Cousin Doobie passed me my first joint…

 

I was thirteen,

we stood beneath the pine trees and he asked me who I liked in class.

I told him no one… he said “That can’t be right, there must be someone.”

So I told him about Jenny

 

the kiss in front of the basketball trophies.

He punched my arm and said “My man! tell me what happened next.”

Sister Lucille caught us, and despite her palsy, she paddled me senseless,

my ass, a hue of blue I have only seen once, and have yet to see since.

 

By the third hit of Doobie’s trees, the pine trees and were soft and fuzzy, and the azure sky

puffy with clouds, held an infantile amazement.

“So why don’t you like Jenny?” Doobie’s eyes squinting through the smoke.

“It’s not that I don’t like her, it’s just,

 

she has a boyfriend and she’s white and black boys aren’t real boys to white girls.”

The sky is filled with Peter Cottontails and clown faces, the happy kind of clown faces, not

the child terrorizing Pennywise scary clown stuff,

and there’s cotton puffs sprouting in my mouth.

 

And Doobie said “forget that old nun

kiss anyone you wanna kiss as long they wanna kiss you.”

Now it feels as if there is a box of tissues stuffed between teeth and gum and cheek, and all I can do is smile and nod and sit admid the pine needles,

 

and Doobie prods, cajoles me, tell him more about the real boy bit.

I whisper my parched condition he offers me a swig of my father’s Stroh’s,

it helps but only slightly.

Another swig of beer, and the teary eyed story of yet another classmate; Julie,

 

prettiest girl with a uni-brow you ever did see; On a dare I asked her to ride the rides with me

(Waldemeer Fun Park, class trip) she said yes, she even held my hand; We rode the Skyride and the Spider and the Tilt-a-whirl

and right before we into the Whacky shack she said it.

 

“I want to go in here with a boy.”

I don’t know what she thought I was, but I knew what she meant.

and Doobie said “forget that thick eyebrow chic too.”

And with that Doobie became Buddha before I knew who Buddha was,

 

he preached love and kindness, he was a light-skinned Dr King preaching oneness,

he was Richard Pryor with a southern drawl. He was the only one I ever told about Julie

And then the bunny rabbits and the happy clowns told me to go in the house,

and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pour a big cup of milk,

 

and watch cartoons. (the Flintstones was on)

So I did just that.

Doobie sat on my parents front lawn, content,

watching the animated sky.

 

 

 

Everything but…

i wish i could leave the scabs alone
write poems to the moon or the soft green glow of the smoke detector, anything but you
anything but four AM moves from the couch to the floor and back again, anything but the mist of bodies absent touch or scent or rhythm anything but the Coltrane playing my head and the chorus of forgotten shoe strings anything but you
but it’s always you isn’t it and when the moon ain’t full there’s still a sliver of something between us and when soft winds blow and the bats flap their wings against a black August sky and church bells are silent, and the spider builds its web in the uncut grass and the cigarette stays unlit and the scars just won’t heal, anything but you, anything but you
anything but you

 

Hello Beatniks,

I trust you’ve all been well. I just completed the initial installment of the three part “Autobiography Of Me: Viva My Existence!” This will be a three book series covering the periods of my life from 0 – 30, 31- 50, and 51 – as close as death as possible. This first book I shall entitle: “The First Third” taking cue from Neal Cassidy who wrote and published his own book “The First Third” intending to write the other two thirds later in life. But he died before even attempting these further works. Apparently he died of exposure trying to count the number of railroad ties between two cities in Mexico. His last words were supposed to have been something like 450,792.

Of course the esteemed Beatnik Cowboy Press will be publishing these exciting new works. And I’m sure the fact-checkers will be lined up to purchase their copies, for the sake of future reference. I’ve solved the riddle of what came first the chicken or the egg and extrapolated on it. I’ll share later the answer. The new question is what came first the cow or the human? You see when I was in prison in Cambodia there was a fellow of Indian dot decent there and as both fluent English speakers we bonded. He called himself @. @ informed thou he was from a long line of Brahman in India though he was from Australia where his parents were teachers. Anyway he shared the first humans were born of one of the four bovine stomachs. That’s why the cow is sacred in India. I told him about my idea for sacred cow hamburgers and we only got in one fight during our entire time in prison together. The fight occurred when I had a mid-afternoon nightmare during nap time. I awoke with the intention of attacking the skinny, poorly uniformed, unarmed guards. While advancing on the guard brethren I had the sense to cry out to @ attack me! And he did. We had a slug fest and apparently he beat me out of my ‘fight the screws intention’. I thanked him and started engaging him concerning the scientific fallacy of the different human ‘races’ (and ethnicities) and which breed of cow birthed the Chinese? In the end he cryptically said ‘some men smoke, but Fu Manchu’. I countered with; ‘It’s a great day for the race!’ He said what race? And I had to tell him, ‘the human race!!!’ Then I suggested to my cow parent brother, ‘why don’t dogs dance?’ Why, they have two left feet I intoned! Then I grew grave, extremely concerned and a big throbbing vein showed bulging down my forehead. I leaned in and asked conspiratorially, what’s ‘The Meaning of Life?’ He became distant contemplative, his eyes rolled back in his head and he went into immediate trance. Finally, after much quaking and third party channeled gibberish from a dead virgin ninety year old Thai king I had to break it to him. “Hey man relax’ I said, ‘it’s a movie by Monty Python. We embarked then and there on a lighthearted discussion of timelessness.

We didn’t finish the discussion. That’s the way prison bullshitting goes. Time ran out during our mutual contemplation of timelessness. Talk about your non-irony. I was sprung, they let me go. All baseless charges dropped. I said, ‘Sorry’. @ got out soon after me and when he came by my home (I was living at the hotel I ran at the time, in Siem Reap he said he wouldn’t tell the others where I was.

But gosh, enough about me. Though my non-totally off the wall poems keep getting rejected, I know yours won’t. Especially here. So past them in or attach and send ’em in, viruses, anthrax spores and all. And keep on laugh smiling, hopefully moronically. Bye.

 

Relentlessly,

Randall One Editor 9/14/2017

 

what it is

by Ross Vassilev

a small rented apartment
one bedroom with water stains on the ceiling
from when it rained 5 days straight
a TV that fills my eyes with all the lies
that the powers-that-be want me to hear
and moronic bullshit
like Friends and Dancing with the Stars

my only escape is
100 books about the Mayans
and my rabid imagination

I imagine 10,000,000 Buddhas
falling from the sky
on clouds made of jasmine
I imagine North Korean troops
liberating Amerika
I imagine some topless beach in Denmark
all the girls playing volleyball
in the sun

I gave up on life getting better
a long time ago
so hand me another bottle,
friend.

 

The Perspicacity of Rain

by Stew Jorgenson

 

 

I wanted to talk about falling Romans,

declining imperatives,

large scale ineptitudes,

the shortage of elevated thinking,

high tech window peeping.

I wanted to say all

there is to say about

ideological turpitude,

hemispheric pressure,

moral viscosity,

social insolvency,

oceanic perturbances,

historical sediment,

and carbonated skies.

I wanted to spill my guts

in a violent rage of

righteous recompense

for the lost city on a hill,

its fraudulent afflictions,

intemperate thresholds,

shrinking civil habitat,

sacred insanities,

institutional atrophy,

cruel impotence,

blame games,

and the gurgling grudge

of third degree spurns

refusing to heal.

I wanted to rant about

the pitiful plight of injustice,

give people a reason

to vent about nothing,

gripe about grievances,

tongue tied imprisonments,

intractable resentments,

crippling betrayals,

emotional lacerations,

and decry the ruination of love.

I wanted to say something

that would make the sun bleed,

and beg forgiveness for its

smug indifference to our needs

but I didn’t want to get sidetracked by

celestial politics,

the co-mingling of souls,

animal magnetism,

longitudinal shortcomings,

aeronautical proclivities,

or mathematical probabilities in

the dissemination of kindness.

I thought that might sound

a bit whacked,

giving credence to all sorts of

paranoid prognostications by

gentrified social engineers

with slide rules and zip ties,

so I backed off on that program.

I also wanted to put in a plug for

compassionate forbearance,

and call attention to the

imaginative logistics

of wearing other people’s shoes.

But most of all,

I just wanted to take pleasure in

the abiding conviction of words,

peel back a few layers of

caterwauling concerns,

and declare how hard it is

to stay grounded in dreamscapes,

while groping for sentient cohesion

 

in the tangled tribulations of life.

 

 

HEALING TIME

She could have said anything:
she had the right to: tears
framed her eyes that looked
at me with such hurt that I
had to look away: she shook
her head and the tears
silently fell and I waited
for her words and then
they came, she said, quietly,
‘Leave me alone’
and I wanted to hold her,
to ask for her forgiveness,
I wanted to confess, I
wanted too much:
‘Okay’ I whispered and
I packed in quietness and
left my house-keys on the
kitchen table and closed the
door behind as I stepped back
into another fuck-up of my
own making,
leaving behind a wound,
that time would turn away
from.

“Petri Dish World”

 

Living under a microscope

In a petri dish world

Full of human music blues and

Dirty Harry amoebas

That vengefully destroy

All rational thought

 

Spinning tales of the stoned

From can to can’t

And basket case lies

About reflections

Of a floating world

 

We’re all the stars

Of our own movies

Eating frustration sandwiches

Made of the great

American death rattle

That kill all the extras

With untold truths

 

Stuck here

Somewhere over the rainbow

In a mad scientist’s laboratory

The three futures

That could have been

Have come and gone

Down the guilt party waterslide

And Google is our new God

 

 

***

 

“BFFs”

 

God and Satan

Secretly get along

Playing back alley craps

Between Heaven and Hell

Gambling for souls

 

Together they’ve compiled

The greatest rock supergroup

Of all time

And throw wild parties

That all of our favorite

Dead poets attend

 

They even have matching tattoos

On their asses

Of good and evil owls

With the roles reversed

Just for fun

Satan’s has a halo

God’s has horns

Acquired after a long night

Of heavy drinking

 

Once they had a falling out

Over a woman because

God is love but

Satan did that thing she liked

With his tongue

Yet they follow the code

Bros before hoes

So they’re still tight

 

Currently they’re locked

In a game of chess

That’s lasted for eons

Taking breaks

Now and then

To throw their parties

And go on benders

They’ve even agreed

On their next tattoo

“God + Satan

Best Frenemies Forever”

 

©James Dennis Casey IV

 

I read

 

that Audi Murphy
gave all
his medals
from the
war to
kids in
his neighborhood

I understand
but having
kids of
my own
I will
leave mine
to them

as payment
for the
year they
lived without
me while
I was
in Afghanistan

and for
all the
years they
have lived
without me
since I
came home.

 

Sketches, panels and planets

new gods and forever people

oh, where have the humans landed

in a tidal wave of inhumanity

screaming “cosmic retribution!”, frogs from the sky

lightening zapped by hovering squids from another planet,

each being a universe in the pocket careening into a nihilistic void

bursting into new directions in the quasars of minds yet to be born,

the infinite crisis of anti-life equation is not not learning- we don’t know how to live

but how we are not allowed to live, rebels of delusion,

mirroring counter-revolutionary tactics,

the constellations come together,

Orion with his belt makes a club of mars,

Jupiter splits apart, innards of creme corn

and interstellar strippers made of jello and (here all thought it was gas)

existence, exit stance,

another wave of reality

forget the fourth and fifth worlds,

demand to break the wall

between self and source, they say mathematics is the language,

words are treason, but the mystery is breathing,

the philosophy is marvel in the elseworlds of confinement,

the miracle to concede defeat in the land of unliving

an embracement of tomorrow’s glory

when moment is what you are without meaning,

true being, serenity of the soul, there’s your earthen saga

and heroic myth of the ages recycling into another dawn tinged transmigration

of starved stardust exploding angels and the nine fingers of nirvana,

but what about the thumb?

up my dead wandering desolate ass, wrestling a stranger in town – the valley of bones

where giant men in unstable molecular suits are testament highways

warnings to lovers of all ages

gracing the wild and crazy eternity.

 

MURMUR

There is an echo
That resonates
Throughout her soul
A light
Where all darkness
Disappears

Her smile
A mere second
Which lasts
An eternity