LIVING POETS

volume 2 number 1 First Published by

Dragonheart Press 11 Menin Road Allestree Derby DE22 2NL England http://welcome.to/livingpoets livingpoets@seanwoodward.com 2001 Individual Poets All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Volume 2 Number 1

Volume II Number I
July 2001 Era Vulgaris

Edited by Sean Woodward

First Published MMI by

Dragonheart Press
11 Menin Road Allestree Derby DE22 2NL England

http://welcome.to/livingpoets livingpoets@seanwoodward.com 2001 Individual Poets All Rights Reserved Worldwide Layout & Graphics by

No part of this electronic journal may be reproduced in anything other than its original form, other than for the purposes of review, without the permission of the Editor or Publishers.

Contents
Kamikaze Rain The Visitor Mother Mary Tethered Goat Invader After Rush Hour Caspian An Ending To It Quilted Minds Who Am I Cleansed Apple Tree Dolphins Heart Who Lost the Love File The Harrowing Athwart Him In the Forest Pretence Absence Encounters with the Shadow Massachusetts Autumn The House of Horta Luckless in the Far Cloister Cancel Call-Waiting Diving Evening Drops The Crowd of Time 23 April No Peace Until The Space in Your Mind Elegy For A Poet Dream On, My God Dust and Ashes Ivan Hylton Ivan Hylton Robert Phelps Ben Wilensky Ben Wilensky Geoff Stevens Geoff Stevens Robin Ford HP HP HP Nigel Coles Nigel Coles Nigel Coles Will Daunt Francis Spencer Francis Spencer Francis Spencer Francis Spencer Francis Spencer Sean Woodward Sean Woodward Sean Woodward David Stone David Stone David Stone Timothy Hodor Timothy Hodor Roy Clements Roy Clements Roy Clements M Pickard Louis S. Faber Louis S. Faber Louis S. Faber

Introduction
Welcome to Volume 2 number 1 of Living Poets. We continue with this new volume to feature powerful new poetry and to provide a platform for the voice of international poets. Poets spotlighted in this issue have appeared in South Carolina Review (Louis S Faber, New York), Orbis, Smoke, Pennine Platform (Will Daunt, Lancashire UK) and include the editor of Purple Patch (Geoff Stevens, West Bromwich UK). Ben Wilensky (Rockaway, New York) has appeared in a multitude of magazines such as Long Island Quarterly, Hobo (Australia), Jerusalem Review (Israel) and has published two collections with Mellen Press. The background of the poets varies from those who have never previously expressed themselves in verse to a 60 year old Franciscan friar currently preparing an electronic book for publication by Denlinger's Press. Poetry has been a vehicle for healing personal traumas, inner reflection and observation of this world and its inhabitants. In sharing their inner worlds with us, they demonstrate the commonality and interconnectedness of the human condition. Sean Woodward Warmbrook, 2001

Kamikaze Rain
Ivan Hylton
Cold, Kamikaze rain, hard Soulless like granite. Timeless cycle Without point or end. Dank grey island how you have suffered. Day dreams your only vice your muse sleeping or dying. Smear my lazy body with your rich blood. Lie and turn inwards, concentrate, scream husky Insults at the moon face that can only watch

The Visitor
Ivan Hylton
Madness visited last night, with her Hyena smile, slanting. A swirl of crazed ebony, bleeding, bubbling like hot phlegm in the cauldron of her eyes. Here speed was incredible smearing the innards of my tiny room with a faint surreal scent, a threatening territorial urination. Her impossible garments twitched and disturbed like an epileptic fit filling all space with the menace of tormented snakes, Medusa! Please spare me your look. Like an erection of feathers my fragile sanity stands poised. Why bother with such a feeble challenge? As sudden as geysers her eyes threw me to the wall then bludgeoned my gentle brain with the curiosity of a child wounding ants.

Then with the mundane yawn of routine the morning sun crept through the windows; she left. I readied myself, with cigarettes and cologne.

Mother Mary
Robert Phelps
Sometimes like a half-remembered fragrance Like smiles in a fading photograph Sometimes like the melody of a song thats Hummed all through the night Sometimes like a beautiful gift unexpected Like the logic of a child in the midst of chaos and fight Sometimes like a sunset capping the earth with the promise of morning Like the feverish hug of forgiveness Sometimes like the eyes of a little girl on the knitting hands of her grandmother Like the fingertips of lovers at the love-touch aborning Sometimes like the birds settling on my mothers tombstone Like waking hungry for the fevers rack Sometimes like feeling Christ sitting in my car Like the embrace of cool wind on my back Sometimes like a loving dark that wishes me well Like a kiss on my cheek Sometimes like sweet tears that well into my eyes Are you, are you, O gentle and meek Mother of my days Are you, O mother with arms bigger than Siberia and a Voice smaller than a confessional whisper Are you Sweet Mama for the days when I lose my hope Jewish mama with your gentle wisteria calm and Smile that burns away clouds and makes a hole in the ground from Dubuque to Shanghai, Who holds your son in the crock of your arm and with your free hand walks me around Your adopted second son Baby boy sick already with sophistication Sick with the consumption of consumption You gently walk with me Mother walk away from the bad places to the light

Mama who laughs at my pretences Pierced heart Mother laugh Sounds like Gods laugh Laughing at all that comes with the night A laugh That dries my tears and tears down the fences Made with the clapboards of fear of My preordained schedules of inanity That stunt my growth And lay the spores That grow in the chambers of my heart Into a primordial fungus of soul insanity Which covers over with silly scales Eyes made to see the sun. Created by your son To see where I have been called to run.

Tethered Goat
Ben Wilensky
Call it three before the light or three inside the day when spatial negativity comes rushing by to rattle my ship, squeeze my sanity. The heaving deck is pitch black, obliterating surface from interior, wiggling fingers in front of my face. The soul cries out in panicked comedy when knives are primed for pulsing meat, the loss of life, the force of tragedy. The spit of the sea is the hiss of a predator searching for prey. Warmer now, ten degrees warmer than that when I hear the cry of a tethered goat. Sweet stench clogs the air. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, hyperventilating, fit to be tied. Pressure is up. Pulse is down. Pain is quite exquisite. Literally, I can leap into the bloody ink of Isaacs sorcery and disappear. Sky is breaking. Waves are calm. Time to cast my nets and troll for bottom feeders. Function replaces fantasy, reduces the play.

Amused and chilled to the bone, I go below to meditate on whiskeys burning hell, as I eat lobster, squirming in its shell.

Invader
Ben Wilensky
Sleek stainless steel, she changes speed and mass as if she were a sorceress. Impervious to river tot and termite time, she glides through vines and cul de sacs blaring music, colored lights, for lights and drums attract a crowd along the Great Yazoo, Madre DOro, Black Shingu. Our ship is a murderess, spy for Nomad Khan, hurling tons of fire high into the topmost trees. We are burning forests to the ground, cleansing them for browsing sheep. A slow witted sloth looks into the eyes of old friends roasting in the heat, their fearful shapes quivering in the smoke.

After Rush Hour

Geoff Stevens
Street lights bleed into the darkness, diffuse light like seed clocks, dandelions losing alpha-particles into passing time. The rain is greasy, oils everything. Cars and buses stop, then trundle between dying rows of department stores, their eyes gone out. 13 and 74 stencil sharply into the front of slow passing buses. They are cut with precision; everything else is blurred. This window is shedding tears. We sit in its brain, which has ceiling lights that flutter in sequence with the thunder. Someone is walking through it, carrying a ham cob, which is tightly wrinkled in clingfilm, with pink meat pressing its tongue against it. Waiting here is flat, lifeless, and dull. I drink it down like warm beer and it fills up again with the same. Brain signals glisten like cigarette ends. I get a message which says that I am going to be late home for dinner. I dial the same old number and a voice, as dry as ovened gravy, puts me on hold.

Caspian
Geoff Stevens
Suicidal, youve often though of drowning and the cobalt mirrors that create a triptych of yourself have cost a fortune. You immerse yourself in them, each night, before you go to bed. They hold three neon-blue images of the bedroom light, and your arms move like lazers in them as you remove your earrings, that glisten like blue ice. An electric, blonde shock of highlights crackles within it, as you teasel with silver-backed hairbrushes. You remove your (purple-in-the-mirror) bright-red lipstick and Prussian Blue eye-shadow using cotton buds of baby-blue and a bladderwrack-brown lotion, before you slip out of your clothing and sit there with black nipple-smudges on your bluebell breasts, and your pubic hair as lively as hungry mauve sea-anemones. Flanked by your perfume bottles, phallic and cut glass, engorged with indigo, you see your bed, behind you, waiting for a lover.

Some nights you bring back some hulk to keelhaul with your wants, and to cling to when you are drowning in the intense Adriatic blue impulsations of orgasm, that wash over you while circling gulls are screaming take me, deep down in the salt water fathoms of your psyche.

An Ending To It
Robin Ford
You left no message you will not come back I have learnt this. Even if you returned and crossed the same threshold you would not enter the same room. If your form were to appear framed by lintel and architrave my heart would sicken, shrink shed its blood, squeeze mouse like under skirting boards. Love or mania-like this bows under its own weight leaves rupture, puddles of red mud. Think of me felled then file that image for the future. I know you will not

Quilted Minds
HP
what happens between the space of my mind that no one else sees desire and lust to name but a few are these Within this space an explosion thoughts, verbs, scattered onto the quilt of paper minds and when theres nothing then I write as nothing can become a cascade of my mind edit and re-edit but soon theres nothing left but is that not what lies between the space of quilted minds

Who Am I
HP
Who am I A rose A thorn A spec on the carpet of life insignificant And yet when joined by others I become A part of a great voice that can heal, save lives Make a difference in this world So who am I depends On who stands beside me

Cleansed
HP
Washed in the tears of those that lay dying it takes strength to walk away Indemnifying You dont have to fight to prove youre strong even sanctioned killings are sometimes wrong From twisted commands to blood stained hands Washed in the tears of the dead and dying

Apple Tree
Nigel Coles
Love is like an apple tree It starts growing from a seed you see Planted in your lovers head You can watch it grow, I have heard it said A small apple tree starts to grow With leaves and branches, ever so slow The same as love, it grows stronger Obvious consequences, making it last longer A blossom appears at the end of the branch Love is flourishing, given the chance The fruit we have mentioned, starts to grow The branches get heavy, and start to bow Like a couple you sow your seed The same process has started, yes indeed The fruit drops and the harvest is in The apples are collected up in a bin The same goes for the baby thats due Fruit of the lions, I have heard this too So, from a seed, a tree, a blossom, an apple grows Its called the apple tree of love I know For I have been there and sown a seed And experienced all that love indeed

Dolphins
Nigel Coles
Dolphins are said to be a sign of love I suppose likewise goes for a white dove But swimming with dolphins, is said to be A loving feeling, from within the sea They are a sign of safety, love and beauty When someones in danger, they always seem to do their duty They have a healing effect on children that are ill Maybe they tickle them with their bill Wherever you are, out there, in a boat At the bow you can elegantly see them float With that beauty and elegance in every way You could stay there watching them all day So dolphins are surely, what they are made out to be Beautiful angels from within the sea

Heart
Nigel Coles
My love for you, is deep in my heart Of its weight, I would sadly let it part Because I am filled to the brim, with all this love for you A release is what I need, what can I do ? I feel my heart, is about to explode My bloods pumping that fast, my veins erode So please tell me you love me likewise This may reduce my heart back to the right size Synchronise your heart, to beat with mine This way our hearts will beat on time You see, cupids fired that arrow at me He wants me to hang out with you, you see Give me your heart, and I will store them together This way our love will last forever

Who Lost the Love File

Will Daunt
Hallo, come in. Ive forgotten your name. No. Dont tell me now, its somewhere on screen, With your details and oh dear, what a shame Ive deleted the life where your folder had been. You registered late, I attempted to fit any profile which proved you were out of my hands. Our recycle bin is preparing to split with thousands like you no one else understands. There might be a space I could turn into yours, in stacks or the card files beyond the alarms. Theres somewhere beyond here and through the baize doors here is the password, now creep out of harm. Thats how she spoke every speck of the trip, while one more small part of him died in the chip.

The Harrowing
Francis Spencer
Three days we harrowed Paradise: the graveclothes lay unfolded by the bed. How simple it all is. The room, your hair, the river sounding by . Our hands reached into the side of the world. Its eyes are soft as eggs. And nowhere underneath the skin is anything but this We lied when on the third day we appeared to hang again, like dutiful defeated thieves, on those dead trees, to cover up this savagery with smiles and cries of dereliction.

Athwart Him
Francis Spencer
Athwart him and his waters, she: I want to bear your child shivering triumphant gift. Woman. This one. No-one else. Unbuttoning his grief as the terror of man is broken.

In the Forest
Francis Spencer
Following each other naked as the trees Into our no-mans land, the edge of the wood was all around us Winter and our breath snow-laden, blossomed overhead in pillars of white fire We followed our words like a god And there was time here and tall bones a misery of air and the skeletons of children growing vast in death Their silence covered everything as Infinitely small we too grow white and soft crushing the snow with love

Pretence
Francis Spencer
Let us pretend in this small room and on this room-shaped paper that we can walk out naked under the trees or fly to Prague on a train that we are virgins still in fact not just in rediscovery and that the hours we press together here will turn to years like wine Let us pretend because its true we do not like being false that our eyes are not watching us from other lives or rooms that we do not have children there or boughs weve ripened on and that they unlike us, arent walking loves white stick Let us pretend to make believe to make love, to make waves that One day comes, that Ill leave mine should you leave yours that well get over somehow their not getting over it and that

thats what we even want to make a life in time If not, let us pretend these sheets are blank and that for instance, we are not two had and eaten cakes or that I do not love you even

Absence
Francis Spencer
After love we drew the counterpane all around us; sitting cross-legged by the window, were a Buddha with two heads. Usually we talk. I know that you exist then because I can see the words go ruffling the fine hair on your neck. This time we are only breathing, but I still know we exist because the glass that separates us from out there, its wandering headlights and our lives, has misted blindly over. But is it true, my silence, that we can only know this when we cannot see ourselves or see the world see us ? For when your hand crept out of our two-headed idol, whether to wipe the pane clean or to wave, absence fled between like a knife.

Encounters with the Shadow

Sean Woodward
from a bright summer's day the shadows are new prominences on the rim of the morning sun - crow feathers and burnt moons in the cut-off moments as black as the turning instant between all you know and all that can change. I kept your name the exact number of eclipses of moon and sun of mood and funless moment. I kept chained the ghetto atrocities of speech and broken thought of each way and method your stratagems mapped out those tired black lands of torture. I stand now, as ever, watching new encounters with the shadow watching him stepped from an alchemist's glass a Gollum decked all in gold and finery holding nothing but lies and anothers crooked shadow cast from the past upon him waiting, flickering unseen.

Massachusetts Autumn
Sean Woodward
Harry, You always appeared exhausted when calling spirits your daughter's vanished your neighbours in the Baltimore Hotel were very LA, very quick to say anything that would take the edge away. That day in 1926 you had wished for a great escape only now is it that we are watching and waiting, second-guessing the secret trade of magicians, played out in the dark shouts of children of owls on church lytchgates. A crowd gathers as we await your illusive infamacy mixed in its own alchemists mist in this Massachusetts autumn in the midst of this storm.

I see a spiders web bridging death with its illusion of deft construction. And ten circled words are spoken in smokey dew picked from the threads of life and death. Conan-Doyle and Houdini what it was they knew to come through this seventieth time this Halloween night, Nine teen Ninety Six. Once more I walk within the lines. Once more I talk with him of other times. That someone would uncover the crimes of Innsmouth, of the blind arab who led me here waiting for you to appear from the back of the faceless crowd Ii a loud round of applause.

The House of Horta

Sean Woodward
Marble steps Effortlessly merge With the curved spurs of wrought-iron, Of fingers, in awe pointing To the staircase landing Of Hortas organic abode. I have felt those sea-crest joins, The handrail as smooth As my lovers skin. I have walked through doorways As arched and indistinguishable As our bodies in given rapture. Only in silent harmony Do you begin to see The dew-drop symmetries, The shades of aching flesh, The nouveau mesh of bud and seashell. Bring me again, lady of the night, Through the cafe laden Streets of Ixelles. It is your touch that melts masonry, Composes the once grilled orifices Into open offerings of abandon. Gone are the scents of dried floweristry, Everything is effortless As frozen as a moment of Rambles observation Everything marble, stone, honed thought -

Everything Is how it was meant to be. Bring me again, daughter of the night To the House of Horta To the light of your touch.

Luckless in the Far Cloister

David Stone
I marked my place in Plato, Erased my notes of remorse, Surrendered my sorcerers license And desperately poked the strand To the applause Of a choir of horseshoe crabs.

Cancel Call-Waiting
David Stone
Reading the ledger of Anubis, Dry-eyed, behind bars, Counting rhapsodies, Apologizing for pitching streetward, Scrawny as a dream.

Diving
David Stone
from the cliff edge over a burning ring, wincing, rotating, stripping, retreating, restating traumas above embankments, rinsed seawalls. vaulting above chimneys, over the stadium wall, grappled to rest like a rosewood cannonball fuming in the clocktower.

Evening Drops
Timothy Hodor
Tears touch The tenderness Of others When they Are exterior; But when There is No light In their liquid, They must Melt into The self; And in that Nocturnal world The candle Of some Melancholy man Burns in The midnight Of life. (Reprinted from Hours in the Orchestration)

The Crowd of Time

Timothy Hodor
It's hard living in a world -When you feel alienated from your native country, And from the country you live in. And you feel alienated from the Catholicism You learned as a child, And from all the religions you know as an adult. You are a loner, walking in the crowd of time. The people behind you are dead; The people in front of you aren't born. How well you know the people around you. Sometimes they bump you. They tell you how well they advance. You see how well they retreat. You are a loner,walking in the crowd of time.

(Reprinted from Cyphers)

23 April
Roy Clements
Nearby, on the festival of St George at my greening roundabout, a thousand Dandelions vehicle poison all the day and, unperturbed, declare their bold gold opinion on it all. How, then, shall I do less than slay the dragons in my soul, and smile ?

No Peace
Roy Clements
There is, without a doubt, peace aplenty for the wicked why should they be worried ? It is the right-minded, conscientious and good who lie awake and watch gaunt faces in the dark. Don't proverb them, don't mock. For they it is who bear a neighbour as a brother, who wipe a wound a pay a price, who stand between a victim and a foe. No peace out here, in this our wasted land, for over there, asleep and undeterred, the wicked waits.

Until
Roy Clements
On the ground, fallen, beside Autumn's last dying leaf. This, then, is waiting.

The Space in Your Mind

M Pickard
A circle is a line of progression that starts at a point in your mind and, having created, finishes back where it started. To get where you want to go you have to start from where you are not where you would like to be not where you think you are not where the others think you are. To get where you'd like to be and move on from there. You might have to go back and start at the beginning. You might find that you split a circle and finish where you started leaving a perfect moon. 2 you might find the energy in breaking free from the circle of belief that constricts and strangles your mind though it saps your energy carries you a million miles through the space in your mind. 3 You should find that a healthy unrealistic dream a dream of where you'd like to be

shoves you along each tottering step through the circle of your mind takes you quickly through where you'd not like to be. You might find something boring. You might find something uninteresting suggested put things together find they complete the circle. Take a look, closer and closer at the space in your mind. The more you think, the bigger it gets. Without the circle, you run the risk Of becoming lost. With the circle, you run the risk Of going round and round and round. The enormous energy it takes launch yourself from the circle carries you a million miles through the space in your mind. Back to the starting point. 4 Take a look take a closer look the old woman, wrinkled and sarcastic is she still beautiful? behind the wall of a stuttering pathetic forgetful dependant lies the invisible, the wise, the mind the person, the awareness thrust so deeply to the centre of her being. Into the space of her mind. To challenge your perceptions is to break free of the circle to launch yourself

through the space in your mind. 5 That should be the end but a circle never ends end it now or be sent spinning round and round and round Everything goes into the push, the leap that carries you a million miles through the space in your mind. space pushed constantly expands mind and matter constantly expands until you end up at the finish back where you started whether you started at the beginning or at the end. 6 So that you complete the circle and finish up where you started like the Sun But the Sun is not chained to the earth the Earth is chained to the sun such a belief shift takes a major effort completed, carries you a million miles through the space in your mind.

Elegy For A Poet

(for Allen Ginsburg)

Louis S. Faber
You died quietly in your bed without friends gathered around the car and buses of the city clattering out a Kaddish to a God you had long ago dismissed as irrelevant. We would have expected your howl, to decry the unfairness of it all, but you merely said it is time, and slipped away. Who gave you the right to depart without leaving us one last remonstration against the insanity that surrounds us, lone last censure of the fools who we have so blindly chosen to lead a generation into a hell of our creation. You had your peace but what of us left behind, what can we look forward to in your absence save the words we know so well, can recite by heart that no longer beats in your breast.

Dream On, My God

Louis S. Faber
Good night, Sisyphus try and get some sleep. It's been a long day and you already know the rock will await you when you arise in the morning. I suppose by now you've come to realize there is no percentage in pissing off the Gods. This of this as a personal re-education center where right thinking is the lesson of this and every other day. Did you really think they would let you stand in the middle of the Square openly mocking all of their edicts. Sleep old fellow, we have all the time in the world, it is one of the benefits of immortality.

Dust and Ashes

Louis S. Faber
Between Scylla and Charybdis they cower amidst the ruins fearful to look skyward lest they encourage the rains of hell. Now and then they visit the corpses, hastily buried grief drowned by the sound of the laugh of the gunner peering down from the hills. It is always night for the soul and lookout must be kept for Charon, who rides silently along the rivers of blood, that flow through her streets. In the great halls, far removed from the horror, self-professed wise men exchange maps lines randomly drawn, scythes slicing a people. They trade in lives as chattel, reaping a bitter harvest, praying there may only be but seven lean years. They offer a sop to Cerberus, three villages straddling the river, but the army of the hills knows they will take that and more and waits patiently for the winter when the odour of sanctity no longer arises out of the city to assail their nostrils and Shadrach is no more than a ghost.

Colophon
This issue was sustained by Angela. Special thanks to David Taub. Editorial evasion assisted by Typhonian excursions from the realms of Malkuth, Gravity Winter Games, (Mammoth, California) ; MontSainte-Anne (Quebec), Linkin Park,Kid Rock, Santana, John Mayall, ELO, Papa Roach, Tonic, Black Sabbath, Playstation2, CNN, 2000AD, Deepak Chopra and Derek Acorah.

New for 2001

ev

Splushnay Records release the Best Of collection, Gothick and an audio CD of poetry readings from Dragonheart Press.

splushnayrecords.soundvault.net

191, The Mailart Asemblage Zine from welcome.to/191online

is available free