social
Three Poems by Tyler Dixon
Three Poems
by
Tyler Dixon
Enough
One day when I’ve had enough
I’ll pack my bags and hit the road
hitchhike out past my life
and leave myself alone.
Shouts Heralded in the Wind
Caustic moments left to rot
in trying times maybe we’re not
all that we say we’re meant to be
on burning ground from sea to see.
Shadows light the way today
in triumphant gazes that we make.
The heroes lie dead on the floor.
Nobody lives here anymore.
In the midst of all this hate
the drums, they beat a lying fate
to which we submit and bleed
and struggle for the ones in need.
To grasp at a moment’s peace
on our backs we salivate,
sweating in the noon-day sun
how much longer can this go on?
Caustic moments left to rot.
Silhouettes of what we’re not.
Crowded dreams shattered in
a broken down and beaten heap
of sun bleached bones and shiny crowns.
The jewels we fight for make us drown.
Weighed down and tied to stone.
No one suffers here alone.
Circles and Cycles
Faces scattered in the wind.
Some things seem to never end.
Unified in isolation
suffocating with shining sand
reaching for a helping hand.
Deep breaths void of oxygen
Disappearing into the ocean
One by One
Again and Again.
Some things seem to never end.
Random particles and chemicals.
Organisms composed of molecules.
Finite beings with infinite potential:
Owned and controlled by debt and capital.
Drowning in the deep end not knowing how to swim
Pulling each other down with the best intention.
Some things seem to never end.
Spirits scattered in the wind.
Game over… Start Again?
Bio: Hi, my name is Tyler Dixon. I’m from Vancouver, British Columbia. I’m 29 years old. I’ve been writing “poetry” for a long time, probably since I was seven or eight years old. I’ve self-published three books but have never sent anyone, anywhere, any poems to be considered for publication. If I had to classify this work I would call it Poetry Without Borders…
Poetic Statement: These poems, much like their author, are unpolished, uncensored, unabashed, and uncompromising. If you believe that poetry and politics don’t mix, or that abstraction and metaphor are the most efficient tools of the poet, these are not for you. These poems are as much a direct resistant action as they are a collection of literature. Our lives exist in a constant state of information warfare, and the poems you are about to read are weapons in this fight. This collection represents a battle fought for illumination, freedom, and love, against servitude and fear. Which side you choose is up to you..
This entry was posted in Tyler Dixon and tagged creative writing, culture, economy, everyday, history and truth, lyrical, poem, poetry, political, real, social.
Three Poems by Ankita Anand
Three Poems by
Ankita Anand
Fillers
Interlinked fingers
A face buried in the hollow of a neck
Lips tracing the meanders of an ear
The swirl of a tongue around a navel
An embrace erases the gap between arms
An entry swallows up the chasm between legs
For love is all about filling the void
As is sex
Roman Holiday
They were accosted on the gondolas of Venice
The honeymooners, and asked, ‘Why must you love, if you please?’
They hemmed and hawed, made much ado
And then decided to do as Romans do,
Finally declaring, ‘Let it suffice, O Rome
That we think of each other when we think of home
And if the home and the heart live together
It means we have homes everywhere.’
Quarter-Life Crisis
when the years
spent
in
making
frantic
efforts
at
self-realization
finally begin
to throw up
results
that show you
are so full of
stuff and nonsense
that
to make
an altogether new
you
you
need
to begin
a-new
beginning
to
start
all
over
a-gain
Bio: Ankita Anand has been secretary, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, editorial assistant, Penguin Books India, coordinator, Samanvay: IHC Indian Languages’ Festival and member, People’s Union for Democratic Rights. She is the co-founder of a street theatre group called Aatish, which produces plays on socio-political issues. As a freelancer she writes and edits. Her primary interest lies in working for the prevention of violence against women.
Her poetry has been chosen for publication by The Indian Review of World Literature in English, The Riveter Review, Papyrus-The Poetry Journal, First Literary Review-East, Em Dash Literary Magazine, Sugar Mule, The Criterion, Writers Asylum,Labyrinth, Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts and DeltaWomen Magazine. Some of these can be read at anandankita.blogspot.in. She wants, through her poetry, to make the felt read.
Poetic Statement: My poetry occurs when multiple layers of feelings simultaneously get entangled with each other, when I am feeling, and strongly so, but do not know what, why and how. In the process of putting my finger on the spot, poetry happens, as it does when I experience beauty and am compelled to share it, to reassure the word that it shall exist as long as we do. The hope is that as poetry helps me define my self and feelings, it will create connections and identifications in the readers’ mind and help them understand and articulate their own feelings better.
This entry was posted in Ankita Anand and tagged creative writing, culture images, experiential, history and truth, imagist, lyricism, poem, poetry, sensation, social, writing.
Prose Poetry by Matthew Kirshman
Prose Poetry
by
Matthew Kirshman
Jaguar and the Joking Tree
All of nature is a giving and receiving of signs. The air around the body collects in mosaic fraternity. A wee worm wriggles its way up and gets lost in the Alien World of Creation (AWC). Before the first recorded dream, before the soothsayer and tribe, in the heart of the jungle stood a hard, dark tree, beneath whose limbs crouched a sharp-toothed Thing (T). With infrared KillerVision®, it spied two figures approach, interlopers in the Garden of God’s Astounding Desire (GGAD). Try and hide. The jaguar’s first slice is fine and light. With no warning, you are TradeMarxed© completely.
Folk Legend
I photographed them get into the car. Have you read my “Manhunt of the Year” (Life May, 1977)? How about that close-call with the law, which might have ended it all? Their escape was a travesty, bought by suitcases of cash from the Narcotics Agency. How ironic, the shootout took place at the Ford Pharmacy. They entered Cincinnati on page 96. With a trunk full of gelatinous explosive, they headed to the Flamingo Motel. From there they followed a well-established strategy. Do you think they looked like newlyweds? I find it difficult to credit. I tailed the Jaguar to Chicago, where a cult following had sprung up overnight. To the journalistic eye, their pop-appeal was transparent: the lore of outlaw lovers, with sirens closing in.
Mysticism and Meat
Ideally, you are devoured in your prime by medicine men and not as junk-meat for the communal pot. With the breakdown of tissue, the cells issue a mortal cry. Around the Cook’s Bible chimes a chorus of sous chefs. The page emits a campfire glow from which a cannibal emerges. What’s missing? Pretty soon, your arms and legs—seared and smoked until dripping from bone. In the aftermath of prayer, when chords rise from the planet, you make the rounds of the soothsayer’s intestine.
The Hungry Python
All of life the python seeks to know. He slips through the flea-market with a clinging stomach, catching in his glittery eye items from the old world: sheet-music, tunic, ice-cream scoop, top hat. To touch these with quiet flicks of the tongue. At the sound of thunder, the merchants start to pack, placing wares hurriedly in boxes and covering these with plastic sheets.
Bio: I live in Seattle, Washington with my wife and two daughters. I am an English teacher, but before that have had a varied career–telephone repairman, bartender, and cook, to name a few. Writing since the early 1980s, my publication credits include: Charter Oak Poets, Dirigible: Journal of Language Arts, Helix, Indefinite Space, Key Satch(el), Mad Hatters’ Review, Phoebe: The George Mason Review, posthumous papers (NothingNew Press), Vangarde Magazine, Xenarts.com, and Z-Composition.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged conceptual, creative writing, culture images, folk tale, imagist, legend, musings, poetry, prose, prose poetry, social.
Bachelorette by Stephanie Kaylor
Bachelorette
by
Stephanie Kaylor
1. I never much cared for hosting parties.
Always, it seemed, in the morning there’d be broken glass.
2. I’d crack abstractions into the glass until I could recognize myself, a hundred eyes searching back at me for what, they did not know.
3. I offered a bandage to a broken mankind.
I forgot the antiseptics, said I’d be back within the hour.
4. Once a man took me to the river.
We could only stare at it through all the barbed wires and their proclamations: turn around, there’s enough of a mess for you to swim in there.
I thought myself Bathsheba, but I couldn’t even dip my feet.
5. I thought myself an enlightened convict but they wouldn’t give back the key. “We said it would only be on my conditions,” but he’s gone and he can’t hear, and he didn’t say he’s coming back.
6. Blissfully illiterate, he never read my notes.
He’d fold them into origami, flowing into another world on the breathe of every kiss.
7. In the corner I recalled my grandmother’s warning like a prayer.
Do not heed the sun. The moonlit reveries & their daytime retrieval is the only way to stay unburned.
8. The reminiscent complex,
the sugar-titted histories overflowed from my nursing bottle every time I tried to heat it up.
9. The mattress is grey.
Not grey in indistinguishable soot, but the led of pencil etchings we could dream then erase. I like to lie here with you at my side.
Bio: Stephanie Kaylor is an Albany-based daydreamer currently working enrolled in two graduate programs: an MA in Media Philosophy at European Graduate School, and an MA in Women’s Studies at the University at Albany. She is a staunch advocate of ecriture feminine, but won’t shy from admitting to being seduced by the female beats. Stephanie is also currently working with Reginald Lewis, an incarcerated writer whose information can be found at facebook.com/reginaldsinclairlewis.
This entry was posted in Stephanie Kaylor and tagged avant-garde, beats, creative writing, culture images, everyday, imagist, lyricism, narrative, poetry, post-modern, social.
Take It All Away
Take It All Away
by
Rebecca Corshia
There you give me freedom but I don’t need it anymore,
Fake. You are illusionary,
Transcendence into a block of coal,
Cloaks black as a kettle burnt from the evening
Mocking strive for design, not neglect.
Intellect calls for us a great deal of patience.
Away to take the train there lays a great bank of gravel
Trying to crawl away the bird lies dead and is buried
By its lover.
The strength of the people is amiss and there is not one to care
Under-covering the blank dilemmas is a horrible task.
Great is the one who calls for us to be better
Then we shrink and hover and stretch
Until there is a great young tent concealing
Our insecurities and strengths.
The flounder is jealous.
I call upon the ancient powers to create within me a pure heart.
A sin upon a sin, how can one be alive, free, and naked?
Naked, we crawl as a great whale laughs in our faces,
Stress, coward, real, raw, sex, creation is nothing.
There is a law that condemns those who feel
The call and play dead.
Bio:
My name is Becky Corshia. I am entering my junior year at Gordon College Wenham, MA studying Psychology. I was part of a research study on power posing that won the Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Social Sciences Category. My interests lie within the fields of clinical psychology and counseling. I involve myself in researching human behavior, teaching roles, educational reform, cross-cultural situations, and promoting awareness about mental health issues. I write stream-of-conscious poetry and prose to process my own thoughts and emotions.
This entry was posted in Rebecca Corshia and tagged academic, cognitive, creative writing, cultural, history and truth, imagist, poem, poetics, poetry, social, stream of consciousness, student.
ALTPOETICS 