♠  ♥  DM XL  ♦  ♣

Walter Conley - Subhankar Das - Hemang Desai

Megan Falley - KJ Hannah Greenberg

Duane J. Jackson - Brant Lyon - Janice Pariat

More XLnt Poetry

Walter Conley

Ed

Ed
Was found in the Shed
Less a good part of his Head
His clothes were spattered Red
On the places where he had Bled
Said Ed, “I think I’d rather be Dead!”
But we gave him another boy's Head
Instead

Subhankar Das

Once More For Lucy And For All Radio Stations

Not only licking lips you know Lucy we had
                                  all these nerve disgorging dawns
lips in search of mystery lips
water in search of water           your face and lots of clouds
It would be wrong to call it just water
                                   There was ice made of smoke and row houses
how shadows arrive strolling and get prepared
on our electric-skin all our search all the water of dawn
Colour will cover all the burn blemishes of rain
even then we can talk of arson those life long anger
For the power of burning blood streams on guitar-chord
                                   will have to be licked clean
Now the cloud-pulps have fled after lifting the curtains
                                  Living is such a pleasure to live
that means those mile-long nerve-nets
                                  have not learned to fly
are tied to the ears of a guitar
That tree emerges from the abdomen
                                   roots and stems emerge
branches spread out of the mouth and peep
glory of the leaves starts falling from eyes
It would be wrong to call it just water
These are probably words not flesh-lumps
                                    These are probably births
Which can never be aired to you from any radio station

A little more than the river Khorkai

 A little more than the river Khorkai,
What’s real are many beasts and blood and hand and skin and
Religion and the cash and sand and
Which is the hand that holds, and whose?
Which sky sinks to who’s walking steps?
Which is that wronged love that keeps hugging the buttons of a star?
There’s no need to call nobody
There’s no need to know anybody
All the things I have seen
Every notes manuscripts chess moves.
A trampled reptile.

Though he is a kid so many mistakes forced upon his shoulders
Rights are nobody’s profession and could be easily plucked away
Soil of the stars listens to its smell and keeps coming back
And so a tinkling gourd-nest    manuscripts   chess moves

It’s better to exercise your rights knowing that there are flower hills
Eye lashes   light   whirling women
This is not a flight that can be named a journey
Opening up, slackening off of a river and water and everything
Whirling women moves inside an edgy vertebra
Ramming through the peeled up concrete slabs
a fountain of tree breaks out in loud laughter,
How shivering cold was its sprinkling breeze
Unaware it could cut my cheek
But that was the day of Tusu fest
But that was the time a heart of a flower
There’s no sky here
Just a canopy of a timid yellow shadow,
That could be called a sky or a roof or anything
These lights asphalts boulevards are bought with money made by humans
And since feeling good is all everyone needs    I too felt well
Sky never rules here   sky never loves   sky never gives warmth
Only the charged furnaces came to engulf the golden feathers
Going beyond a thousand roses in that grassy and manicured flower garden
Fucker even a pint of local hooch is better than this
Fuck those crisp fried eggs; you only need some salt to delight on them
Knowing that we love bird storms
The woods came to hide in our pockets
But even inside them there remain those whirling women   every mistake

All bone joints are divided facing each other
A crevice and intensity never live together
So the crack remained between the reptile and its nest
But still a meandering net works in silent isolation
Instead of our eyes let it rip at least two seas
I don’t want to see sins make me blind
Although I don’t know what’s a sin but still it seems like something wrong
They have sapped the bones of all intense communications
 threw away the movements
So in the cracked dialogues there’s so much shouts bumps and cuddling
As if they have opened a market to keep the heart inside the heart itself
If we have a heart our learned eyes won’t get a chance

A common caste to plunge everything in deep shit
Those who move through water holding sandals high above their head
O kind god never gift a bridge to them…never
Even now Falguni Nath is obsessed with his songs,
hasn’t learned to shuffle autographs
Keep your manicured rose garden with you; instead get two seas for me
Glasses of my specs sigh too much

Paru’s lover was dragging the watery threads from my eyes
O candle come, let us sink together once again pour again pour
Showing us the lights O warmth empty bottles skins
Sinks in the flowing stream roots of water peeps through the blood
The table floats away and I tear apart my flesh and float them
If it gets netted, this fish, but it can never
A crevice and intensity never live together
This red blue white black white black     black
We only have blacks, that is why so many golden feathers keep coming back

All our deeds were pre-determined
We knew every notes of our life, read them before
Since everything was pre-written we completed our task en-route
Now we’ll go to the other room to finish it up, jail the dialogues in
blank cassettes
But still the stories of water was never in the notes
Those swirling water that moves with a suppleness of pine trees
Still love was there some parts loved
The rest remained like a blazing rose that I kept touching
The way the winter touches a city a cigarette and remains like smoke
A borrowed blanket hovers on my shoulder, the same way.

Hemang Desai

Song of Slippers

Beaten into precise shape
By a callused master who must have
Bit the dust of godawful places
Before he finally decided to bring me home
In a bargain he clinched below the break-even point
I can hardly complain of a relationship
To have started on a wrong foot
As I am head over heels in love

You slip yourself in ebbing libido
My overstretched muscles cling to you
In a frenzy of over-delayed climax
Until you get fed up and withdraw
To crack your dazed knuckles
Consummation is not an issue
Until you keep coming to me religiously
To wear me from inside and out
Until you get so madly used to me
That you shudder at the thought of losing me
Outside temple to a discriminating pick-spouse
On the rail-track while getting aboard a local train
Or in a busy fruit market gone helter-skelter
After that colorless commoner next to you
Went to pieces all of a sudden

Then the tables will turn, doddering dotard
You’d tighten your grip on me as I’d let loose
Sweep you off your feet to justify my name
Or pull you along as I get sucked up in rotting mud
Inducting you to the destiny you scripted underfeet
Or else without doing anything silly
I’d keep growing bigger and bigger
Than your shriveling puny form
Make away with a mangy dog
Inebriated with my sexy core odour
Who’d escort me most respectfully
To his most private den
Pay well-lubricated tongue-service
Till he dropped off to soul-deep sleep
Later to be worn on sinuous hands
Of a cut-legged curbside crooner
Or simply immolate myself
For the cause of decemberish backs
Of sleepy road-washers

Leaving you to find a new
Headstrong bitch for yourself
Who would scrap off your sagging skin
Forcing you to bite the dust again.

Aghori

the natural nudist wearing the apparel of sky
tangly matted hair
a shock of stringy dusty beard
purdahing twin-baby pregnant belly
male-turned-female breasts’ nipples peeping,
emerges like an earthworm
from the prehistoric hollow he had crept into as
he loathes light
ephemeral and illusory
loves dark
all-pervading and permanent

he is an absolute sucker
-not in that derogatory sense-
but in that he sucks well
there he sucks a cigarette
with his lugubrious lingam
hanging loosely down his crotch
like a shriveled drumstick
he has trained it in sucking
first water, then milk, then ghee
and in a climactic crescendo
quintessential fire of a fresh womanhood
but without falling as
he preaches the gospel on the public pee-wall
“Every drop of semen shed, has a part of your youth fade”
thus abiding by the ancient adage
“Renounce what you want to pounce”

the holy ash on his body is
his armor against everything worldly
once subverting the sexual law of man losing, woman attaining
he snapped his bond with arousal
to avoid even an adventitious fall
chose cave over consort
to worship Lingam –the archetypal phallus- uninterrupted
however the earthworm performs staggering feats
pulls a car, lifts a heavy stone
and faith fertilizes barren women.

cross-legged he sits at times
staking his tarnished trident beside
-from its tip glides down the sun
cuts itself into a crescent moon-
poised on one leg like a crane
he does penance at other times
smoking a legitimate ganja chillum,
the devotee of Nataraja
sways and swoons in frenzy
and  rocks the world
with the tremors of his thumping feet
at still other times.

Megan Falley

Boy Scout

The boy who smells of sleigh rides
has seen a black bear
twice in his life.
The first time
was the morning we met.

He reckoned bear was a symbol of our love.
It became an obsession.
While he slept I’d draw a bear on his torso
and he’d carve one for me in stone.

Together our hands were thatched roofs.
Our sex was a wood-burning stove.

The second time
it was too late.

He didn’t see it in the road;
its coarse fur pecked
the windshield like hard rain.

He bled, gutted, and quartered
the beast, built a fire
with his two good hands.

When he picked the shreds of meat from his teeth,
he did not think of me.

When he raced the leftovers to a freezer,
he was not preserving our scraps.

When his mouth fell open to chew,
there was no tiny scream.

(He still calls for me once in awhile;
more like a bird than a telephone.)


A Kindergartner's View of Cancer

When the Long Island tap water sunk
its venom into the neighborhood women,
I was afraid of their heads, as bald
as cellos.

Remembered how easy it was to ruin Barbie
with a crew cut.

But I was assured of the Almighty Barber:

How a woman with straight hair
could suddenly sprout corkscrews,
as if God were holding her ponytail and a scissor
the way mom curled ribbons
on Christmas presents.

If He shampooed them in that biblical river
the women might soon look like mermaids.
A box of dye labeled “Red Sea # 9.”

Cancer was like a television makeover show.
It was Oprah surprising you at your house
with a new wardrobe.

I stared in the mirror and tugged
at my limp brown pigtails.
Waiting for my turn.

KJ Hannah Greenberg

Bilious Lament: Petulant Words 
 
Folded in half, certain avuncular motes immediately search
Ways to pin cousins. They’re practiced at reaming small expressions
Into dissolution orbits as well as expert at collapsing young scripts’ self-esteem.
 
Incredibly, those retinues justify pursuing palanquin-like places as ease
From their resulting miasma; irascible sorts would rather shine self-important
Than acquiesce to assigned grammatical strata.
 
No prose or poem could convey papailla enough to sate such linguistic louts.
Even an enclomiphene-filled text would fail to favor bits big on lights or bells,
Who nary befriend literary locavores; Internet exposure means so much more.
 
Accordingly, I think those mendacious intromissions ought to be made to bow,
To grovel, a bit, as servile instruments at which we jape. After all, verbal tremolos
Necessarily assist their authors and need be shed of each noxious effluvium.

The Amusement Park among the Steel Mills: Reminiscing over Pittsburgh
 
In the amusement park among the steel mills, where cotton candy, raw French fries,

Messy Slurpees, sell at least as well as do tickets to the Bobcat, the Thunder Bear,
The Mustang, next to the children’s motorcar highway and the first aid station,
Alloy canisters, resting on cinderblocks, sing vitriol anthems.
 
Grande dame monoliths of production, such mighty manholes
Form mill workers, their families, twenty ethnic neighborhoods.
Assuredly, the chime of card clocks whisper aside of steel, iron, raw ore’s din,
Calculate, conveniently, when nearby carousels might liberate enough small children
 
To merit taking a sick day or a timeout for some grandparent’s “death.”
In our district, while rickety dippers splash laughter, thick-gloved men,
Dressed in steel-toed boots, touting OSHA-sanctioned eyewear,
Check inventory, keep lines rolling, rolling, rolling.
 
Sometimes, parkland ponies fail to trot, after too many sticky hands
Pull manes, heel ribs, otherwise infuriate the beasts. Paused, they regard
Flocking ribbons of waste paper floating up toward our urban furnaces.
Dust’s our Ides of Spring, our sooty snowfall, our cloudy forecasts.
 
We pay vendors handsomely for the right to ride. Yet, many monkey faces
Mean to regard our homes like fun houses. Outsiders never learn
That arcade miracles, perogies, Italian loaves, all sell two for one
Before closing time. They’re too engrossed with winning on the midway.

Duane J. Jackson 

Throat Of Sky

Skeletal claws
of lightning slit
a throat of sky
with flaming flicks.
A red rain spills
while turbine winds
blade stars to dust
in firmament.

A sketchy moon,
in ripples, slips
through froth of cloud
that wells amidst
the vile succor
of sin which lifts
vampires from
their graves of grit.

Trees

Ravens convoy death-songs
to the waning lives of trees.
Their shriveled leaves, dismembered,
parachute into the weed.
Their skinny limbs, like beggars hands,
in torment and appeal,
unify to pierce a cloud
and sap the Monsoon Queen.

Brant Lyon

Reanimation

They’re at it again, this time with hardened resolve,
storming the woods with their torches and hounds.
I pray for my disinheritance in a hollowed-out log,
smelling my own breath so hideously bequeathed me.
So newly undead I don’t know who I am.
They turn the knife on themselves, asking me to surrender
what I’ve never taken from them.
They will find me and devour me.
My criminal dumbness attests to their own monstrosity
I surrender:  
a heart, barely begun beating again,  
another’s brain, just re-lamping its genie.
Strapped to the table and shocked back to life,
they cannibalize each other.
You… you… YOU!  This second-hand tongue stammers.
They will devour me. I surrender.

Janice Pariat

two funerals

in the city today
two funerals,
making their solemn
way through afternoon
traffic (which stops
in faltered condolences)
~ one coffin-swathed
and enclosed,
scent of pinewood
and the alcohol he died
consuming. the other
tribal-laced in bamboo
slivers, open to threat
of rain and strange
illnesses, like the one
that consumed him.

one shall be lowered
gently; dark pit, red mud
in overturned sacrilege,

we commit his body to the ground

and a shower of flowers
to mark the end.

the other shall be raised
gently, light-filled pyre,
wood stacked in broken
sacrilege,

we commit his body to the sky
 
and a reverent watch
to wait for the end.

in the city today
two funerals,
both returning us
to the place
where we came from.

Clarissa
re-reading Mrs Dalloway

and today
like a day at the beach,
shiny, polished mirror
brutal sea-sky blue
blade sharp expectation.
a century later, I walk
the streets you did on
paper, treading through
the ages, word to word
hand to head.

and here
in London, stone storeys
the colour of sand, endless
as a coastal shelf; I search
for prophet and soldier,
and a woman buying
silken gloves. to wear
for the party, that evening
and the next, the ones
that cover the silence.

and now
a distant chiming, leaden
circles dissolving into
the air; the hour irrevocable,
lost between the pages.
I stop at the florist
with a thousand lilies
white as the edges
of sunlight.

all the while, watching
constantly ~ an old lady
by the window.