Your Anger’s An Inspiration

…until you look at it more closely.
All of that energy is fuel,
if you could focus and channel it
into something creative.. who knows?
You could just have a masterpiece
of some kind upon your hands.
You could really get things done
with that coursing through your veins.
Wade through mountains
and punch stars right out of the sky.
Just imagine the good you could do?
You could help thousands of people
get their own lives back on track.
Explore the four corners of the globe,
invent something fantastic
or discover something unbelievable.
But, you can’t switch targets, can you?
All of that passion and enthusiasm
has become a personal prison cell.
Where you pace bored back and forth
hating everything and everyone
except he who actually put you there.

© Paul Tristram 2016

Tooth & Nail

Some people have constant help
with everything they choose to do,
they barely wrinkle into old age.
Never knowing what the inside
of a ‘Penny Jar’ looks like
and can still remember, vividly,
that one time that boy
punched them back in Junior School.
Those kind of people are not for me,
I see no depth nor character there
but good luck to them
I’d swap a weekend of their easiness
every six months of my life, happily.
I prefer the Beggars, the Vagabonds
the Lost, the Ones drunk and scarred
inside and out, howling at the moon
and 75% insane, The Ones unbroken
inside after beating after beating.
The foodbank queuing Single Mother
with pride and defiance still upon her face.
The Downtrodden but still swinging,
Survivors who have to fight Tooth & Nail
for every meagre thing that they’ve got.

© Paul Tristram 2015

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Peace/Love/Empathy

The Editors

Live Again

 

Lift the veil

Saunter in the sun

Mope at Mona Lisa

Shout at Shenanigans

Break out of your shell

Melt the expectations

Forge your happiness

Pester yourself

Manifest your dreams

Swim in the Pacific

Laugh at the moonlight

Reimagine your life

Over seventy years after World War II’s Nazi Holocaust, then the killing fields of blood soaked Cambodia in the 1970’s, we now have more fossils to dig. But paleontologists don’t know these young bones. They are now found in the sand, dug up by yellow backhoes and pulled from the pit by busy peacekeepers. They were laid down on their back. Their hands behind their head. And shot one by one down the long line of the shooting gallery. Then kicked down a hole they had excavated with their sweat and fears minutes before it became their final place of rest.

But the dead never rest. They are restless. And so are the living.

So what Mass funeral should we pray to?

 

 

Chris Butler

I Shall Return

 

I remember the ladies

during the time I spent at Hell House

in Pattaya, Thailand.

There was Bamboo,

who liked to

put things in her mouth,

and Bee, beautiful, breasts

the size of cantaloupes,

slim but stacked – rare

for a Thai woman.

Both did anal and

lined up on the

“we do anal” side

of the yellow line.

The girls worked

best as a team

and I would hire

them for hours,

ordering up joints

and shots of tequila

while Japanese schoolgirl

porn played on the

large TV mounted

high upon the wall.

The other girls would

secretly bring us ya ba as the

management frowned

on the use of hard drugs

on the premises.

After my allotted five

hours or so we went

to a short-time hotel

bringing five more

women for the after

sex orgy; me seven women,

beer

and hetero-lesbianism.

Me choreographing

the girls as a hyper-sexualized

porn director.

I didn’t think circumstances

could get any better,

and to think of it

from then up to now,

some ten years later

they haven’t.

Lordy,

I can’t wait to get

back to Thailand.

 

Furniture

 

Did Memorial Day approaching

fuel my dream of a kid I knew

who’d served in the Marines?

We loved the horses but underage,

jumped fences, outran cops

to get a bet down.

When I awoke we were at a window

cashing winning tickets.

Saw him last at the Narragansett

Park under last race lights.

Not for nothing, he was a heavy smoker

and my memory squinted through

a fog to make certain it was him.

His older sister dated a guy who wore a black

leather jacket: “Love Hurts” in big white

letters on its reverse.

In the Corps also, he counseled Vets

after city trash truck work wore him down.

Liver disease failed to count

his medals, finished him off.

She had beautiful eyes but cancer didn’t

care how startling their blue.

My old gambling friend was in Nam too.

He went into furniture repair

and refinishing after discharge.

I hoped the ponies still mattered

and I pictured Marlboro ashes

mixed with stripping fluid

on an old Racing Form spread

on his shop floor—

tobacco and solvent fumes

inciting memories of long ago

horses we’d bet not war.

 

Thomas M. McDade

‘1-800-CAPITULATE’

I understand
the struggle

What’s the point
having to exist
in a world of
darkness
if you’re the only
course of light

All these hideous
people and their
ugly actions

No appreciation
for the splendor
of white roses
planted in
the cemetery

They call it
the easy way out
If it was so easy
it would happen
more often

Plenty of folks
wanna do
themselves
the favor
but lack the guts
required for this
life altering decision

The world is
an ugly place to be
You could die
young and beautifully
as they grow uglier
each passing season

The last laugh
could be yours

 

 

 

 

 

My Salvation

I always think in
terms of more misery
than joy

there is joy and
plenty of it in life
but for me I think
too much of the difficult
times

than the happy
content times in
the past and possible
future

as for the present
I’m happy just not
to cry.

The Hair Starts Growing Upwards on the Neck (and therefore it should be shaved)

The beard grooming specialist
said if you don’t have a well
trimmed beard it means you
just don’t care.
Exactly, I said.

Death, The Final Frontier

I tired to remember
to forget.

Do the things we can
not think about.   Exist?
Only in infinity
and imaginations
and melatonin driven
dreams
outside the Universe,
probably.
Though it is said
by some, for eternity
to be real, any
combination or singularity
of thought is possible
and may have a possibility
of being reality,
if it can be thought.
And, if endless infinity
does hold sway,
since as it has
already
been said,
“The [present] Universe
is far stranger than
we can imagine” (Issac Asimov).
Unless, of course,
we consider eons
into the future,
when our Sun eventually
blows up/burns out/stops shining
and we have not transferred
to artificial intelligence
indestructible, non-aging,
self-rejuvenating some
type of organic or not
“machines,”
rather like
we are now,
but healing
much longer lasting
than we currently are, or
in a final analysis,
of course, if we are
mute-silent, and
very much
stone cold Dead.
Though even when expired
we
live as much-motion
atoms, nuclei, quarks.
It then appears,
if life, as well
as Death, we are
so gloriously
and persistently,
indestructible.
Recycling all the time.

 

Semisonic Closing time

 

Drifting into this: slower, slower…,

World – here, in this obscure

Subculture we live and breathe

Free of your 9 – 5.  The traffic jams

Never that far from your nose.

See me shuffling down Virginia

Avenue in these old shoes

In this midnight lullaby’s postcard dream.

Sleeping here and there

From the back of street bars

Occasionally woken by the piano

Player playing for beer and cigarettes.

Behind his sunglasses

His frontage knowing

Closing time brings him an end

To another day

As the night rolls out

The bar throws out

Into the ever longer

I pass by your window

As the last night bus

All life goes on – bars open again.

Now I’m smoking cigarettes
And I strive for purity
And I slip just like the stars
Into obscurity

 

Grapefruit Moon Tom Waits