Thursday, December 29, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: Andrew Darlington

 


Ensorcelled by the September 1955 mystical vinyl codex ‘a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom’ at age eight, Andrew Darlington embarked on a lifetime quest to decipher the magical incantation’s profundity, traipsing in not entirely straight lines of zigzag wandering across decades of enchantment, yet is still no closer to the true enlightenment revelation must bring. As of now, the seeking continues across a proliferation of platforms, including EIGHT MILES HIGHER .



THE TIME HEELS/ INSANE NO MORE

the phases of the moon in 1907
the algorithms of butterflies,
a dialogue with the dead,
through an ambiance of bells
and birdsong in immaculate taste,
the faucet that drips and
the clocks that won’t tick,
where words are pictures in smoke,
and to say there is no choice is
a failure of the imagination,
for the moon is howling in the copse
and oblivion is calling my name


TO MOCK A KILLINGBIRD

it has presence
the soul of timber,
these trees contain
aspiration to be forest
to eclipse all other life
beyond the human flicker
untroubled by mind
not so much indifferent
as enduring in proliferation,
if I stand here long enough
they rise around and through me
if I don’t move they entwine
and suffocate me in leaves
rooting me hard into soil
ripping the grain of flesh,
replacing bone and sinew
to live a thousand years
in the migration of spores
in the slow soul of timber


INFINITE

it began on that first beach
it will end on that final beach
this continuity of frozen space
where time whispers echo in
every shiver and ripple of tide,
the grit of sand is lost lands from
imperceptible erosions counted
by the slow shift of constellations,
I stand beneath this storming sky
bare toes sandy and wave washed 
and I feel it tremble into my soul,
this is the nexus where eternity
curves in upon itself, and stills
into a single endless now



Thursday, December 22, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: Rp Verlaine

 


Rp Verlaine lives in New York City.
He has an MFA in creative writing from City College. He taught in New York Public schools for many years.His first volume of poetry- Damaged by Dames & Drinking was published in 2017 and another – Femme FatalesMovie Starlets & Rockers in 2018. A set of three e-bookstitled Lies From The Autobiography vol 1-3 were published from2018 to 2020. His newest bookImagined Indecencieswas published in February of 2022.


Eve

Wrote about
her active love life
for years. I was lucky
to be a part of for
a few eventful days
and featured in 3
or 4 poems that
fortunately
were kind.

She stood about 5' 4”
had long red dazzling hair
that went down to her waist
and would move with a
rare abandon as she
danced and twirled
reciting poems
from memory.

Now 62
that wonderful hair
is cut shot like a man’s
and is white as bones
in the desert.
She uses
bottle thick glasses
to read her work
not moving so much now.

Many of the poets
we knew are dead.
Yet her smile still has magic
even though she walks with a cane
when she reads, which is rare.
Poems about birds
and cats not
about her love life
anymore.

But I’ll always
remember her
with that wild red hair
I see it a few times still
in dreams beyond boundaries
where I gladly
surrender everything
to her again.




Of Carrion and Sunsets

We hover like carrion crows,
death in the air yet we still circle
this limited trajectory. We've mastered
the synchronized chaos of new emotions,
duplicating subterfuge of starlings at night.
The joy of laughter when the clown falls,
the curtain blind to what’s behind it,
the empty tears that fill a coffin,
calculating the odds against any sure thing.
The parade that ends with no destination,
trigonometry's failure to make things clear,
the difference between losing and surrender.
Wrong calls ghosting missing telephone booths,
vainglorious ambitions pretty in retreat,
the bright sunset never quite ours.



Thursday, December 15, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: Michael Berton

Michael Berton is a percussionist, tequila aficionado, traveler and all around bon vivant. Poems have recently appeared in The Sinking City, Pank, Caustic Frolic, Boats Against the Current, Soor Ploom, Ubu, Page & Spine, Peach Fuzz and Talking River Review. His forthcoming poetry collection, The Spinning Globe is scheduled for late 2023 from Recto y Verso. He was nominated in 2021 for the Touchstone Award. A native of El Paso,TX, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon.   


North Beach Crawl to Chinatown

 

If you don’t have a boat

on the San Andreas fault line

you do without buoyancy

but don’t stumble into Sam Wong’s Hotel

at three o’clock in the morning

after drinking with poets at Spec’s

looking to rest your aching head

you’ll be scolded for waking the owner

and the complimentary wonton soup is cold



Fingertips Rattle Drum

 

feel the imagination

a gang of potential

 

miles of breathing

anonymous name

 

swallowing hard

earth’s smoke

 

weeping and hallucinating

ancestors’ visions

 

the poet’s eye

using peyote

 

in a retching cleanse

soars a crescendo

 

upon the blue sky

water rock

 

where the moon shines

to the bottom vibrant

 

river tremors quicken

sacred afterlife rhythms

 

earth’s tumescent shadow

uncoils a gourd down

 

into a wave of tears

to chart a deluge

 

and begin healing

the universal womb.




Thursday, December 8, 2022

GAS Featured Writer: Benito Vila's Homage to Wavy Gravy

 


Benito Vila lives in a remote fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. He first had his poetry published in 2020 in Love Love, an underground magazine based in Paris. His other published work includes the editing Of Myth & Men, a narrative cut-up of poet Charles Plymell’s email correspondence (for Bottle of Smoke Press), and creating profiles of "counterculture” instigators for pleasekillme.com and legsville.com



Wavy Gravy


Who is Wavy Gravy and why does he keep following me around? I’ve only met him once but he keeps popping into my life from time to time, as a wise character in friends’ stories, as someone who knows what’s really important. When I discovered he’d said, “Kissing builds up your mouth”, I wrote it down on a page that had the beginnings of this poem. When the poem began to take shape, I found his line was the perfect lead, the perfect title. In dedicating this poem to Wavy Gravy, I imagine he’d agree that oppression, injustice and cruelty have no measure, no standards, no units and no sonnets and he’d have fun with the idea that bitterness is not a flavor in the Love Store.


The one time I met Wavy Gravy was in the late 1980s at the Lone Star CafĂ© in Manhattan, a bar and performance space with a big iguana on the roof, at the corner of 13th Street and Fifth Avenue. I didn’t know much about him then, other than his real name was Hugh Romney, Jr. and that he had been promoted by Lenny Bruce as a comedian in the early ‘60s before plugging into the Merry Prankster/Grateful Dead scene in the late ‘60s. He’d been wearing tie-dye ever since, often taking on the persona of a clown, rubber nose and all.


The man I met was no fool. Wavy somehow ended up seated next to me, and I watched him sort through the goofiness of the high and happy who came up to him. He matched their love and respect, or deflected their wit, as was appropriate. He sized up people fast, and always kept his part of the conversation kind. After watching him for a bit, I shook his hand and said I was glad to meet him. I let him be. There were way too many people who wanted his attention, and there was no way I was going to do anything to impress him the way he’d impressed me. 


Later on, I discovered Wavy had set up the non-profit Seva Foundation with Ram Dass, helping people get eyecare around the world, and that he’d created Camp Winnarainbow, a circus and performing arts camp in Northern California. I also found out he’d run for a “Nobody for President” campaign in the early ‘80s and was keeping a hippie commune, known as “the Hog Farm, alive and thriving. The Hog Farm is still going strong in 2022, even if its most legendary act is feeding and caring for the 400,000-plus who attended the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969.


Last year, when Wavy, at 85, ended up needing some hospital care, he started coming up on my news feeds, the whole world it seemed saying nice things about him. That set me into looking into his life a little more and me liking what I found. Last month, I was in Portland, Oregon visiting Prankster George Walker when George told me the tale of how Neal Cassady’s ashes made it from San Miguel de Allende, outside of Mexico City, to San Francisco, to the home of Neal’s ex-wife and their kids, by way of Wavy and the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm was then outside of Los Angeles and it was the first U.S. destination for the ashes, which were being delivered by Cassady’s girlfriend, J.B., Janice Brown. J.B., with Cassady’s remains, arrived at the Hog Farm by hippie bus at the same time that Charles Manson’s black bus was exiting that compound’s property, which was right next door to the Hog Farm. It’s all weird coincidence but somehow relevant now that our world has gotten so strange. 


Maybe that’s the point here, that compassion lives on much longer than crazy. Or, better yet, as Wavy Gravy put it in his haiku elegy for his friend Ken Kesey: “They say Kesey’s dead––but never trust a Prankster, even under ground.”







Kissing Builds Up Your Mouth


For Wavy Gravy



1.


Kissing builds up your mouth. The people most opposed to escapism are jailers. A poem is more than a series of words strung together to sound nice or make someone feel good. The nine billion names of god float, adrift in a conscious soup, under the influence of an outmoded way of perceiving the world. 


Take root, feel the dark of the new moon. Plant trees if for no other reason than to be kind to those who come next. Plug in, feel the flow of knowing right now. Make art if for no other reason than to be a window for light to reflect off. Tune in, slow the beat until the hum heals. Write if for no other reason than to have your passion go where it needs to go.


Jump rope rhymes. A cake in the rain. One for the baby who sucks his thumb. One for the bubble that’s sure to come.



2. 


My cat looks at me like there’s a bird singing inside of me. Speak what makes you wow. Why are you here? One two three: to have fun. One two three four: to tell the truth. One two three four five: to sweep away the nastiness. One two three four five six: to learn, to teach and move. One two three four five six seven: to play, play, play and keep playing.


Every monkey is different and any monkey can lend a hand. Tyranny releases its hold only to come back again. Oppression, injustice and cruelty have no measure, no standards, no units and no sonnets. We have no idea the influence we have on each other but like planets and moons and stars, we bend space. We each have gravity.


A glass tumbles, resists definition. There’s no crash, no applause. I trust my compass: the closer to home, the easier the way.




3. 


I bow greet salute the person I am becoming. I bow greet salute the person I have been. Shabaz, shabaz, shahbaz, the open wing. I am I am. Relying on a measure of time is overwhelming, unless I learn to slow down the crush, the moment, the intensity, the show, the need, the emotion without resisting any of it. Being clever is nothing. Being wet is.


I ripple, I spiral, I wear my incomplete knowledge of the true nature of time and space with absolutely no sense of which thoughts, which actions, make or don’t make a difference. The poem is the word, bouncing off the page into the ear, across the heart and into the feet, your favorite dance, waiting for the sound.


Bitterness is not a flavor in the Love Store. It’s not even a topping. Forgiveness is available in sprinkles, swirls, cones and even comes in throwaway cups.






Tuesday, November 29, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: JB Mulligan


JB Mulligan has published more than 1100 poems 
and stories in various magazines, and has published 
two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and 
THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books
The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms 
(a loose translation), plus appearances in more than 
a dozen anthologies.




 wasp’s nest

petite chinese lantern   wasp’s nest
in the bus kiosk
                            the bottom tapered
completed since yesterday

my father mixed french furnishings
with oriental vases   black lacquer cabinets
all sorts of crap
when my friend   on honeymoon
in Paris   visited the Louvre
saw one vastly overcrowded room
he told his bride
I didn’t know that JB’s dad
had an apartment here

(family joke   all jokes
are family   some just have
a larger family for them)

webs of strands
words   feelings   memories
an image like a fierce kiss
bind the world together
for us   to us
everything always new
strange and familiar
ours

what binds the world to the world
we don’t know   just offer equations
as if measurement were answer

wasp’s nest   lit with life
a wasp lands   enters   ignorant
no   innocent
of history and love
busy with body matters
the world building the world
delicate and angry

somewhere   everywhere
a Chinese lantern
glows in the gathering light





late in the Empire

("The winning made no sense.
No one admitted defeat."
Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin
https://poems.com/poem/it-came-late/)

They fell like bombs from the sky,
birds wounded by flight,
doomed to ravenous earth.

The flags were more important
than bandages or shrouds,
than diapers hanging from lines

while flocks of captured mothers
trembled in body bags,
their eyes like mice in rubble,

furtive, starving, stone
beneath the wings of owls
like shadows of shadows in night.

The child of many fathers,
an orphan in defeat,
screamed at the side of the road,

its hunger buried beneath
the rumble of trucks, the anthems
of empty promises,

the high howling of jets,
the eyes and somber voices
of men in tailored suits.




maybe a soul

Deadyellow gems
and rustrubies
clutched in the fists
of September trees
across the hills
in commingled rivers,
touching one breeze
brushing all years.




Iz
(for Sean)

Billions of years of creatures dying
from small and struggling bags of gunk
to swim and slither, to meat and wings,
to here (and therefore precious) us,
and something close to a dying knows
sharp love and pain, the cut of a cry
things utter in the fist of death.

Ages of coming, hesitant, in
from dark to warmth, to food, to hunt
the quick (but rarely quick enough),
long-tailed spoilers of the crops,
to live within walls, or close outside,
have led, through streams of births and deaths,
to one among so many cats.

He walked his crooked broke-cat walk
(he did from birth, as did his brother,
both of them brought in from out on the deck
beneath which so many pets are buried)
until he yowled and dropped into empty,
through countless brawls and purrs and nipping
scattered behind him and in our hearts

and this, perhaps, is what we get
from all of them we hold and scold:
warmth to take into the world
against the chill of circumstance,
the cold of those with heat within
we'll never touch, who bear their own
undying embers beyond each death.
 


Tuesday, November 22, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: Candace Meredith

 


Candace Meredith earned her Bachelor of Science degree in English Creative Writing from Frostburg State University in the spring of 2008. Her works of poetry, photography and fiction have appeared in literary journals Bittersweet, The Backbone Mountain Review, The Broadkill Review, In God’s Hands/ Writers of Grace, A Flash of Dark, Greensilk Journal, Saltfront, Mojave River Press and Review, Scryptic Magazine, Unlikely Stories Mark V and various others. Candace currently resides in Virginia with her son and her daughter, her fiancĂ© and their three dogs and six cats. She has earned her Master of Science degree in Integrated Marketing and Communications (IMC) from West Virginia University.



by Candace Meredith


This Time 

 

This time when the high tide

Is so unbearable 

When the lows 

Keep rolling like thunder

 

Like an endless cloud cover 

Or a drought that has gone 

On for the ages and the 

Masses perish there 

 

This time when the meals 

Are not plentiful and the 

Famine is too much 

To bear the weight of it 

 

When there is the insurmountable 

Ego that has repressed such 

Memories that held his heart 

In captivity like a caged animal 

 

This time he lets go of his 

Thought processes to allow 

The future to bare the fruit 

Of forgiveness if only 

 

For his soul to feel whole 

Again or for the first time 

In his life because then 

He can feel the change 

 

This time he won’t bleed 

Egocentric lies to conceal 

A past that he could not 

Stand to know so cognitively 

 

This time there is change 

The real chance to feel 

Harmony and the days

Of his orphaned past 

 

Wanes like a high tide in May 

It recedes from the shore 

Like a wake carrying him 

To a life he’s never known 

 

This time he rides the tides 

With the air and sea breeze 

That wisps his long flowing 

Hair like a real memory gone wild 

 

This time his heart is so full 

It spills out like rain or candy 

From the candy jar that sprinkles 

In longevity of a lifetime healed 

 

And on the beach he 

Runs into her arms as 

A someone with a past 

But this time he is complete 

 

With a being and a believing 

That life is worth living 

When there is love because 

Love is his soul surviving 

 



by Candace Meredith

 


Monday, November 14, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: Patricia Walsh



Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland.  To date, she has published one novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors, with Lapwing Publications in 2010. She has since been published in a variety of print and online journals across Ireland, The UK, USA, and Canada.  She has also published another novel, In The Days of Ford Cortina, in August 2021.



Monohazard


The wound heals from the outside in

Apocryphal findings seep their way

Through as crack’s breadth, bening the form

Designed for ridicule, a slighted journey.


Fiscal punishment hangs in the letterbox,

A slight of entitlement washes up solid

Cursing circumstance tied by the letter

Raining on parades is the only option.


Brick upon brick, a familiar establishment

Excludes my inclinations for the sake of want

Cutting hair on my face a necessary bolt

Running through thunderstorms is a specialty.


Innocent windows soak up the hailstones

Pummelling with force against the walker

Some stone acrostics burns in spite

A cigarette breath justly dressed down.


Living our own lives in spite of paperwork

Feeding animals for its own sake succeeds

Love, spread thinly proves us correct

Cutting through flesh is a necessary crime.


The sacred one-liners tour its force.

Relaxing muscles to be reckoned with

Exploiting the deserving a likely outcome

Fear of protocols a given prophecy




Sunday, November 6, 2022

GAS Featured Poet: Thomas M. McDade

 


Thomas M. McDade is a 76-year-old resident of Fredericksburg, VA, previously CT & RI.  He is a 1973 graduate of Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT.  McDade is twice a U.S. Navy Veteran serving ashore at the Fleet Anti-Air Warfare Training Center, Dam Neck Virginia Beach, VA, and at sea aboard the USS Mullinnix (DD-944) and USS Miller (DE / FF-1091.) His poetry has most recently been published by Chariot Press ReviewFeisty Runts, and Dear Booze.  



 The Storm Virgin


Aboard the Mullinnix

My first storm at sea

I’m a deck hand exempt

From the word passed

All hands remain inside

The skin of the ship

I fight my way

Out a watertight door

To secure loose gear

On the 01 level

I wrestle the gale

To trap a canvas tarp

That wants to sail

Me high and away

I battle it over a reel

Of cable as a kidnapper

Might a victim and pull

The eely draw line taut

As a lifejacket strap

The rain is a plague

Of antic inoculations

And there is no Navy

Vessel christened 

USS Immunity




Thanksgiving High


Over the Wabash welcome

To the Crossroads of America

Wild Turkeys a driving hazard:

 In Ohio Indiana and Kentucky 

Gas up at a Marathon Station

Kentucky Christian University

The times of your life

A Preaux Life decal on a semi

Hello West Virginia

Hal Greer Boulevard

(NBA jersey #15)

State Capital in sight

How many fast breaks away

Charleston Stadium

The Chuck Yeager Bridge

How many have mistaken

Their arms for wings

By God he flew under it

Korean War Vets sign on

38th Parallel North Highway

Wild turkey hunting

Season is in October

The same-named whiskey

Never disappoints

The ads say





 Moon Handling


A red ring

circles the moon

and I’m walking

the Parkway

but just take peeks

must beware

of cars and trucks

that might want to

do more than just

scare or blind

No sidewalk stroll

as trees have

popped roots

turned the asphalt

into tripping zones

An overpass

has fencing rising

from its rails that

curves inward

nine feet up

yet a man

or women with

half a mind to leap

to the road below

need only walk

to either side of

the barrier to

find a way

when eyes act

like binoculars

to make two

headlights into one

and more moons

than a mind

can handle

and the crimson

lunar ring

is a pair

of red lips

propped open

in aria or in

mock distress