poetry
Cold meat covered in thin white cotton.
One foot protrudes.
Mouth agape, drools silently.
Teeth removed, stored neatly on the roll-away table.
As if you might get warm,
or wake up and need to chew.
Sourness—a look or a feeling? I'm
not sure. Mislabeled television controls.
I'll see what I can do to fix this
error.
Published in little bang, Volume 1, Number 1, 2008
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I love you, I told him
Meals on wheels didn't come 'til three o'clock
He's pissed
I love you too, he said, trying to swallow it back down
*
Rewind, thirty years:
Leisure suit and perm aside,
Dad's never changed
Trouble with women, he says, they just want to be happy
He never remarried
Thanksgiving with my Mom—Christmas with Dad
I came home after college
He was an old man
*
He reads glossy magazines
Schools me on pop culture
On his 78th birthday he asked for Moby
Though lately
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The rogue state is diseased
United in fear
and delusion of grandeur
An identity of artificial construct
Borders drawn in blood and hate
Symbols and assertions confuse nation with individual,
desire with right,
loyalty with heroism
Obsolete and unaware
the patriot is the enemy of mankind
Bio: Michael Lee Johnson is a poet, and freelance writer, Itasca, Illinois author of The Lost American: From Exile to Freedom, http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-46091-7. He has also published two chapbooks of poetry. He has been published in USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Turkey, Fuji, Nigeria, Algeria, Africa, India, United Kingdom, Republic of Sierra Leone, Nepal, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Poland, internet radio. He is also publisher and editor of four poetry, flash fiction sites--all presently open for submission:
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You in this sepia-toned photograph,
with your arms wide open in greeting,
with your hands held up in surrender.
Edge of highway, corner of house,
hint of something better. A body of water,
maybe, or the back of someone else's
head.
A gun pulled from inside the
killer's heart, and he says [i]Mr. Lennon[/i],
then smiles, then pulls the trigger.
No.
I've gotten ahead of myself here.
I'm ten years old and in a boat with
my father and two of his friends, and the
engine has died. The tide is going out,
and the only sound is the pull of the
ocean.
The only heat is the
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it happens this way sometimes,
where the children die from the poison that
seeps up from underground
you vote for one person or the other,
and the children die, and it's not war but
business, and both words are actually just
different ways of saying [i]profit[/i]
listen
new computers will be given to
the schools as gifts
the sharpened teeth of priests will snap
the bones of young boys in two
what you need to believe in are
rabid dogs
speaking w/ the voices of humans
what we do is use the word [i]political[/i]
to describe what we don't want to
talk about and then, of course,
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1.
~ Basho & Hemingway ~
I ponder several times
over Basho's Haiku,
"The temple bell stops--
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers." *
I surmise he was
six feet underground when
he heard above sound.
It was for both a contrecoup
for whom the bells tolled.
A sort of ego contredance.
~~~
Alex Nodopaka June©2004
AD Something
2.
~ I Con.Template ~
NB: desirable to center formatted.
I Con.Template
my
n
a
v
e
l
while my belly
e~x~~p~~~a~~~~n~~~~~d~~~~~~s.
By
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Don't
© paddy gillard-bentley
I think back to that night
a dark rainy Thursday in November
crummy run down
apartment building
where you lived
in New York City
the aroma of ethnic food
coming from their tiny worlds
arranged in rooms
600 square feet of universe
The smells drifted into the dark stairwell
in the midst of our colloquial frenzy
spitting truths and lies at each other
sordid and foul
a back drop of graffiti smeared walls
like primitive cave paintings
her face
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