Hemogoblin Blues

By:   Keith Allen Daniels

The heart is a bagpipe
filling us with the sound

of chamber music.
Shall we listen to the auricles?

The ventricles are clogged
with pulmonary pudding

impeding the sounds that inform us.
Better death than the thudding

whump-a-whump
of a plugged and pasty ticker.

Better the sound of ratcheting
from some mechanical wretch

with a tin ear for life's chords,
worthless as  a plugged nickel.

Is anyone a maestro anymore?
Drumming in synchrony

with blood bursts is never discordant.
Eat to the blood beat

and the blood beat's what you eat.
Eat your heart out

and keep it down,
that sound of retching.

Rataplan, rataplan,
the hemogoblin blues

will get you, blueblooded or not,
in or out of Boston.

The music's pounding at our temples:
we need to let it out!

Copyright © Keith Allen Daniels


Apokalyptikon

May, 1999 of the Month

Restoration

By: Sean Webb

It's been years since the vintage church bells seized.
The elaborate works, the means by which they rang,
shackled in rust and persistence of pigeon squalor.
I clearly remember the scanty bell tower struck
silent and joyless by the incarceration of its bells.
As well, I clearly remember the announcement:
The only man capable of restoration had been found.

I had no formal concern with the bells.
It was not my church, not even my denomination,
however, I was raised within a brick toss of this
stunning bell tower.  It reigned heavy on my conscience
as it measured my minor accomplishments against
its hourly toll.  It spawned a peculiar circadian soul
within my already peculiarly syncopated heart.

Today, in my one room flat, I listen to the groan
of plumbing pipes.  The naked woman I always imagine
showers in a room above me, hot tapwater strains 
through clogged pipes below.  Offbeat unscheduled sounds
emit from the common pipes, the common walls,

the church of mice between us.  I hear myself listening
to the metronomic clock inside myself awakening
to the tamperings of the restorative man.  I watch him, 
fully recumbent, toiling for less than portal-to-portal pay.
He works for the one clear note that will reinstate
the hourly cadence of an intimate march.


Copyright © Sean Webb

Comments to Author:   sean@doug.med.utah.edu

February, 1999 Of The Month

30 Poets Give Advice

By: Paul Kloppenborg

Firstly,
 Read
 Swift

 Sitwell
 &
 Wright

Always,
 Hope
 Marvell

 Be Young
 &
 Never Blunt

Choose controversial subjects like:

 Gunn, then Ransom
 or
 Bishop & Pope Riding their cummings

Images are important:

 Bacon Browning
 or
 Lamb crossing Winter's Brooke

And universal themes like:

 Frost on Graves

Finally,

 Don't Doolittle
 Do Moore

 Be Wilde
 Shaw & Hardy

Make each Words
        Worth Fuller

 &

when the poem's Donne
Remember:
  No T.S.


Copyright © 1998 Paul Kloppenborg

Comments to Author:   paulk@library.lib.rmit.edu.au

January, 1999 Of The Month

A Customer Reflects in the Express Lane at Kroger

By: Ron Watson

She keyed a code into the register
And blew back her bangs 
As if my apples had misbehaved. 
You're a naughty boy, I could hear her say
From someplace south of reality.
She was beautiful and obviously smart,
Casually indifferent and obviously bored.
One of her hands had a mind of its own,
Fingers swarming over the machine
As if they knew by nature where to land.
Dawn, her nametag read, like an interval of light.
I was thinking aloud and the words escaped
Before I could hold or call them back:
You're the most beautiful woman I've seen all day,
I heard myself saying,
And I rose early this morning.
She smiled as if the news had been overdue:
I'll bet you did, she said, and winked.
Which stopped business for a while--
Carts halted, bells ceased ringing, 
And nothing moved for what seemed like miles 
As we stood, apparently transfixed,
In the grip of each other's eyes.
Of course, this has nothing to do with apples;  
Nor with time, its fluid properties and its quirks.
But I no longer look at apples as I once did
And those she handled that day tasted sweetest
Of any apples, before or since.


Copyright © 1998 Ron Watson


Biodebris

November, 1998 Of The Month

Geranium

By: Beverly Jackson

Memory, like a red geranium 
in a cracked clay pot, has faded. 
The summer of my life behind me,
I didn't plant the date in my mind,
nor even the year
so eager was I to displace it,
to disregard the pungent drooping head,
of that faux bloom passing for flower,
with its mangled stalk,

its shallow roots no deeper 
than the kiss of soil.
Because I let it go,
drowsing in the sun,
I can't count backwards
across the years,
tally up my losses on ten imagined little toes,
mourn the beginnings, her birth, 
his first step across a polished floor,

first day at school, first corsage.
I saved myself from gardening
by pruning out the year,
the day,
so I can't tell you how many flowers
might have been strewn at a wedding,
or offered on Mother's Day,
or tenderly placed 
on my winter grave.


Copyright © 1998 Beverly Jackson

Poetry Premiere