deep tissue magazine 12

8/6/2019 Deep Tissue Magazine 12

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DeepTissue

Magazine

Number 12


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Alan Britt

FRIDAY NIGHT, LATE SEPTEMBER

I weave like a boa

through laundry hanging

on pastel plastic hangers

from basement copper pipes,

quarter-inch leads

zigzagging my jungle of existence.

I could fall down


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beneath these drying black cotton trousers

and heavy grey sweats,

even choke on these button-down polos

that never quite lived up to expectations,

but I choose

to stand anyway.

I cut through

all the bullshit

to live another day.

EVERYONE WANTS TO BURN

Every day I devote myself

to her,

thunder shreds

my gauze dining room curtains;

bison clouds

nudge power lines and suburban warehouses.

Everyone wants to burn

as bright as blue plumes

billowing from I-95 Philadelphia


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sanitation incinerators

at 7 AM,

rush hour.

But, today, the road not taken

is the only road left.

So, my fellow horses of instruction,

shake your gilded halters

if you must,

but beware

that beautiful blue wolves prowl these beautiful blue hills

were so fond of calling home,

and remember that the scam always unfolds

when you least expect it.

However, for the scam to become a legitimate scam

it must first pass

the test of guard dogs

fast asleep on Sunday piles of un-ironed laundry.

But let me tell you,

68 pounds of herding dog


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can relax like nobodys business atop wrinkled denim asses

and ungodly wads of barracuda-striped business shirts

quietly shielding at least three pairs

of slightly-stained and exhausted, khaki illusions.

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

Reconstruction,

as far as I recall.

Reconstruction

that followed families

through the Louisiana bayous

of the Coushatta nation.

Reconstruction

that involved your folks

and mine.

Not a single Great Aunt

voted for the tattered flag, that day,

let alone

baked a pie,


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a special,

nonpartisan pie,

that everyone could enjoy.

GETTING HARD TO TELL

Its an $1,100 bottle of Chilean merlot

or perhaps its merely Papa JoesBig Red

signaling

from a buoy

disguised as a mermaid in the moonlit Atlantic.

I used to worship

the clouded berries

of your seaweed hair

before my godmother suddenly appeared

as a sullen wolf

from a Brothers Grimm fairytale

prowling my sheets and pillowcases.

I used to worship

my uncanny freedom


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until I stumbled

across guilt and despair,

not necessarily in that order.

Dressed as a male peacock

shimmering for all hes worth,

I used to worship electric imagination.

And, sometimes, I even worshipped the Divine Providence

promised by bloody placentas

sprawled like Autumn on the granary floors

of 17th

Century extended metaphors.

I worshipped it all!

Then, we rode like hell, one god-awful night,

my appaloosa and I,

across the feral Arizona desert,

bleeding profusely from our genocidal blue eyes.


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Alan Britt teaches English at Towson University. His recent books are Greatest Hits (2010),

Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003) , Amnesia

Tango (1998) andBodies of Lightning (1995). Essays recently in Clay PalmReview andArson.

Interviews and poetry recently featured in Steaua (Romania), Latino Stuff Review and Poets

Market 2000. Other poems in The Bitter Oleander, Christian Science Monitor,Confrontation,

English Journal, Epoch, Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Magyar Naplo

(Hungary), Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Pacific Review, Puerto del Sol, Queens Quarterly

(Canada), Souwester,Square Lake, plus the anthologies, For Neruda, For Chile (Beacon Press),

Fathers: Poems About Fathers (St. Martins Press) and La Adelfa Amarga: Seis Poetas

Norteamericanos de Hoy (Ediciones El Santo Oficio, Peru).

Alan occasionally publishes the international literary journal, Black Moon, from Reisterstown,

Maryland, where he lives with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Friese

and two formerly feral cats.


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Rose Morales

The Ethereal Beauty of the Newly Dead

The seconds stop,

expiration of final breath,

then stillness, mouth poised

in bubble blow puff. Bubbles burst

like saliva escaping, rainbows

broken in corners of the mouth.

Minutes before the cold, softness

of the frozen cheek, some awareness

still lies there, a ghostly firing of synapses.

They light the way down dark tunnels,

hurrying unburdened legs onward, unto home.

Beauty of the eyes we think no longer see,

but it's our faces that disappear, the candle


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not yet flickered out. It burns, micro blink,

gazing out at far horizons, the green flash,

gone, the time remains for keen laments

of living and the wrenting of lapels.

Belief

I store it in a lock box safe,

swallowed key jangles on my spine,

revealed, but never told,

the final piece that lives on

after faith and hope is gone.

Chew the skinned morass,

the pleasure of teeth sink

in my fractured bones, impaled

by the cross reversed, Buddha

sits upon my chest, I found him on the road,

and had not the balls to kill him.

I would not choose sati, Shiva

looked on with jaundiced eye.

I am a relative pariah at the pyre,

let those who sin do the suffering.

I turn six corners, a star crossed Jew,

stripped of my Matriarchy by angry Philistines,

Sarai stoned for the progeny of her barren womb.

I will not turn my back, though I be old and grey.

I live in a land that pulls threads from the mat,

obscuring views of Mecca from the South, the East,

wars from North and West, strangled under burden

of my girdle, pulled into nurseries and called jihad.

I walk with nothing, skin and hemp against my back,


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the road is empty, and the end is dead. I bring up binds

that shatter all my ribs, I have no more to give, no more belief,

no Heaven, nor a Hell, no gods along this stretch,

I give you this, my love, and only this, a tale, a story,

the keys at last, the total wreckage of my soul.

Rose Morales is the author of the book "42" now available atwww.alabasterandmercury.com

She lives in Miami, Fl with her husband Alex.
http://www.alabasterandmercury.com/http://www.alabasterandmercury.com/http://www.alabasterandmercury.com/http://www.alabasterandmercury.com/


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Felino Soriano

Recollections 38

|sleep|

canopy of fortune

textile

sways

renaming

selection of nights

spontaneous hours


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certainty

of drastic horizontal stillness the

weight transfers from whole to some, purpose becomes branded feeling

nested

within shelf of cottoned circumstances

creating halo of admitted freedom the

eyes surprise with closed indentations

halting blink of noons styled air

unraveling sight with darkened stone

immovable by light until dawns earliest struggle


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Recollections 39

|upon frail hands|

Nothing speaks (able though characteristic, nonchalance)

as does the cyphers inexistent shadow

withholding prior holdings

spaced into deliberate fulcrums

inward outcast, movements deracinated subject

bone into bone

thus

wrinkled explanation

hurried to youth among visions sole hanker to

reignite wisdoms osculated ending.


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Recollections 40

|conversation with hollowed vocals of accumulated silence|

mastery of unwinding chaos

cultural complexities

approximate diversions of

analytical movement; anafter

truth (this subjective dimension, diverse speculation)

apparitional mirrors

converge with blatant tongues of dilated embraces:

we can hear skeletons retain temporal schemata

their alphabetic motions

reclaim habits of prior innuendos, imposing

fantasy of sound

nearest


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augmented window of evaporated bodies, voiceless now as

winds unseeable carcass

following arid mendacity and

paradox of caressed tribulation

Recollections 44

|trust of misused conundrums|

divisible web of answerless queries

retain

adolescent motions across

depth of visual

assistance

through

a density of sound

jejune with

partial acclimation

crossing


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chaos juxtaposed paradoxes, retaining

confirmation of ambulatory cessation

Recollections 50

|social reliance|

verbal accolades

spontaneous effort as esteem ascends

blend of forehead plateau

beyond then self-sufficient halo

manifest dexterity of self and self-another version

delineates counted moments

dissolving etched degrees of

resuscitated persona

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974) is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental andphysical disabilities. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in

poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review. Philosophical studies collocated with his

connection to various idioms of jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. For

information, including his 45 print and electronic collections of poetry, over 2,800 publishedpoems, interviews, and editorships, please visit his website:www.felinoasoriano.info .
http://www.felinoasoriano.info/http://www.felinoasoriano.info/http://www.felinoasoriano.info/http://www.felinoasoriano.info/


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Chad Repko

ANGRY PASSION

It's one of those days

where reason is clouded in hazewhere you get lost in the maze

There is only one thing to praise

I want to take you

with mein the kitchen

with no referee

on the floor

asapThrow me against a wall

and crush bodies togetherwrap me in glory

and bound me with tether

pull the hair,

scratch the chestget out all those demons


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that frustration have expressed

in the hall,on the stairs

we will soon make our way upstairs

I love that dress on you

but you won't be able to wear againtorn and slightly off

no candles or champagne

It's not overuntil all muscles are drained

you can rip off my cultural shroud

and begin your own reign

Hands clinched tight as one fisttongues speaking in spiritual coexist

we leave the world of gain and success

exorcise the meaningless stress

bury all the vampires that seem to depressand unveil our touch that we repress

sweating and twistingas I undo you

complete meditation

That I do deserve

and so do..... you ........

VISION AT THE STOP LIGHT

The light was Red when I saw you,Walking like a sweet violin

Black silk top,

beautiful chest, And soft skin.

Hair flowed over a passionate neckand the body as vibrant as the sun

and a smile.....

a smile that makes my sorrows come undone

I see you gazing my way,

and your eyes have worlds inside

And I see us begin to talka voice like an angel

with nowhere to hide

You get in my carto much of my surprise

you nervously show laughter

As I begin to drive


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I see us in a bedafter a night of sweet communication

Exploring each others warm skingiving in to all of our temptations

the minutes and hours do not existas we use each other to forget all of our frustrations

I see us experiencing weekends,a picnic away from the maddening day

Phone conversations, lively vibrations

As lost as we seem to get

We help each other find our wayAll of this....

Is what we seem to display

I see years go by within your lightened touchand all the growth of what we've become

Filled with the passions that flowand with the horrors that can come

Drying each others tears, holdingGravitating on the touch

Hoping we do not succumb

I can see you battered and tired

of the stress within the soulAnd no matter how hard I would try

I could not make you whole

And as you turn to others

as before you have turned to meThe decay of time

Makes you want to be free

And as the life time rolls away

like the credits on the big screen

My vision is complete

As I hear a beep when the light turns green

and in those little minutes, you are gone.....


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THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Strange memories

of things I can barely remember

not a long life-

but it seems like a lot of Septembersa little bit of calmness and a bit of suspense

somehow- it all makes sense

I remember a golden island of Moorea

Trade winds, adolescence

and a girl from California

a beach of immeasurable beautyvacations and seeing the world

so young I barely noticed the booty

I remember readingHemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Tolkien

Helter Skelter, Poe while in schoolThompson's fear and loathing

While others got game- I was a fool

Always feeling there was something in-betweenthe living and the dead

that there was something else here

something to discover just ahead

I remember an accident

Femur split in two

months in a hospital bedmy developing years

watching Alfred Hitchcock presents

and engaging in my fears

I remember LSD

nights spent raving on Ecstasy

snorting coke, Ketamine, Speedlearning philosophy and cosmology

counteracting dependence with Sadomasochism

and diving into the world of psychology

panic attacks, hearing the jazz sax

the balance between living and dead

doctors scripts, mental health tipsbut nothing really settling what's in my head


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I remember making movies

studying Scorsese, Lynch, WarholMy life has always been a Woody Allen gag

Engrossed in Chaplin's comic realities

Trying Creatively to melt thought to screen

devising pictures scene by scene

I remember love and marriage

ten years of complete adorationchanging, becoming what need to become

lusting after that one complete friend

and maybe you needed a bigger cock

whatever it was, it had to end

And I face my 35th summer

learning the space between living and dead

with a son now, so full of graceand focusing on the future instead

My name is Chad Repko, born very close to Philadelphia. The journey has been long and tiring,

but filled with amazing twists and turns that only make it all worthwhile.


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Cornelius Bent

Baptism

atrocities drag themselves across my ears

bleeding from the talking box

programmed with agendas

codes of illegitimacies

written against nature

summer is creeping in slow

the caress before the blaze

gives me time to inhale each wave of transition

inciting my innate deviance

to unnatural compliance

level by level


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the first sweat

of a yet clean body

I've shaken the darkness from my head

it's pieces are piled 30 years deep

in a barrel

where my grief was laid months ago

I will burn them both

when the moon is positioned

to receive the ash

my father still speaks to me

through the insects he always told me to care for

through the woodland he taught me to listen to

through the breeze he said i should touch with my lungs

through the perpetual baptisms he knew each moment to be

and this moment

finds my form

beyond biological existence

i am alive and i am well

Cornelius Bent is a human being who writes poetry.


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Glen Still

Rusted Garden

I'm trying to save you and me

where we can move on

the scaffold

high above the water

not spilling oil into the deepness

of our souls

We can never go back there again

it was so insane

trying to break the

camels back


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with straws shooting

razor blades

I'm trying to

relearn

everything that i forgot

once upon a blood stained heart

a beat

that sold me

upon a path

away from you

The fact is i got an ego

and it tends to get in the way of us

you got one too

and yours is

like elastic

snapping back at me

when i should not be pulling

I'm trying to save us

from the Rusted Garden

where many tribes have corroded


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laid to waste before they ever planted

a seed to grow into one another

we are just two people

but we can do this together

stay up on the scaffold

stay above the Rusted Garden

Glen Still is searching for his soul in Seattle Washington. He is looking for volunteers to helphim find it.


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A.g. Synclair

Silent Killer

still

perfection realized, no

neither lithe, nor delicate of limb

yet mortar bound in fidelity

in eerie calm, a silent vigilwatch features intersect at algebraic angles,

yet delicate

softly, like a whisper wind

she plays the executioner

in silent dispatch

a death knell dealt to prurient folly

a milk-white liquid touch.

A.g. Synclair is the editor and publisher of The Montucky Review. He doesn't have an MFA in

anything. His work has been published in numerous online and print publications. He lives,

writes, and otherwise collaborates in southwestern Montana with his significant other, the artist

and poet Heather Brager.


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JD Glasscock

Deep Groves

counting moments...slips of tongue arcing breath.....trying to carve my way to

discernment..truth over flesh.........do any of the masks spinning love around

my frame actually hold to this as hard edges....sincerity in the hip pockets of

their cast lines....or is it all frail and broken carnival frivolities to pass

the ticking of second hands....what do you believe when duplicity seems to be

the road to everything...Hope and gutter swell prayers in the curves they

double Dutch shuffle in the side periphery of my lone moon haunts is what

sustains the theatrics of my belly crawl through the crumbled ruins of this

archaic arch I find within the dazed hazed stumble I call life.....yet

still....doubt naws my chewed over bones......my ears tentative to the high

stroke timbre of a lie playing hip holster to their verbiage.....to their limbs

in manic sultry shape......to the patterns of past mistakes......

It's why i do the bi-polar shake bake to the jump cliff huddle down hollow hill


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to craggy forest junk heap in the seconds it takes to chest heave deep.....it's

why in every footfall that places me closer to the sweat of our skin enmeshed

in sin I back flip ten feet to shutter curtains between our heat.....it's why

every door ghost creaked open to the placement of articulate fingers upon the

thumps of blood....I feel the deer in headlight adrenalin game of push and

shove.....its why lonely hermitage with wailing howls to the beat up harp

blues is sometimes an easier road to rule.......easier then thebulls-eye paint

stamp the possibility of intimacy trumps within me.......yet still my pit toss

bones in the prescient weave of silk that has laid it's palpability upon the

fork tongue adder lisp of my fate leaves me little choice in the cemetery

willow that has sung my lullaby since my momma's womb spat me to back alley

streets and said goodbye..For in the storybook sigh that has followed all the

passing of sun to shade in the drown boogie jazz horned skip step of my

solitary transit there has always been the empty symbolistic runed hallow

hollow that should be a woman's silhouette.....and no matter the shark teethgrunt pull of my every whim and limb straining against the cosmic pre written

loom spun novel of my down trodden hovel...in the end.......my flesh wll form

to bend...it is inevitable....inevitable as death calling me it;s own.....of

taking me to the endless dark of the deep grove....

Twisted Gate

in the sleep time of distant memory

a requiem to the film noir

black and white frames

of a forlorn history

the twisted gate was the foghorn of our steps

We met in the dark ethers of moons yet cast

our hands tentatively seeking lost preludes

to kisses never tasted

flesh never consumed

Her hunger was palpable fornication

of reunification of roads meant to tie

the cupid pierce of a forever haunt

a heat simmering wants in deep glades


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butter wrapped in a guise called love

the tickling of skin, small circles being formed

by fingers agitated in unsure articulation

We spread our lies in thin tethers

heart thumps bugling isolation in a word

a look

her limbs were pirouettes in the repose of truth

the gate sent screeching

iron to mark the passage of goodbyes held

before hellos softened tongues

They say stories are just a spinning globe

running themselves into perpetuityof repetition

That we crayon draw the precipice of our own falls

that in the dissolution of our illusion

we partake in the immolated aroma of the bruises

forming art upon our bones

that it be our own fists planting imprints across spectral

fluidity

in other words....we bit teeth to crooked teeth

in the consumption ofour own cannibalistic mourning...

loathing....

He whistled melancholy stitched into

other worldly drifts

of memorials to the sorrow

lining bottled ships never brave enough

to leave docks...

And sailors wantonly deep throat

banners of lucidity and duplicity

to etched barbies with puppeteers

pulling strings to movements

of imposable will....

the iron of swinging bars


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wails to the tricked trump

of this paradoxical query

They both pass ghosts

who wave in connected continuity

lives trickling mirrored answers

to the fumbling of their sincerity

Honesty is a many bristled beast

who causes stutter stare shakes

and dark closet movie remakes

with huddled forms painting shadows under

toddler shaped beds....

They will spin the faulty mishap of their ever dwindlingdawdling in the hopes that the next passing

will be the last

while an alcoved audience peels

belly croaks to the inevitability

of tragedy marking the ignorance

of their stumbling carnal ineptitude

the shades that follow the querolous

inundation of their eternal white eyed

cave shawl

And a low ground hugging wind

rolls the movement of twisted gates

howling

forever vocal restraints into the cacophony

of life rewinding itself in broken bridges

to the record spinning itself on the same melody

on the same linear scratch thinking itself original

in it's bop bop bop..stop the clock

crooning.....

and two fading frames sculpt the acrimony

of two celestial spirits too afaid to lock hips and lips

and understand the breaking of chains....

tick...tick......tick........breathless


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Artifice -- a gift is given when the giver has already taken all there was to

give

A glade....an open space....a virulent echo of a long ago melody...one left on

the byways....the forlorn alcoves of the humble and lamenting......we travel

verily wayward upon mistakes weighing our steps till dragging limbs into a

crevice of proverbial threading ......a matrix of chains interwoven with

regret....to let go....to embrace the emptiness of wisdom coming from a fool's

lips, the lack of it's meat chalking memory without history tying up it's

expectations.....we fall to fly...and fly to touch dream.....long is the night

with no apology...long is the night alone in the dark.....salt eroding rivers

upon trembling flesh.....roadmaps to days left far away, hope and it's parody

of happiness as markers to remember, sorrow the collapsing structure to

celebrate the forming of cages.....and yet still our limbs sketch sandboxeswith which to grasp toddler past times in monkey bar tumbles...

We pray.....we whisper hungers and ritualistic coinage in the verdant yearning

that it accomplishes what our own limbs cannot....that within the folds of it's

holistic hallow verve it will sculpt the Earth into something more resembling

beauty....less so cannibalistic loathing and a carapace of delusional

hierophants of black cabal junkie fixes....We lather our wails of stiffening

resolve to become less replicated sheep grinding circles in smaller concentric

shapes suckling American Idol reality tv celebrity simulacrums of artisticintegrity......a convincing hollow eclipse of serenity....our teeth chew upon

our own surface flailing circumference dwindling upon the depth of honesty

becoming a slogan one uses to fornicate duplicity into the open maws of youth's

venal simplicity....we argue the merits of curriculum tied to the pent up

altruistic warp of fatalistic truncation of humanity's ever soiled

morality....we twist and bend the bars of our prison naming them the fruition

of freedom.....our wings clipped and broken as we tell ourselves the pristine

glow of their healthy sheen.....stroke, stroke, choke upon the nicotine

acerbic fallacy of never ending complacency....we shall look upon this moment

of breath and shall wish a different road was chosen when we lay for that final

rest.....but until then we shall look good upon our journey.....


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Interludes of a blues mood

rolling numerical boxes of prophecy in the shape of bones to the wherewithal of

fate syncopated within tones.....got dribbles of drunken blues trickling back

of throat......and sculptures of romantic interlude writing what was

wrote......my desert is parched...and I got tha attributes of Texan stones with

which to impart........Got down home jazz melodies dropping the hammer to the

anvil of my anxieties....

My eyes look up only to see the pirouettes of ghosts doing two steps to the

foreplay of my broken down jig.......and a crowd back lit with shadows

watches........silent in their accusation...demonstrative in their

appreciation.........Flood lights lighting the lit paranoia of their barelyrestrained sarcasm and pent up irony......

When did the roulette of my undying fetters spin the amalgam of my breath

rasping death throes to the determination of uncharacteristic by-blows of

sought after moral dilemmas....? Was it during the sweating toss turning of

rumpled sheets on the night the grins of a desolate man asked me for the fabric

of my heart, the crumpling gratitude of my deteriorating spirit....? Or was it

the insipid sacrificial conundrum of the last love I clung to tossing a child

from forsaken womb? When did the honorific borderline schizophrenic declinebegin it's rope'a'dope last round round up?

I mosey in chaps and low slung holsters down dark alleys and paint a smile

hovels with hot iron playing across fingertips.........I tilt hat to shaded

flickers of forget me not looks as my sight pierces the moments of memory and

the latitude of longitude rolling the crosshairs of my upside down

existence....

I hear their footsteps echoing distantly down corridors ever revolving around

the corpse I call a shell that still hasn't realized it's own demise and keeps

puppeting itself with the delusional certainties of a life well lived.....lies

are the meat of a story's bi line......yet some part of me...some say the self

immolating self incriminating border line bi-polar drop a hat in the lunar


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dance of lucidity brought to a new low part...but still a part....sends

staccato rays of hope to a midnight world where the crumbs of such are few and

far between the cracks of the asphalt hump riding our dreams.....slipping

between the divides of good people's, derelict in their dust the scarlet off

their pumpernickel duties, haunt hides in the seams of division bullet hopping

visions....and still another part believes in the thirty eight cracker draws

this flesh has peeled through the star fucked calendar of years will still

insert phallic limbs into the orifice of love's cherubic mentored into the

cremate go on a date lute driven archaic stage play of film noir black and

white shade gray despot rerun of Bonnie and Clyde romantic fun....one can say

much luck would have to cluster fuck the happening.....but can and could sha

bang bang the realization of such profound and unsought after climactic

interludes......or should I say always sought after forever deluded

disappointed hum drum of humanity cavalcades of fruitless yearning......

I shake the cobwebs off the howls I send bouncing truths into the

night......gather my knees under me after the fall I failed to notice....and

straighten my stride into the deepening of the long eve......in the

end.....it's all a crap shoot......a drive by the night in a tailored suit

pulling jokers where there should be aces...jacks instead of queens....... and

tumble my stumble I leap into the canyon free for all....I got my iron spraying

lead aspirations into the gaping maw of fear......my wings unfurled....my

throat heavy with song.......eyes nailed to the coffins of could of

beens.....should of beens......and into the narcissistic Dante Nostradamus pit Ismile......this is what it's all about.....facing whatever comes with a grin

shit pasting the worn lines and scars you call a mug......so bring

it........spit some blood...a tooth..a fucking limb to the wails of hubris...I

have seen everything you got to throw....breathed it, lived it....soiled

it....so come on already, I'm getting bored......I'll be your

huckleberry......say when...........


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The Oceanic Terror of Dream and potted gold as elusive as weaves of threads

etching mythos into a nightmare's boon

The road is a tumultuous driven labyrinth of never ending walls and pitted falls

of forever lessons carved in their make.....an endless wake of wisdom in wait

for your scarred palms to lift up it's craggy visage-- to consume it's nectar.

It is within the ghost towns of these promises that we sculpt our own

divinity...find the fulcrum of trinity between the nurturing love of a mother's

sacrifice -- the hard boned courage of a father's vice and the innocence true

compassion birthed in a child's wide eyed gaze....

I stop and wonder and dream and weave and yet the culmination of theseatrophied limbs find the ascension of my life long pursuit sometimes as far way

as a rainbow's gold....as elusive as staying sleep from berry wine's revelried

gourd.....

One can have gift and talent climbing rafters in Cerunnus antlered glory--in

the deep dark hallowed completion of the hunt -- yet in the hard curbed

streets of these downtrodden clicks of calendar years it is as useless in

apeture intrusion as a blunted spoon in blood strewn diadem's of a battle's

corpse ridden rune....for in these end days of corporate games it is only in

whose eyes u fall upon and whose sheets you sweat that can elevate the meat ofyour flesh into the fruition of success.....it is only in the hands u shake and

the bodies u slide into that can satiate the burgeoning aspirations of your

womb bought fate -- a world driven in envy and hate creates hard avenues for

rising upon earned merit's value...it is a politician's city to table top spin

a be bops grin of victory.....it is the schmoozers licking chops and the inner

curves of a suit's ass that get one past the hard oak doors of a dreamer's

dream......slithering serpents unveiled to humanity with nothing to dribble off

their tongues yet a continuing cheer of sheep and shallow dips in preprogrammed

under usage of mental acuity....

My eyes brew storms in the back drop of their falling beauty...thru failing

hubris of my body's aching bruises and hard spent scars ---lightning stirring,

coalescing to supturate this puppet flesh --- ember burn through the falsity

of this spinning globe of duplicity and the allegories of caves long ago

predicted now etched in stone of reality's bones --- Men attired in satin and


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velvet hiding the sun from a blind man's visage and hopes of more......prayers

rebounding off heavens long ago closed to listen.......

Faith is a couplet of melody that in today's age has found difficult to hold a

steady tone -- shaken with hollow idols and empty preachers selling diamond

studded crosses and nation carved buildings grafted in silver and

platinum......platitudes spun in thunderous pronouncements about the all

inspiring importance by which name one call's something so vast as to make the

attempt laughable to begin with....

And green greed permeates everything as the majority of people become

foundations in wailing death to the few aspiring to immortal consummation of

their own reflection --

The keening siren's call of an endless ball of drunken revelry and go nowheredrifting loss of love and brotherhood....is this the destiny of humanity -- is

this the heights we had hoped when first stepping from Gaia's womb??????

I spit upon the next step as my feet stumble their way to change --- I will

never give up upon the thermals of my broken wings reforming to flight upon sky

silhouetted wind -- by my father Uranus and his ocean spun heaven I swear oath

to the breaking of these rust pitted chains ----my blood returning the

couplet of faith and fervent belief to its steady tonals of symmetry and

universal melody -- till my lungs heave their last melancholy call to

dream.....i shall stride this mud with a titan's purpose and verdant growth asI fall to knees at the door of hope....to the endless lope of a bard's heavy

weight six colored cloak I shall endeavor to bring up those whose talents have

been forgotten -- to those whose lives have been left in the ditch upon the

side of the road -- I shall do my best before i Lay to rest to reignite the

innocense and pure joy of the children in all of us asleep in

perdition......soo all ye dreamers and weavers and saints of heart and honor

--- let us join and bring a new future to this failing falling trash heap of

corporate creation --- it is our world -- let us bring it to heel.....


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For those of you who are wondering Glasscock is not a fake name. It is my real

last name. It is Welsh, and yes, I am sure my ancestor was drunk at the time of

choosing. :)

I am originally from Orange County, CA but in 1990 decided to be an artist and

felt the hunger to experience life so moved from southern cal to trek my spirit

down the long road flitting from place to place moving to Seattle in 2000, the

avenues in fruition bringing me to Los Angeles, CA in 2009 to finally pursue my

aspirations in writing/directing/acting and as a lyricist. I have been

writing/performing for 20 years, starting out as a Slam Poet in 1990,

eventually becoming a member of a 2000 National Team for Spoken Word. I was the

lead singer/lyricist for Sofa King and a music promoter for many years. I'm now

focused on writing film and novels. I enjoy people of true depth...people who

are honest and real...who treat people from all walks of life with the respect

they themselves would wish.... Anyway, that's me. I have 4 self published books

thrululu.com, 6 shorts, 12 feature film scripts, a video game concept, a

graphic novel, three novels, a children's book, and various other projects,

though I have never submitted anywhere. I am 6'1, 200 lbs, ugly as ugly gets

-ha ha- (or maybe not ugly, depending on which throne one sits), 11 tattoos.

Anything else, just ask.
http://lulu.com/http://lulu.com/http://lulu.com/http://lulu.com/


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39

Paula Lietz

This Lovely Disarray

ponder me to the depth of your soul with

butterfly kisses murmuring tales of old

sooth our disarray as you sip my parted lips

savoring the taste of wine

I've noticed there is no path, for that reason

entwine me ever so lenient amid your cautious

thoughts that nurture the ardor waiting

to unfold in mutual esteem

acceptance of now means letting go of the old

bear with me in your wisdom as I stumble a bit,

cry a bit and laugh at my errors and wondersas I learn and continue this journey that I

truly know nothing of

worn wood rich in hue, the door once so inviting

now to be closed with utmost respect


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40

I vibrate to the beat behind the door not yet open,

it is ajar, pulsating steadfast passion encouraging me

to fly but the lesson being that no, not now is the time for flight

again I maunder when all I ask if I may for some of your strength

of soundness to sooth my disarray this lovely disarray

Storm Passes

Pathetically waiting, strung out for a cue

shadows starve and hinder my viewsilently I stand mired in the blue of

the moon, indigo sky peeling

the dark of the night leaves me

vulnerable to the scrutiny of the sunrise

Last stars suck in the remnants of what

once was the Milky Way

preamble wisps and wave of daybreak

dance to dawn's tantalizing tango

in a narcissistic sort of way

I simply

wait....

how bloody naive

Sterile dust devils shimmy and

sear my porcelain skin

noon heat brands and taunt

in obsidian viciousness, malice taunts me

bodily and boldly with your name


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41

Time maliciously passes me by and I again

stare into twilight till afresh

the mischievous evening shadows

begin their cruel trick of portraying you

ironically they make you out better

than you truly are ~ full of yourself

You weave in and out of my emotions

a game, a bloody game of high tides

I stand my ground and dare you down

You, this coward man in the moon

Oh Euphoria

Oh Euphoria

this ~ your surreal mania

beyond enchantment

but a sip of your essence

and the reins slip from my hands

Untitled

I shall not forget

the man, nor father you were

they say I'm like you

there's no need for words of love

~ I will bring the fishing rods ~


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42

Edge of Reception

at the edge of reception where

I know naught

sphere, realm, dimension

not fully in nor out

stretched between nanoseconds

of here, there and now and then

mathematical matrix of

quirks, quarks, myths and theories

I dislike physics, but the science of

matter and energy and their

interactions make sense of thisdraw beyond my ken

it taunts and flaunts spectacular

galaxies as I travel amidst this

one star ruin

black holes beckon and I barely

resist their temptation

I am in awe

what is the definition of

redemption as I teeter on the

edge of reception

Growing up I was surrounded by art in its many forms; my Father and Grandfather both being

Professional Photographers and my Mother being not just a Professional Photographer, but an

Artist as well. However, that being said, being young and involved in youthful pursuits, I never

took advantage of the wealth of knowledge literally at my fingertips. Fortunately, decades later,that dam burst and a flood of artwork and writings have resulted from it. My art, poetry and

photographs have been published on numerous online e-zine sites as well as in print.


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43

Michael Benifield

Lost Stars Alone

I stood next to a moonlit Oak,

awaiting my own decisions.

Within the mixed array of my mind,

lay a burning question.

The mirage of confidence,

just like the whisper of wind,

turning harshly my tourniquet within,

dulling the wrecking-ball pain, and sin.

Stars! You are lost,

even you are not my friends.

These tears you cannot stop,

these wounds you cannot mend.

My warped mind is aflame,

pushing back the cool wondering,

and hot pondering,


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of this autumn night in chains.

The evening of my life is above,

flashing in sequence with the stars.

Pushing me to flight,

throwing me far.

Can you see through my mirage?

My blanket of false hope, wrapped around me...

I tie it with ribbons and bows,

So you may see it, and not me.

Not I, only a blinded eye,

caught beneath the fears of the heart,

and exhausted by single tears,

falling from my draining strife.

Swipe it away, for I am no longer whole.

Swipe it all away, for I am gone.

Lost beneath the stars,

bleeding salt water, and forever alone.


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45

Elephant Series #1

Elephant Scorpions

You sting too deep,

knocking the head of another asleep.

Dieing today by your own sting.

No Pity for you my Scorpion being.

Die now but with truth of self,

portrayed by ringing bells.

The tole of others lost in stride,

spread by those who choose to lie.

Elephant Spiders

Beauty and thought,

the celebration of lose.

The belief that all that in life can be bought,

but bridges burnt cannot be built.

The original sin,

with the taboo within.

Yet, the declaration


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46

of hidden truth, and in all intense.

Elephant Butterflies

Your little foot is not enough,

but your wings flutter above us.

Beauty and tithe, youth's answer to strife,

quietly gliding between obstacles of life.

A wondrous thing of grace,

falling through the pyres.

Made by your gentle suffering...

a million questions forced by a million desires.

Elephant Dogs

Your bark is much louder than your bite.

You could be a wolf, but lack the balls.

Humping all in sight, and good in a fight.

Howling for company, hungry for destiny.

Lay with dogs and three dog night,

growling at nothing, running in fright.

Dogs bring fleas and flies around,

Dogs, the enemy of the new, and Ignorance's frown.


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47

Duane Locke

THE PAINTER OF VENUS

He never sold a panting while alive,

On his atelier door he kept a sign

In large red letters on a white background

That asserted Closed.

Upon his death, no one knew him.

State officials had to break in.

Were found paintings of Venus

Stacked in rows against his walls.

Always in each, Venuss erotic pink cheek

Was the same shape as a the pink cloud

Becoming dark fringed above on a most delicate


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48

Background of baby blue spotted with what looked like human tears.

Now Dead, recognized as a refiguration genius, but not yet

Quite understood. Critics of were perplexed

about the sameness of cheek and cloud shapes.

Critics asserted contradictory meanings.

Many scholars wrote the usual mediocre articles

On the meaning of these similar shapes

Of cheek and cloud. But no two scholars ever agreed.

The public saw in the paintings what the article read them told to see

I looked at some of his Venus paintings

On the day I received the message about the suicide

Of the dark haired girl I loved. Feeling a deep grief,

I understood the feelings the similar shapes conveyed.

I looked at a photo of his lover, whom no one

Knew anything about, her photographed cheek

Was the same shape as the cheeks of Venus and the clouds.

I understood, but could not articulate my understanding.

I just read in news paper that one of the Venus paintings sold

For several millions. The new owner renamed the painting.

A Portrait of Thais. A restorer had removed the dark fringed cloud.


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49

MAGIC WITHOU MYTH

Linden leaves against nakedness makes one feel

As if touched by a magic linen.

On windy days the wind will cover proneness with linden leaves,

If one is immobile in hidden places.

One feels the bizarre mysterious touch of embossed stiff threads

And their sensuous revelations talk as touch on the skin.

It makes one feel as he is a magician and can transform

Himself into something spectacular and unknown in a classifying world of dullness.

SHEPHERDS AT LUNCH

He became pastoral as he sat

In an American simulation

Of an English Pub. He joined

The chorus of Rolex banded arms moving downward

To pierce with fork prongs a crust,

Shepherds Pie, watch the cream-colored

Sauce oozing out from underneath.

He, a slave mentality, knew he was happy,

Cozy in his conformity, as he

Imagined himself a shepherd


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50

As did the other accountants, lawyers,

Financiers. He, like all the rest

Who bought their blonde wigged,

Blue-contact-lens-over-brown eyes,

Secretaries to lunch, imagined

That all these girls who wore

Shoes with long spiked heels

Were barefoot.

EL GRECO

The fingers long, the knuckles large,

When looked at the second time, the fingers

Were extended farther than upon the first look. On the third look

The fingers of this tall giant had stretched

Through space to cast shadow on the lightning

Over the crenellations of the walled city.

The El Greco painting

Competed for my attention. Its

Competition, the girl in front,

Her bare back that displayed a tattoo

So large on her skin it looked like a mural.

She stood in front and gazed at El Greco,


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51

She looked down on her museum notes to find out

What she was supposed to feel.

What I gazed beyond the tattoos border

At her bare skin surrounding the ugly ink drawing,

Its texture, a few freckles, was an exciting

As the shadow of the El Greco giants extended

Fingers that shadowed and blotted out

The walls of an imprisoned , old figuration city.

HAPPY HOUR OF AN UGLY MAN AT A BAR

Each word he spoke was a shilouette, guttural,

Had a Germanic goose step,

A helmet with a spike. His sentences

Were a hand with an Index finger and no other digits.

His face

Had the forced grimace of what would be called in bygone days wooing.

There was a homely housewife domesticity about his ordering rye whiskey.

She, his companion, not his wife, looked like a celestial illumination on a Key West beach

As describled in polysyllables by tourist Wallace Stevens.

Perhaps, the poet would describe her as courtesan in a democratic, liberal democracy, age

That had no lacy courts, wigs with long silver curls, or Versailles mirrors,

Or a divorced secular woman whose husband left her to stand in black by a wailing wall.


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The scene stimulated my thoughts. Why are the ugliest of all men

Are always seen with the most beautiful of women. My thought were on why

The ugliest man in the world could seduced so many women,

Betrand Russell . He even married a dozen or two.

Is this due to a gender deficiency. Have women no aesthetic sensibility. .Jean Paul Sartre,

Another ugly man seduced an abundance of virgins, but he had

An expert pimp in Simone Beauvoir who enticed her students to have good faith.

Duane Locke lives in Tampa, Florida, has had 6,601 poems published in print magazines

And e zines. Nation, American Poetry Review, Counter-Example Poetics, etc.

His last four books 2009-10 are: Yang Chus Poems 376pp, Crossing Chaos( Canada--

Order: Amazon), Voices from Grave, 40pp., erbacce, England, Soliloquies from

A High Wall Cemetery, Differentia Press, California; A Marble Nude Pauline Borghese

With a Marble Apple in her Marble hand, 53pp.,Scars publications.

He has been awarded the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, Charles Agnoff award,

Poetry Societys Walt Whitman award, DeKalb award for best poem, and a Swiss award

For best poem written on Europe.

Also is a painter. His paintings, quasi 300, on sale at Lisa Stone Arts,

290 Parrulli Drive, Olmond Beach, FL,3217--www.lisastonearts.com .

A photographer, both nature and surphotography, many exhibitions, has done over

30 poetry book covers. Blaze Vox has recently published 40 of his SurPhotos in a book

Poetic Imprints: Responses to the Art of Duane Locke.
http://3217--www.lisastonearts.com/http://3217--www.lisastonearts.com/http://3217--www.lisastonearts.com/http://3217--www.lisastonearts.com/


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BeezleBarb

with a twist

dirty, shaken, pimento-stuffed imagination

stirred her ice-crystal tongue

sipping the idea of one of those Bud Stamper affairs--

spun fairy floss stockings, deep-rooted Mencken martinis,

smokey humid nights tickled

all dewy in unspoken juniper berry poltergeists;

not the kind of love that kills poetry--

--where everyone is happy and just wants to fuck. No,

this tiffin would release her words from the bounds of nobility

with a dusting of its fine unsweetened innagadadavida powder;

the kind of words mistaken for revelation;

tympanum to conscience noir....

trick or treat

his Quaker City confection came all corn syrup pink and white

resinous anise oil extract rattled in her little box when he shook itheavy-handed, plenty good, thick carnauba molasses sugar lusttasting like door-to-door love in an old-fashioned pillow case

his artificially-colored, hard candy shell stained her Halloween tongue;masquerading as an engineer, her bell echoed in the approaching tunnelsounding off loudly, irreproachably riding the rails as his freight train boy toy;he could even call her Choo Choo Charlie

Finally, a good score, thought the candy-ass loverassessing her bounty, assaying her jones

by the tips of her fingers she rolled his gummy, licorice soul

skillfully over the sharp edge of her loaded, pearly bite


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55

I Wear Goggles For Fun

I wear goggles for fun,

not as a way of seeing

into the future. But

seeing into the futurehas proved to be a great

benefit to me - and has

even helped me savemoney occasionally

on goggles because

they often go on sale

but when goggles

go on sale

is sometimes

a great mystery,like death, the great

mystery is whyI wear goggles

just for fun.

Everybody Loves To Kill Richard Widmark

Boy, that Richard Widmark could act.

Man, he could be nasty sometimes.

Its not normal for a blond guy to be nasty.

I think he had to put more juice into it.

You have to wonder if he went bald.

He looks like he could go bald.

Hard to tell if he was tan, though.

Everybody loves to kill Richard Widmark.

I mean everybody. Especially ladies.

Richard Widmark really knows how to die, too.

Good thing. He did it enough.

and then his body fell limp in the chair

He was dead.

No, not really, he was just sleeping.


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He seemed nicer sleeping in the chair.

Like Richard Widmark only bald

and sleeping. Soon it would be time

for

dinner and a movie.

One

Sometimes I think about that beautiful poem by Merwinand how he looked at the photograph of you when you were twenty

and how beautiful you were, and yet he did not know you then

and you were gone before he was ever born

Sometimes I feel the same way sometimes about you

I think about how beautiful you were and how you were

gone before you * I ever knew. You wrote just one poemin your life but it was

A beautiful poem, and I think about how

it makes me sad, but it shouldnt, and how I wished you had written another but you didntand then I think about how once you were

the Emperor of Rome

Naughty Ink

I had mighty different

shapes in mindfor you.

Ricky Garni writes and draws in Carrboro, North Carolina. Over the last twenty years, he has

produced thirty books of poetry, ranging from the one page A PERFECT DAY to MAYBEWAVY and OK YOU CAN STOP NOW, both of which are over 500 pages long. On the back of

OK you can find the following blurb from writer Emily Cooper: You idiot! All your poems arestupid and about nothing in particular!"


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G David Schwartz

Oh Sweet Emily

Oh sweet Emily

Thank you much for thinking of meWhy you went to go

Out of town to the rodeo

Dear tender Emma

I know you rememberWhat I had said to you

In July 4th 2002

Let your eyes get bug out

Let your voice just go and shoutLet your dreams just dance about

and please allow our love to hang out

Sally Has Such Little Hands

Sally has such little hands

and she wears such tiny ringsBut they seem to be simply so

To go grabbing things

I Do

I do certainly wish to be

Held within your arms

And I do not believe

That would cause any alarm

G. David Schwartz is the former president of Seedhouse, the online interfaith committee.

Schwartz is the author ofA Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue. Currently a volunteer at DrakeHospital in Cincinnati, Schwartz continues to write.


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Deep Tissue Magazine is published and Edited by

Glen Lantz

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