F Is For Failure From Atrocious Poems A To Z

Failure is the last poem I finished for Atrocious Poems A To Z, and I got it finished mere days before the deadline we had set for ourselves. The poem itself had certain prerequisites because it had to contain and have explainable paradoxes in it to comply with the standard I was trying to adhere to that the poems needed to have something teachable about them. All except dog poop and urination, of course. 

Taking the lazy way out, I of course tried to retrofit a poem about failure I had written at Jack's Cub Scout meeting a couple of weeks previous, but Jenny wasn't buying it, so she looked up a list of paradoxes and saw a quote by George Carlin which she incorporated into the poem. I wanted to quote the line from George Carlin and use it as an example of paradox, but was overruled. 

This is the only place on the internet I'll post F. Then I think I'll alternate the rest of the letters I haven't done among the other blogs I edit or use as personal blogs.

The book is finished and for sale at Amazon, as well as the gift shop of the Rockford Art Museum. It's also on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum in its entirety as part of an exhibit titled Bittersweet Observations. The rest of the family is on vacation in Rhinelander, and I'm sitting here drinking sparkly water and eating grapes. 

I have decided I will only use the Times font forever after in all my writings. 

If anyone reading this is willing to write a review on Amazon I'll send you the PDF of the book. Just let me know, poets of America. One way you can really help me out.

Wolf Poetry By Darren Demaree

Darren Demaree's poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. 

He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently "Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly" (2016, 8th House Publishing). He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. 

He is currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. 



SWEET WOLF #13

Lost in the acreage,
sin can stretch out a bit,
can sing the crowd

into a burning skeleton,
can make a path
out of the ashes

of each field party
& when the sun becomes
a witness, how many

stray animals do you
think it will count?
How many sheriffs

are found sleeping
in their off-duty trucks?
It’s useless to govern

most of Ohio, but there
is a feeling on the right
night, that doesn’t matter.

Wolf illustration by Jenny Mathews 

SWEET WOLF #14

The first salvation
is the last salvation.
Most of us have chosen

so poorly that we pull
on every artistry
until we’re swallowed

up in the epic
of our own demise.
There isn’t a Lord,

but there is plenty
of heroin.  Sometimes
it really is that simple.




SWEET WOLF #15

The river wakes up
from time to time
& every time it does

it spits out at least
one girl I took
to Homecoming.

It’s pretty
fucking righteous,
that damn water.

Short Fiction By David Daniel and an Illustration of a Tiger Riding a Bike By Jenny Mathews

David Daniel lives near Boston and has been the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer in Residence at UMass, Lowell. His work appears often at thestoryside.com.

Behind the Doors of Her Smile

I know a woman who gives me a smile whenever we meet. She’s very pretty and her smiles are not always the same. They are like doors, with unexpected things behind them.

One door says, hey, how are you? It’s good to see you. I hope you’re doing well. Let’s have coffee sometime.

Another door says little, just hangs open for a moment, then closes, and I’m left with mystery.

A third door purrs: put your arms around me, what are you waiting for? Make me feel like I exist. Slip a hand up under my skirt and touch me. With that smile heat settles around me like a skin whose clothes are the night, and I want to look around for an empty hallway or a dark alley.

And there’s a door that mixes the others together and it says: How are you? I’m happy to see you. Finish your drink then take me into the shadows and nuzzle my throat and kiss me. Do more. More. And, BTW, this big guy with me is my husband, who played football at Princeton.

Call me feint-hearted: I always smile back but I don’t open any of the doors.

I’m afraid of tigers.

                                   

Tiger Riding a Bike By Jenny Mathews 

A Brief History of the Beats

Bixby Canyon in Big Sur, where Kerouac cracked and 10,000 maniac hearts broke with him. 

Kerouac who imagined into being a land of middleaged diner waitresses writing their order tickets for dharma bums and all the sideburned hitchhiking gypsies of the open road, and was coronated. 

A thorned crown, alas. Relentlessly he was pursued by lovers of the night: faceless, formless, alight with the fires of their own sanctifications, seeking the tender breast of the artist as a young man—who wasn’t young long. Where once he had rejected the fixed lines of demarcation, challenged the order of forms, by 35 the alchemy was failing. 

His had been the jazz poise of a zen virtuoso, a saintly touch, no howl or hurl of bricks at the temple of Art for him; leave that for kid brothers Allen G & Gregory C. Nor did he get lost in the Tangier twinings of a junk-infested mind, as big brother William B. did. No, he caught lightning in a bottle, and then it got out and torched him. With the balance teetering, who was there to say (who is ever there to say to genius?) “Stop! Walk this line!”

Jackie Boy was going, going, booze-sopped & ancient at 40. Books continued to come, of course. Ossifications on arrival. Harder to read than rune stones. 

And then: 47 & gone. Bleeding out on a toilet in St. Pete. Carried away to his final hometown home: Seventh & Lincoln, Edson Cemetery, Lowell, MA. RIP, Ti Jean.

No crucifix keeps the vampires away. Locusts swarm the groves of academe, gilding the dirt of bad books, unearthing juvenilia that shoulda been left buried. And what are scholars but appendices and addendums, the genitalia of marginalia, ooh-ing and ahh-ing, like love-blind parents, “Come look, petite jean has made merde!” 

While dear ol’ forlorn-beard Ferlinghetti, granted the gray grace of age, steady hand at the wheel of fortune, is still doing it at 97 in the Coney Island of his mind. And 5000 poems/plays/translations later, what he’ll be recollected as is a footnote: for lending the King of the Beats his tiny dark cabin in Bixby Canyon, where the blue-eyed boy could quietly go fuckin nuts. 

J Ash Gamble Is a Great Name For An Outlaw Poet, Huh Google?

I like the style of outlaw poet J Ash Gamble because he may not be an outlaw poet at all and his name could be a clever anagram and I also like that he uses the word "rassling" because my youngest brother is a rassling coach and he hates that word and I think it's funny. Now it's likely I'll find an Iron Sheik drawing Jenny did and post it here. 

Quantifying

I cannot count for you
or ring up on a register
or abacus how important
this day is, or the feeling
of a bit of rough skin,
you don't like it but that
simple touch ignites me

---

Rules of Matter

I threaten to float
through the universe
becoming a lighter molecule
or else moving more quickly
to produce heat and become
a fast-approaching solid.

---

Hearth

Here is the home
I promised you and you
promised me, just a little
too late
Here is the man
you wanted me to be
arrived the day after.


Hidden Agenda

It lingers, a serpent, right below
the surface of their words, ready
always to strike out with venom.

---

The Day He Stopped

Damn it, I’m going to stop, he said
and she had heard it before. Watched
him at the sink. Knew his well-rehearsed
lines. She knew when she left it would
be the same old blinking story.

Don't give you mom the claw on Mother's Day. Wait until tomorrow. Illustration by Jenny Mathews.

Rassle

We used to call it rassling
and pinned each other to the floor
never knowing we let each other
win every time.

Five Poems By Jack D. Harvey and One Tiny Drawing By Jenny Mathews

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, Slow Dancer, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Piedmont Journal of Poetry and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.   

The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle "Sweet Adeline," use a knife and fork and killed a postman.

Sturmalarm

Clouds hurrrying;
cloud after cloud.
Dark.
Darker.
Dark boots marching.
Thundersnort
after thundersnort
blazing banging
rank and file;
brown battalions
marching free
on the streets 
of Berlin.

On the sidewalk,
my Berlin sweetmeat
gives me a 
small-moue
lech-look
yodeling
O look!
Oh! Oh! Frightened
by frightening 
dark and lightning.

Herr Hittite,
father of 
ashes and 
lye,
killer of Siegels and 
Greenbaums,
you no I love,
you I hate.
You ring-rang you
rooting-tooting
rattling-tattling
custard from hell
fly-blasted
two-bit turdkneipe.

Not yet,
Minnie the Mouser,
on big B-29s
so unsleek,
so lassome
lissome
langsam they
slip along
alone away
again bombing
back and gone.

Not yet. 

Watching her 
watching the marching,
the goose stepping,
it’s her I wish,
it’s her I loathe
all at once.

Bye bye
creep crack rattle
light light
lightfarb lichtgang
light light
-ning -ning
it goes snarack;
snarackit it gegangs
gegoing gegone.
Noisome sulphur
blaps out stink.

We cower in conundrum
corners and wait for
peace and sun,
the young placid gawd
good God!
to go come-come
beam gelucid
bright-bright
light ringing 
bright bringing
over us unheeded
unimpeded
divine sunhead. 

Dark. 
Darker. 
Dark troops marching.
Bad man
ranting and raving;
Herr Hitler’s favoring
weather rides a ring
of iron and blue
October breaks our hearts.

Go away 
Herr Hitler,
go away;
Apollo,
god of light,

blow him to hell. 

Boat Song

     (after Martin Codax)

Waters of the sea of Vigo,

Hast thou seen my amigo?

O God, that it were given!

Waters of the sea arising,

Hast thou seen my beloved?

O God, that it were given!

If thou seest my beloved,

For whom I sigh,

O God, that it were given!

If thou seest my beloved,

For whom I bear great suffering,

Tell him, tell him, I wait here,

Tell him I wait for him,

in the fading day, 

in the dead of night,

in the rising dawn, 

Tell him I wait for him,

O God, that it were given! 

                                       Tiny Drawings 11-14-2010 By Jenny Mathews

Tempest Storm

She stoops,

her tits swing forward and

on her fanny she sits

                                  plump

while behind the tickling wind

her peacocked fan creates

the flock of friends 

her nakedness creates

like dying foes

the steel of her

stern gape feel;

it wrenches them back

out of passion.

Twin busts

like Darien’s peaks

rise and rise;

their souls in arms,

these prancing dunces.

The thumping butler,

the aspiring youth

shut down

before her

sweet fulsome 

giggle;

it’s Maid Marion,

it’s tenseness,

says the old 

blade and blesses his

stars as he stands

stiff as an icicle;

it’s stupidity,

says the college 

don and turns to his glass;

eorthe mudder,

says the 

street gang,

yelling and yelling.

Everybody sees 

the greater whore 

or the lesser.

Bare buttresses established,

she makes a quivering retreat

backstage.

Dreaming dirty, inflamed, we

slouch, going out.

Lust descends over the

black isles of naked women,

the shadows crunch 

on doorsill and 

fishnet thigh,

cocks grow

hard as rocks; 

insides light up 

and easy in the

light we joke and 

condescend to enjoy

one another’s fixtures.

Spanking Jack

gets his thrill

and Jill

climbs another mons,

brandishes another

tower of Babel.

Indeed, we all tremble

while she,

half slave and 

half sweaty slayer,

gives bubbles and baubles;

lower, higher, streams 

the noise and motion,

nursing us 

she goes on in labor,

on and on-

the belly and its neighbors

have no ears-

fanning, stinging, preparing,

the first and last 

quarrel is resolved. 

But From That Nest

Was there a kangaroo

hopped and hopped

on the desert

tail down,

brown top-fur

burnt tan

under the sun

with his leg tendons

tensing

like ribs on a fan?

Was there the tiniest yellow

swallow swinging and dipping in

gables and winter far off,

far off to the north?

Did he nest, did he sit on

his own ancient crocket?

Were there men

building and breaking,

creaking and stamping?

Idle Hands

Brutus knew;

in the carbonized palace,

when the sons of dawn

in blue array

arranged their creaking 

knives about his heart.

Brutus felt

the distance of life;

his ambitious courses

sped away like

spaceships towards the

dwarfing sun.

In the palazzo

of tinted marble

not a piece of 

royal furniture

out of place.

Lofty wars,

bloody hands,

bloody swords

in the emperor's thorax

become transparent

as windowpanes;

more than

food for thought,

history furnishes

fresh and deadly meat.

Inspired monks

in technicolor

illustrate the text;

on some cold

French winter's eve

Roman Brutus lives

and stalks 

in the pantry,

free as grassy steppes;

Brutus yet.

Drunk At Midnight and Other Outlaw Poems By Dennis Gulling

It has been a bittersweet week for me. The arrival of the latest Zombie Logic Press book, The Blood Dark Sea, by Dennis Gulling, was a thrill last Friday. There aren't many feelings as an editor, or a writer, like opening that first box of your own books, except in this case, for the third time in a row, it was another writer's book. I said it's a thrill, but it's more accurately described as a relief. After months, sometimes even years of work, there's this short period where you really have no clue if the finalized files you sent to the printer will look the way you anticipated when they arrive on your porch. In this case I was working with Jenny again, so I knew it was going to be great. And it is.

Soon after the relief wears off you come to the daunting realization that you now are responsible for promoting and finding an audience for the life's work of another writer. That's a sobering responsibility, and one I take very seriously. Having edited and designed a magnificent book just isn't enough. Dennis Gulling's work deserves an audience. These are unbelievably readable and entertaining poems. I have read this book more than it's likely anyone else ever will, and each time I'm still impressed as a pretty sophisticated reader of poetry how effortlessly Gulling seems to tell these short stories with wit, precision, and a lack of condescension for the reader, or his subjects. That's no easy task or all that common in poetry, believe me. 

So, if you're still reading please do me a favor and give this book and this poet the credit they have earned. If you aren't interested in buying a copy, share the link if you think this might be of interest to others you might know. Help me promote a poet I think has written a classic of Outlaw Poetry. Go to here to learn more about this book and all Zombie Logic Press books

The Blood Dark Sea cover by Jenny Mathews of Rockford Illustrating

NAILS

He walked around town
Collecting nails nobody wanted
Twisted, bent and rusty
Kept them in old coffee cans
In his basement
When he had thousands
He set up a table at the flea market
And sold them all
To some guy
Who had a broken hammer
He couldn’t bear to throw away




TOMMY

He used to
Walk around town
With a sheep’s skull
Under his arm
We’d pay him quarters
To french it
The night his mother shot herself
He sat in his front yard
Smashed the skull with a rock
And danced
On the pieces

                            Tiny Drawing by Jenny Mathews


DRUNK AT MIDNIGHT

Drunk at midnight
Spade Jackson presses
His back against the ice machine
Outside West Street Minit Mart
Mouth harp
Invisible in his huge right hand
Head bobs and pivots
To Hellhound on My Trail
Left sleeve of his shirt
Hangs loose
Since losing his arm
Under a freight train 10 years ago
Stiff breeze catches it
And whips it around
He plays faster and faster
Trying to catch the rhythm
Of the dance it’s doing in the wind
His eyes bug out
Sweat beads on his forehead
He shuffles his feet
In a useless dance
As red light
Off Minit Mart neon
Gives him the devil’s face

Flint Water Plant Watercolor

Flint Water Plant Watercolor By Jenny M Mathews

Heart Poem and Illustration For Valentine's Day

I will be 47 years old Superbowl Sunday, but parts of me will only be 3 or 5 years old, depending on which of my surgeons you confer with. Blade Runner and The Terminator are less science fiction movies that documentaries to me these days, and it is fair to say having alien technology inside your body does change not only your physiognomy but your psychology and mentality in certain ways, sometimes ways one isn't even aware of for many years. It also effects those close to you. For instance, my heart clicks. Like a clock. You might wonder how long it takes to tune that phenomenon out of your daily existence, or if it just wears on one in eventually maddening ways like Chinese water torture or Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." The answer is both. For the first several weeks, even months after artificial valve surgery, your heart feels like it is going to pound out of your chest. Most of this is probably attributable to the sound. Typically one probably wouldn't be aware of the beating of one's heart, but being able to hear each beat makes it unignorable. 

Heart poem by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, illustrated by Jenny Mathews of Rockford Illustrating

I am torn between writing more about what it's like to go through open-heart surgery and have artificial parts surgically implanted inside one's body, and the lasting changes that makes in one's life, or just writing about what it's like to collaborate with an artist like Jenny Mathews. Mostly I'm just happy to wake up day after day and see she has drawn something new. In this case I am also happy to be able to collaborate in the process. Eventually I may write more about the ongoing process of becoming a cyborg, but for the most part I just find myself grateful and happy to be alive.

If you'd like to see new work from my life and creative partner Jenny Mathews almost every day, follow her Instagram. Go ahead and like a bunch of things there and maybe buy some of her art so she'll make me chicken wings this Sunday. Please Pinterest or share our work if you find it meaningful. 

Mermaids To Swim Into Rockford August 1st

Artist Jenny Mathews, founder of The Rockford Illustrating Company, will display her new series of artworks, Freshwater Mermaids of North America, August 1st at 317 Studio and Gallery, 317 Market Street, Rockford, Illinois, at 6 p.m.

Mathews' mermaids challenge stereotypes of female beauty, and societal standards of acceptable body types. These are not the typical depictions of the mythical creatures, instead they draw upon species of fishes indigenous to fresh-water bodies of water in the Midwest. In her own words, Mathews describes her inspiration for her Mermaids series…

“Freshwater Mermaids are something I started working on when doing a public art project for the city of Beloit, WI. When I painted my first river mermaid, and it occurred to me the mermaids we are all used to seeing are ocean mermaids.  They are often long, and have flowing locks of hair to compliment their beautiful, sparkly and graceful bodies. We have seen them starring in movies and cartoons, and in popular culture all around us.  The famed oceanic mermaids have tails that move up and down like other swimming mammals, but freshwater mermaids live way up north in freshwater lakes and rivers.  I figured they probably do not leave for the winter, they are elusive, well camouflaged and quiet, and so obviously cold- blooded. Cold- blooded swimmers evolved differently, with a side-to-side swim movement, and a vertical tail and gills.  These are the primary differences between freshwater and salt-water mermaids.  Once I realized what I was looking for, it was easy to find what Freshwater Mermaids looked like.  Their elusive figures and faces revealed themselves to me every day, and I could hardly sketch fast enough. Unlike their glamorous saltwater sisters, they are as varied in shape, size and color as the women you see all around you every day.” 

Abbey Road Rhinos

I realize at this point in human history everyone on the planet has written at least one children's book. But a significantly lower number of humanity has illustrated a children's book. That's why when you find an illustrator you can work with, who not only can see your vision, but expand on it, you hold on to that person like gold. Jenny Mathews of Tiny Drawings is such an artist. She can draw anything. Usually within a half hour. I can't believe the amount of people who want her to draw something for them. It's amazing because as a writer almost nobody ever asks me to write anything for them. But everyone needs something drawn. This is a page from our book The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company

The Wrangler Rhino, For Kids

If you live in Australia, and you can find him, you may be able to hire...

The Wrangler Rhino. (For eighty dollars a day)

But if not, get your child the next best thing...

The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company

Ratatosk the Zombie Squirrel

It's hard to believe that circa 2000, when I created a website for Zombie Logic Press for the first time, when Google first started indexing websites I was on the top page for the search term "zombie." Twelve years later I can't seem to even break into the first 100 pages. It's simultaneously exhilerating and sad to see a genre you love take the culture by storm, but then feel you're not even a part of it anymore. Such it is with all acts of creativity and movements. By the time the public knows about it, the people who created it are on to something else, and probably even something else after that. This is Ratatosk, a zombie squirrel me and Jenny Mathews created a while ago. Zombie bananas, zombie squirrels, zombie zombie zombies. They're everywhere. 

see more Ratatosk here