Stephen Jarrell Williams

Under Their Thumb

Each city becoming like all other cities
Crowded rush for the fleeing dream

Each country becoming like all other countries
Government control with false ideals

Shrinking earth and core of consciousness
We the slave allowing vampire flies upon our face

Burning sun upon our bent backs
Making-love when it’s merely making flesh

Humming entertaining songs in our hyped heads
Deaf to the crying of consequence

Wanting bland contentment in the continuing chaos
Accepting the snuff of the fire within our hearts

But there’s always a few rebels beyond the grip
Pinpricks to the heavy thumb of the elite

And we’re gathering strength under their cocky blind eye
As they’re beginning to know what it means to bleed.
 

Dark Days

They are blinding us

So many starving and undernourished
So many fighting wars against ourselves
So many entertained into inaction
So many tortured with screams unheard
So many trying to resist what they don’t understand
So many stumbling

But still seeking the light.

The Good Doctor

Isn’t it nice? Our lofty analysis, that is. Scouring what is said, done, looking for patterns of wisdom. The Colombian Gold Stairway to Heaven, a new sense of a permanent now. Zero tolerance for future and past. The arresting of all those whom fail a drug test. For profit prisons, for lucky, arrested folks. For time spent in an educational institution comes with life-skill choices mandatory. One may learn 1) constant curious/continuously wanting or 2) waiting. You know it has been said, dear readers, those in prison should be freed and those that put them there should take their places. But of course with the new university prisons to be either free or in school matters not. But then again, it’s all a prison if you think about it, and freedom is after all the freedom to control, the market, drive your competitors out of business and charge whatever price you like. I know the answer, of course, is blowin’ in the wind, but I gotta ask: what is your stupid conclusion? The aforementioned sentence, was most uncalled for. And dammit, God-fucking dammit, I’m sorry.

Cuo bono, and Sonny two. It could be the sound, the meaning-effect, of one hand, one arm, of a one handed person, clapping, flailing away. The sound, the fury, what audacity to live! It is Patton-esque! It is what marks men, and makes them scratch. Newly fightin’ female U.S. soldiers, enjoy their company. Time spins an uncertain circle, wobbling, and needing linearity like the Invisible Man needs clothes. Or bandages, or eatin’ something, or wearing glasses on an enormous erection! Speak of it! In thine missives!! Live it! In thou slovenly graces! Oh idiot!! Come to me! Love bomb me baby!!!

Okay, a couple twenty years ago, I was lookin’ for a cult to join. Or one that would have me. But then, of course, like Groucho, I then couldn’t join that one. Sacred weed use, and sexual freedom with ugly guys, had to be high. LSD and mushroom ritual was a plus. Hippie freaky sexual nymphs and MLF bazongas. Bodacious tatas. Bhagwanger-Rashneesh-like, I wanted. But, as things would be, no cult would take me. I tried the Hare Krishna. I was still high on acid, had seen a Who show the night before, stayed up all night looking out my darkened room window. Saw someone with a can of gas go round an old Victorian house across the street pouring gasoline. Saw the house go up, fire engines, police, gathering people. Then, the house burned down, a charred ruin, everyone and everything gone. Dawn and hour away I still sat, tripping. Spewing “Wow”. That was weird. Then I got up, went to my 8:00 class and met the Krishna, dancing and chanting, playing the little finger cymbals. I inquired critically, and apparently deep introspective questioning of all critically is not their bag. I studied cults, or new religious movements, as they are less acerbically called. Couldn’t find one I didn’t like. Like at the fraternity, I was black balled by them all.

But hey, these poems we’ve published and those coming, are, more than quite simply, let us say, they are poems of courage. Tough little buggers. Poem for poem, I’d put ’em up against anything, say, Updike did, or Whitman. Poems of a coward, they are not. Mere Haggard fightin’ poems. Riverboat gambling poems. Whiskey rivers never runnin’ dry…. We encourage, good-bad, bad-good, solid trans-valuing work. Trans-value your values is the idea, in order to get closest to truth. Think of it, everything is its opposite, in truest reality. Big is small and hot is cold. In an infinite anything, like the universes are supposed to be, it all works out. Infinitesimally small from a certain point to never nothing is supposed to be larger (smaller?) in area more than the outward immeasurably large. When something is strong cold it burns hot. I don’t know if hot burns cold; a question probably best unsolved, by me at least, in self-experimentation. Personally.

So read! Submit! Subscribe! Get a Cowboy blog-published poem in and you may be in hard copy zine! Yee-haw it’s another day! A really, one big chunk ‘o’ a never-ending wake. We are timed here, on Earth. So get writing and remember. Hemingway said when asked how to succeed as a writer: “Stay healthy, and keep writing.” Vaya con aetheismo.

Randall K. “Doctor” Rogers 9:38 P.M. 1/24/2016 Rapid City, South Dakota, U.S.A.

Jonathan Beale

Darkness on the shore

 
The person on the shore – stands motionless.
Turned away from the seas action
As the viewer still blind to seeing
The wave overwhelming…
Then drawn; – viewing the rear of the beach.

Slowness of the animation: The creeping the crawling
there is disaster about, lurking…The clear
black and white, dissolving the coloured world.
The unquestioning, of being there at that time
And time. What is it that is here? This black against white.

Even the white fades in to a clear eternity as magic glass.
Revealing those whose eyes who see in…
And your all unknowing eye that must see out
That ocean all able to take the essence and leave.
The dregs swill around the seas bed and wash up – along, tomorrow….

Donal Mahoney

The World in the Year 3000

There are pockets
of them everywhere,
quiet and discreet.

Usually they meet
once a week
in private homes

in basements
some call catacombs.
Depending on the group

a minister will preach,
a priest say Mass
a rabbi teach.

Elsewhere you will find
a mosque on almost
every street.

Donal Mahoney

 

 
Bullies and the Wimp

They laugh at him
because he’s weak
by their standards
but they don’t realize

they’ve signed a
contract with him,
a lifetime guarantee
for recompense.

It will be fulfilled
perhaps tomorrow or
maybe on a wedding day
or years from now at

the funeral of a loved one
when they’re as vulnerable
as he appears to be
and for the moment is

but they don’t realize
the spider in its web
looks slow to any fly
circling overhead.

Donal Mahoney

Chris Butler

Morning Wood
At sunrise I find I have already risen
after swimming in a sea of wet dreams,
to see that my appendages are stiff
and damp drops of dew have formed indoors.

I come to notice that I’m affixed to my sheets,
as all the blood floods towards my head
and tangled hairs dangle like icicles from my follicles,
while peeling off caked layers from my encrusted eye.

Every day I erect my cotton tent,
which is the perfect place to hide in.

 

Previously published in Poems of Pain Volume 2: Emo (C) from Scars Publications.

El Capitan Rogers

The Manly Thing to Do

 

Aw hell
I think I’m just
gonna pack
it all in
start taking
female growth
hormones
and live the
rest of my
life
as a lesbian
woman.

 

And There Was A Super Eight Across The Street!

 

Me going native
I remember I asked a hotel keeper
A Mexican lookin’ guy
In a Ma and Pa motel
In New Mexico
If he had clean rooms
He looked at me sideways
Like I was supremely uncouth
a real Bozo
Like I was thinkin’ the color
Of his skin
Made the room dirty.
“Yeah,” he said, coolly, and I feeling
foolish, feeling a racist,
I immediately took the
Room
No questions asked.
And goddammit it was dirty.

 

Haiku Time

 

Time,
Bottles of shampoo,
A clogged drain,
And a ravaged Judy Garland barely making it through the
performance
still belting out one hell of a show.
Through the Dryer Hole

He wore shaving cream,
about his genitals,
naked,
running screaming through
the streets
down to the bar.
Started Wounded Knee.
“Careful. He’s gonna puke!”
“He won’t puke.”
“He always pukes when he does shots.”
Pukes. Spurts a dollop. Arcs
majestically. Barfs copiously
into his hand.
Dam God.
Tells you it’s his name
spelled backward
Head through the dryer
hole, poking into the
laundry slash bathroom.
No dryer.
Laura, peeing.
Michelob bottle in
hand.
Head, just a head, grinning
bald head, poking through the
Dryer hole into the laundry
Slash bathroom,
“Heeerre’s Johnny!”
Laura, caught watching herself
drink beer in the mirror, sitting peeing,
Flings
the bottle.
Michelob bottle collides with
Bald head flesh poking into the
Laundry slash bathroom
through the dryer hole.
Johnny’s got a headache
and the girls down the
hall are stripping,
comparing breast and
nipple sizes, awaiting the
Next suicide.

Circa 1985, Vermilion, South Dakota, USA

 

Sheeple

 

I wanna join a cult!
And do cult things!
Like kill myself,
With fifty others,
Instead of doing it
Alone,
In the closet
Belt tied tightly around my neck,
Hanging from the same metal
Cylinder
As my clothes.

Cuz’ I Spoke No Russian

“With or without nucleus?”
the Soviet man
asked me
as he was helping me
buy my olives.

“Without,”
I said.
He translated
and the store-clerk
handed me a
can of the
“pitted”
atomic greens.

 

The Maintenance Man (formerly titled: “the Janitor”)

 

Knows less about stuff
that don’t mean nothin’

 

Stocking Stuffers

 

What’s black and white
and red all over?
Slaughtered interracial
orgy. (or slaughtered interracial couple).

 

Return

 

Watch the faces in the crowd,
Look at the explanation beyond the
Intonation
Know the need beneath desire,
when you break with tradition,
Tradition breaks you,
Deny the calm and
Serenity of God,
You see only hypocrisy,
Foolish restrictions,
Proscriptions,
Denying a fulfillment,
Repressing and killin
The spirit of man,
Leading a life of jazz,
Syringes, broken worlds, cigarettes,
Lenny Bruce and a comedy of
Breasts and ears and death
That winds a little finger
About a shooting star…

Chris Butler

Happy Birthday to Me
Twentysomething was nothing. A decade of pain. So many heartbreaks that the superglue tube has dried and encrusted the tip. Eighty proof concoctions mixed with cocaine and heroin shot from a sniper’s rifle into the main vein. Speed balling at supersonic speeds over the Grandest of Canyons until the rock’s bottom breaks my fall. A decade I cannot let go of in fear that now I can no longer live forever young, but ten years that would and should have killed most. But here I am. Still standing crooked with a serpent’s spine.
And now I am too old to die at 27 like all of my rock and/or roll heroes. I let that year of life float away like a plume of intoxicating smoke into a still night sky.
If only I could meet the maker like Mrs. Sylvia Plath. But now they only manufacture electric ovens.
Eternally 33 could be the club specifically set aside for suicidal and depression inducing poets. A club for us who could not play an instrument, sing on key, or any other talent deemed worthy by an illiterate society. But a club for those who could write words that meant more than their dictionary definition.
Maybe my most prophetic poem will be a suicide note punctuated by a shotgun blast.
Or by my funeral birthday cake’s candle blown out by the wind.

Dr. Randall Rogers

Human Rights

And remember if you ain’t getting
Jobs and peein’ in the boss’s coffee
For the first three days before the
Results of the urine test come in
And you get fired
You ain’t doin’ shit for human rights.

 

A Not So Fullness of Being

Humans
Will never
Stop making
Up
False Gods.

God made it
This way
And if the current
God ever
Were proven to
Not exist
Humans would
Create
Another one,
And if this
New God
Ever tried to
Show Herself
And walk the earth
Like Jesus
Did
Well, we’d kill
This new God
Too.

It’s like they said
In the
Bar down the
Hill from
Golgotha
The day after
Jesus
Was
Executed: “God sent
Jesus
Down to
See what
Earth was
Like;

And we gave him a taste of what
It’s like to be human.

 

Men With No

You either kill
Yourself or
Nature kills you,

Either way,
It’s kinda
Spooky,

Funny though,
When you feel
Like killing yourself
The thought of
Dying maybe isn’t
So bad:
I guess it’s only
Better to be sad
When you’re happy,

Cause when you’re happy
Man,
The fear of
Dying creeps in…

And sadness makes
Death
…more like a brother.

 

Dear Lord

Today,
may my eyes,
and the way I use them,
be beautiful.

Poem previously published by Yellow Chair Review No. 4

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.