sure.
There is no narcissist hall of fame.
I don’t think you are surprised.
Descartes proved there are other people.
He was a narcissist.
If he had said,
I am a narcissist,
therefore, I am,
like he wanted to,
he wouldn’t get all the good publicity.
Don’t go “all in” as a narcissist.
That is the wise move.
Narcissist anthem?
There is none.
Narcissists must come clean and come out of the closet.
Don’t be a closeted narcissist.
Man up.
Face your fears—the fear of being accused of an unreal zeal.
Like a Houdini,
you may slip out of your straight jacket sometimes.
So, be cool.
Mr. Misunderstood, that’s your name.
Or, if you are a girl, Miss Misunderstood.
Me new navel—I mean, novel,
“The History of Narcissism,” is selling well in the gift shops of mental institutions.
“Brilliant! A work of genius!”
–Albert Einstein
This is my favorite blurb.
Competition is keen among narcissists.
This is about the only thing keen about us.
Outlier,
outsider, that’s us, the big Ns.
Be confident and undeterred–after all, you are the best!
We are very upset with all the single white gunmen among us.
We would like to eject them with extreme prejudice,
just to give us more favorable airtime.
We love airtime.
The lone white gunman academy diploma should be a ticket for admission to the prison for criminally insane.
Are we super paranoid—like folks are watching us?
Well, if you spent as much time in jail as us, you’d understand.
There are not many narcissist clubs.
All this delusions of grandeur crap–where is the grandeur vending machine?
We’d like to cash in some cans and get some real grandeur.
Et tu, Brutus?
Folie a deux is twice as bad among us.
Delusions of grandeur are the je ne se quoi for a narcissist.
Come si,
come sa.
Come one, come all.
There is little to be gained by being a narcissist.
Who defends narcissists from unwarranted attacks?
Not me.
Who will be the last narcissist standing?
Me, I’m just a 10 cent narcissist.
Troy R. McGee Jr.
The 10th or 12th Greatest Story Ever Told (maybe).
When I was 16, I came home stoned one night. It was a strong, lingering high which I couldn’t shake, which would only lead to sleep. The kind of high where you swear you have a clown face, and you can in no way look into a mirror without giggling at your image. No one seemed to care that I was home late, and it was probably assumed that I was high, but it was fairly known that I had committed myself to living, shall we say, outside the grace of God. I grabbed myself a snack and moved toward my room in the dark.
It’s my room, it has been my room since I have lived here. It’s actually the parsonage of my grandpa’s church and my mom and my sisters and I are staying here rent free. Meanwhile, some old bitches from the church gripe and gossip and we never seem to get ahead and manage to get out, and the only lesson consistently learned is that poverty makes you hate yourself, makes you hate the people looking down at you, looking at you askance because yes, you’d steal, yes, you’d scam and break the law and yes, you’d sin if you could only get one step ahead of the hell you have to live in and work and make a little money and maybe one day rest and dream your ascent out of this hell or finish your damnation and maybe sleep another hour from your awful work and maybe get these goddamned eyes off of you and live the life others seem to be able to live in with such ease.
God! Everyone wants to have God in their life, God on your side, God as your Father (or Mother), but God doesn’t do that. God gave his Son. If you are a child, God gave his Son to be your brother, if you are a rebellious child like me, the comparison to Jesus will drive you crazy. If you are a parent, you can take Jesus into your heart and raise him like a little child, raise him up to be a man, to be a man unlike your own son, a son who will be what and how you want him to be, not a 46 year old “writer,” not the one producing this blasphemy, the one rambling because you won’t believe what I’m going to say, you won’t believe what I believe, but maybe I’m dreaming my own damnation, maybe this is a vision of my own hell and you should just check it out because it’s fire to my flesh, it’s scourge to my spirit and it makes me scream and it hides the music of death and I don’t want to die and die and die and suffer the tortures of the damned without you understanding a few minutes of what killed and killed and killed and kills me still and always will.
There he was in my room. Jesus. Yes, Jesus Christ, the Savior of Mankind, the guy in the Bible, that dude. He was in my room, and my parents were there with him. My parents have been divorced since I was 8, but there they were, together, with their Son, given by God. There they were, raising Jesus. There’s no way they would be hanging out, my dad always referred to my mom as “that cunt,” a fair assessment I suppose, as I have myself been an ex and can’t dispute that it probably feels good to be away from me after being with me. The point is, there they were together, they had somehow resolved their differences, despite their apparent hatred for each other, and they were raising a 16 year old Jesus. I don’t know how I knew it was Jesus, but you just know. Being raised religious; Pentecostal, actually as a member of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, I can say that we do know God and His Son Jesus personally, and on sight.
His homework was stacked on the little table by the door, you could see it was done and he was ready for school in the morning. Jesus had not dropped out like myself, and no GED score would have spared them that humiliation. Wait! Where were my posters, my stereo, my heavy metal tapes and records? Someone had cleaned out my room! My Slayer poster where someone had carved the logo into their arm! A feeling of dread overtook me as I noticed, the floor was cleaned and vacuumed. Certainly, my little tray was gone, you know the one. My mind raced for a moment contemplating what I would have had to explain about this room, and then I noticed it. The blackest rage overtook me suddenly, and I shouted “How come Jesus has long hair? How can he have long hair!?!” they were always fucking with me about cutting my hair. I ran away from my dad’s 3 times, including spending a whole summer living in Las Vegas at my friend Nick’s house and hiding when my dad and my stepmom showed up. I promised my mom I would cut my own throat rather than cut my hair, and just try it, the hair gets cut and the very next opportunity would mean a gruesome suicide, and it mostly worked because I made myself so much work for single parents, and the gossip began again, and “those poor people, that boy is in to something Satanic, and no, Johnny Dale, you can’t hang out with him, and no he’s not a good guy, but yes, she’s heavy handed and he left her and became a Mormon, (whispered) ball breaking bitch I heard . . .”
They looked at me with the predictable resigned look, like when you’re going to rehab, or a group home, or everyone in the house wants to do an intervention, or everyone got saved while you were out partying for the weekend and you can’t stay here and they’ve already had a really good cry about it and somewhere was a mound of Kleenex destroyed in your name, like an Old Testament sacrifice. “You only ever think of yourself,” my mother leveled the accusation (men don’t really speak in the family, unless in threats, and I assumed my Dad wanted to impress Jesus with how sensitive he was, how much he had, as a man, patiently endured). “We are raising Jesus in God’s will, not yours,” she pointed to the heavens. “You could never be able to get yourself ready for the nail. Would you ever sacrifice yourself for the World?”
Now, you can believe what you want about Jesus. I know what I saw, and I’ve made clear that I know how that motherfucker can be. I know many of you love him, always have. I know you don’t really know me. I’ve revealed myself to you as an unreliable narrator, and if you really know me, I may have lied to you or stolen from you or ripped you off on a lid or whatever, so you got no reason to go along with what I say, but that motherfucker was smirking that good son little suck up asshole face behind them, especially when I noticed the hair. “What the fuck are you looking at motherfucker!?! You better change your goddamn face when you look at me!” My Dad stepped in front of the Lord then, my ears were ringing by that time and I couldn’t tell what he was saying, some shit about respect and you know all that crap about the son against the father and the mother against the daughter and let’s not forget not peace but a sword and a house divided against itself and I could tell a decision had been made in my absence. I was leaving, that was clear, and it would be without my little tray, you know the one, and without my stereo or heavy metal tapes and records, and without the Slayer poster with the carved logo in the arm.
Daniel de Culla
Dr. Randall Rogers
Dust Rescind
Imagine
death is
gonna
be
like a
well-staged
play,
as life is
an unrehearsed
funeral.
Dread the
unthinkable
thirteen-foot
tapeworm
inside
and
out.
Oye vey,
oye vey,
the rabbi say.
Help
It’s
my truth
but it’s not
necessarily
reality;
masturbation
is making
me blind!
Poetic Genius Hole
Poems come
to me
almost as often
as hearty, deep,
throaty, under-
wear billowing,
flammable,
gaseous, methane,
farts thud machine-
gun rat-a-tat-tat
outta my
open gaping
dingleberry-wreathed
asshole…whole.
Go! Trump Go!
Writing poetry
classics
is easy if you
don’t know
what you’re doing.
Just like being
President.
War
I remember
the day
not least
adumbrated
liberated
ingratiated
in pieces
shoot
it was bad;
heart, spleen,
stomach, lung,
splattered
chest shot
machine-gunned
during war,
what is it good for?
Ask anyone nowadays
and
they’ll tell you;
absolutely nothing!
Coiffed Crown Confusion (Crystal Blue Persuasion)
I can’t wait
to
die
and
reincarnate
as a guy with hair.
The Fleeting Now
We may find
the point in
space
but not in
time,
I imagine.
But someday
mathematics will
allow us to reach
a non-present now
outside the mind
Where was x
throughout history?
And where shall it be
in future?
Escape!
Float mystic wings
into the silence
of a noisy yawn.
Life
is a picked grape
wilting,
wrinkling into
a raisin
dangling
into mouths
hungry
for existence.
Long live
and bless
those able
to resist it’s
charms
its pains
its heights
of joy
despair
or perhaps
grant them
an early death
the shining darkness
from where peace
triggers the heart
from yesteryear
and before
to lay flat upon
the unburdened
plane and echo
mysteries of
coming surfeit.
Daniel de Culla
BILLIARDS AND DARTS
A teacher asks Little James
What balls are those that don’t have hairs
And Little James answered quickly:
-None, teacher, because all the balls
And more those of Villar
Have hairs.
There was laughter by spoonfuls
Like garlic soups
In Roa de Duero, Burgos
Before corralling bulls.
Little students from Aranda de Duero
Know this joke very well
And always talk of it
When they go to the wine cellar
And, into the deep of it
They touch the balls among them
To see which of them
Have more grown hair.
To who that has the longest hair
They sent him to Burgos
With free expenses
As a prize for competing
In a competition of Billiards and Darts
To a place called “At Plane”, in Gamonal
Telling him at the Bus Station
Before car beging to move:
– Take care, Villar, you’re going to Burgos
To compete at Plane
Ones with darts, others with sticks”.
-Daniel de Culla
PLANET TRUMP
Trump, gypsylike to, illustrates
The scintilla of life:
Making a Trump taking many lives
Wishing and hunting
Ancient skills of skinning.
His powerful majic odor
Dilates our nostrils
And quickens our hearts.
He will be written with berry juice
Since his brain is as a tortilla
made with turtle’s eggs
coming to Act, coming to Eat
With Putin and his Ego
Within the necessities
Of all the livings.
-Daniel de Culla
FROM BEGINNING TO END
From beginning to end
is explained absolutely everything worth knowing
about absolutely nothing.
Why not’?
We felt that the Beginning is a true leaf
of the inmortal literature
as a side of bacon changing the pig
discovering the best way to keep its legend alive
encouraging mytology
and the controversy about it:
Sun wil have its tide spreading over our maps
Moon remembering us we were gone
and we still sing everything waiting
for birth, death
inside this den of us.
Spring, Summer, Autum, Winter
coming with feelings of love, radiance
quiet and delight
As ever.
-Daniel de Culla
WE ARE ALL A LIKE
Crossing the Street
I’m just celebrating
The feline sense of “Like”.
How do You like Me?
I like more bananas than slices of water-melon.
And I really feel like
And yet I induced it like
That is like.
What is he like?
The like as Me.
With my own words to receive
To touch, to perceive:
Baby is like to live; Old is like to die.
You have eyes like stars
And the face like an Ass.
I’m going to divorce You
For that¡
Like father, like son.
– Daniel de Culla
Original artwork by Daniel de Culla
Original photography by Daniel de Culla
Gwil James Thomas
Five Finger Fillet.
The games had started innocently
enough,
with the radiators on maximum –
as the Christmas snow
twisted and turned outside.
I wasn’t even that competitive but
the explosive reaction
that I’d get from
my brother was always worth it.
I was button bashed
at Rocket League,
thrashed at Ping Pong,
but I smashed him at
Shut The Box
and after my brother
then lost at Ker Plunk –
he vowed to beat me
after he’d rolled
another
blunt.
Once, the twenty minute ceasefire
drew to an end my brother ran off
to the kitchen –
returning red eyed and grinning with
a chopping board, kitchen knife
and stopwatch.
“Five finger fillet!” he said.
“Really?” I replied.
“We’d play it all the time when I was
working out at sea –
those rough waves were
good teachers! Now, put your
hand on the chopping board!”
he demanded.
“Aren’t you supposed to use
your own hand?”
“That’s no fun!”
“The whole thing looks far from fun.”
“Fine, start with me.” my brother said
and put his hand on the chopping
board.
My brother then set the stopwatch
for a minute stretched out his pinkie
and thumb, as he then counted
each
stab
on
the
chopping
board
whilst I built up momentum before
the stopwatch sounded.
“48 stabs!” my brother shouted.
“It was more than that!” I argued.
“I was counting them.”
“Fine, now it’s my turn to count.”
I replied.
I got the stopwatch ready and
put my hand on the chopping board,
like some slab of meat
in front of a butcher.
“Go!” I said.
With a deep concentration I counted
the knife once –
before I felt a searing pain
as the blade pierced my finger
and saw blood on the chopping board.
“You got my fucking hand!
You did that on purpose!” I said.
“What?” he replied.
He put the knife back down,
before I pushed him onto the floor
as he performed some strange
wrestling manoeuvre and I flew back
onto the shelving unit,
taking him with me –
as a vase toppled off and landed
on his shoulder
shattering into a million pieces.
Then there was silence.
I had no idea if he’d just
lost five finger fillet –
or he’d secretly won by stabbing me,
but he looked over and grinned,
holding his shoulder
as I held my hand
knowing that the games were over
and that life wasn’t something won
it was something that you played,
or at least it played you.
The Beatnik Cowboy 