September 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
[i](for John Swenning)[/i]
Enchanted – listening there to subterranean conflicts of love,
Lad and Dad, dark echoes of me and my old man.
That invitation tendered – and declined – would have rendered skill
In me, wisdom of the knotty, passionate weal
Of reciprocal head-butting that embraces love and hate between
Father and son, tethering them like cats on a clothesline, clawing,
Incessantly united, minutely, painfully aware
Of the wefts of each other. No other souls mingle in the play.
Had I hefted that proffered burden, I would now be steeped
In the loving turmoil, been counted wise in that hour when the
Circle dissolved, dispersing discord, leaving only love and despair.
The poetry you sing of your old man dwells within me,
A bittersweet echo of mine, of mine.
So I learn through hollow bulletins that I am forever banned
By time and choice from the mysteries of you and your father.
I am forbidden past the outer rim of your grief.
I don’t know what thing I regret the most.
August 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
[i]for maryann…[/i]
i gave my brother’s wife an orange
and bound our souls,
hers and mine.
not a whole orange,
less than half –
all she could bear.
summoned there,
throttled,
loving her so long,
i stood dumb, mute
at her whispered,
“i love you.”
i gave her an orange,
she slept, and
my heart broke.
i gave my
brother’s wife
an orange.
August 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
constant sin
cauterizes nerves
essential for
rousing God:
your swaying,
unsanctified, blemished,
unwise, unesteemed,
clinkered dream
can metamorphosize
into morning
golden Paradise.
ask that you dream.
August 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
Up! Get up, young man, there’s nothing wrong with you
That I can tell. You’ve no call laying sunken still
Three days dead in the evening heat and morning dew,
The jungle creeping in on you to work it’s green-eyed will.
Him I understand, laying slack against the wall,
No head, no legs, no arms, a bloodless shredded sack.
He grappled with a satchel charge, left nothing else at all.
A tattered scrim of dusky skin informs me he is black.
But you, sir, get you up! There’s naught in you infirm
Save a certain languid pallor and a dusty, dreamy stare
Coupled sorely with a stillness that forebodes the end of term
Of your likely twenty-two that should have never ended there.
Sifting through the wreckage, noting dutifully each
Reason each dead man is dead, what each dead man can teach
Us the living, us the frightened. We who here have yet to die
Garner mute and awful testimony, for we must know why.
Threadbare camouflage and boots, accouterments in place,
No scrape nor bruise nor puncture there to certify your fate.
Lily-colored, silken, waxen, beard ungrown upon your face,
Up, sir, up! You are not broken. Bid you hearken and you state
Why you lie there veiled in tears, ringed by comrades welling grief,
Never touching, never touching, but despairing of relief
From the enigmatic answer to that cryptic question, “Why?
“Why is it that you are chosen, and not he, nor she – nor I?”
August 2001 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
God’s gift of
bilateral symmetry:
we may, if we dare,
sample the adhering ether
outside the scrim
expanding
like thought,
slow as time,
purple cabalism.
one eye
one thought
one hand, one hook –
aural –
glimpse, a flick –
flash vision – Tantalus
frustrated
multiple internal
reflectance…
August 2001 | back-issues, fiction
by Jerry Vilhotti, from his collection of literary precis
([email]vilhotti [at] peoplepc [dot] com[/email])
When Tom was searching for Christ in Northshredder New York, where he and his third wife, a Boston “blue blood person”, had spent a year at [i]The Society of Followers[/i] to get rid of the dirt they felt within themselves which was making the dark shadow on their souls grow, he reasoned that indeed Christ had feigned a limp, something like the one he had due to the polio that had ravaged his baby body to leave its affect on a twisted shrunken leg with a million pimples to colonize the upper area which would be a mark he would carry with him for the rest of his life and actually capture great heaps of pity from those who could not tolerate deformity, escaped to Rome where He settled down with a woman who resembled Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Anne Bancroft and Verna Lissi all at the same time and had sixteen children with the four of them just as the church fathers were killing His brothers and sisters and all of His other Relatives to begin their new better religion on the shoulders of other religions which stood on yet others, that would garner billions and billions of dollars from those who felt guilt at having thrown stones at innocence and as Tom was being taken to a place of “rest” by four large attendants – he emitted an agonizing scream that could almost be heard in the land He had walked: speaking of love along with all the other prophets, drowning in tears at all the hate still existing there, representatives of all the other religions that had attempted to lead human kind into a semblance of compassion – with all their sincere efforts eaten by sham.
