the warm sun scorn automatic burden :
vital gestation
the preliminary despair
of yr obdurate
afterthought
summoned
by the 10 am sirens penetrating
the golden quarantine of junk
tenements modicum of 'more'
"in one
line" turns out
its the highway patrol car "checking"
(catastrophe delayed in rehearsal)
Aditya Bahl was born and brought up in the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh (India). His poems have been rejected by countless magazines and journals.
She had a thing for holes didn't matter where she found them
pushing her whole body
or falling backward
embracing the darkness
Down or up didn't matter
penetrating the surface
drinking herself in
Fur turned her on
she found herself chasing
running and yelling
after bellies of rabbits
hands in the air
she was inquisitive, assertive
the kind who makes history
made a mess of this topsy
men and animals left wanting
her neck bent, her head lovely
Caught in a world
her clothes always snagging
grabbed at by thorns
the fingers of bushes
tearing at her body
or pulling her hair
Tearful and ecstatic
she found herself arguing
with strangers far too often
after drinking & smoking
for a brief time there were:
a large weepy beast,
a guy with some hats,
a stark-raging husband,
an ineffectual queen
still such a hard time
making sense of them all
A fourth generation Californian, SB Stokes has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area all of his life. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at San Francisco State University and is a former poetry and art editor for Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. He is a founding producer and designer for Oakland's Beast Crawl and works as a production assistant for Literary Death Match events in San Francisco. His poems have been published in SEX+DESIGN, Gesture, Metonym, Quiet Lightning's sPARKLE & bLINK, MUST street 'zine, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, The VelRo Reader, and most recently in Saturday Night Special's Year One Anthology.
Set up your bathroom as if it were an apartment for the day.
Make
three peanut butter sandwiches a head of time. You must plan for a full
day of meals in case a parent shows up late, hopefully to save you and
not beat you.
Pick out a book, preferably long and mesmerizing to help keep your sister’s pounding and cursing somewhere in a faraway land.
A pitcher of Kool-Aid goes a long way.
Keep a mop or some long heavy object with you, just in case the lock is faulty.
Stare in the mirror. Pray to any saint or dead relative who will listen to keep your sister from smothering you in your sleep.
Once the bathroom is set, quietly slink down the stairs or into whichever room your sister is relaxing.
It’s best if she’s dozing on the couch, unsuspecting any subterfuge from you.
Focus in on some area of her body she loves most. My sister is partial to her long, shiny pigtails.
Do
not cut anything off. Nothing that can be used as evidence against you.
This might mean catching the wrath from your parents for a lifetime,
possibly even being kicked out of your house and you haven’t made enough
sandwiches for that.
Take
a slow, deep breath and slink up from behind the couch and yank that
tail as hard as you can or smack whatever area you have chosen.
Screech, Scratch, Shove. Throw a lamp. Anything to startle her for a moment, giving you more time for the getaway.
Leap
up the stairs, three at a time if possible and lock that damn door as
fast as you can before her body slams against it. I highly suggest
practicing the running and locking a few times before actually putting
it into motion with a sibling.
Sit
on the toilet and get your heart rate back down while you hum and try
to drown out the psychotic threats coming from outside.
Drink some Kool-aid. Thank your god, goddess or coach from track for getting you safely to your destination.
Pull
out a sandwich and your book and lean up against the door. If you found
any earplugs, adjust them deeply into your ears and try and relax.
As
a listening mind, you'd think God was dead and Coltrane is - at best -
also dead thus ascending in a flurry of failed resurrections, maugre all
those silent angelic balls of light in badly rendered Hollywood
shitstorms. You'd think that he finally found his cartridges empty in
some muddy pit following the stench of a drunkard - God or not, by then
it was all the same - so I chose to follow his (foot/blue)prints in a
way deemed societally wrong. And I have found an unchristian god with no
capitals teeming with emptiness in everything which is why I'm a
sidewinding idiot all the time. I'd have eaten static right off the
screen had I heard comprehensive music, some familiar love song, cheap
and loveless, but you can't hear shit in the middle of the woods. And
later, you can't see shit. He found that he was biologically
predetermined not to hear or see. Not destined, predetermined. He was
not destined to do anything, so he was destined to do everything in
contra-predetermined cathartic postdetermination for a
non-annihilationist destiny where the day was still beautiful as
described by Andrew Hill, who had no doubt seen an ascension or ascended
himself. What he's trying to say is: realize what you know before it's
too late.
I'm as witty as an asscension. (break)
Most
people went ahead and compared it to Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, but if
we all followed each other then we'd just end up running in circles.
A Love Supreme
They
call this one the one. Coltrane comes pretty close to the title - you
know, it's as much as we could ask of any man / woman. Even that asshole
Bono likes it, but for god's sake don't let it put you off. Coltrane's
prayer levitates in-between God's giant and smaller steps and the
unquestionable unknown chaos that had spiraled downward from the heavens
into his prophetic fingers and mad lips. It is the vinyl spinning
'twixt his buttcheeks, the most beautiful excrement propelled by a
raging flush through the toilette that is the global human
consciousness.
I tore pages out of the New Testament and slapped a
sticker of Paul Gascoigne on the front-cover. I got drunk and I tore
those pages and I let them rain all over and around me like a flock of
gulls on their cloudy-blue deathbed 'cause I saw myself in Coltrane
sullenly circle-spreading petals of his withered hopes when nothing came
back except rain.
Impressions
Impressionist
music, this jazz, sure. I can tell because I see all the nervous,
unhappy brushstrokes and composition such as to make one unable to
understand which way to listen, from where, what angle, how to position
one's ears that grow older and wiser with every note anyway. It's like
walking a long long walk, when you have loads of time to think and you
inspect the environment thoroughly. At one point all the ground is
obviously blue and there are patches of grass on the clouds. At another
point you're the blue thing and below you are the deepest depths of the
sea of you. Memories afloat as we reflect in images - some we are proud
of, some we shun and they eat us up inside. Just like that, madly
impressed he gives it his all, but John is still blue after the rain.
Maybe some memory-tree he couldn't bring himself to cut down, growing in
the middle of the room.
One day he climbs that tree, finds
himself lying all tar-stained on the roof, watching the sun go up and
down, losing it in-between. 'Cause hey, there are certainties which will
never cease to amaze, leaving an everlasting impression of awe.
Let me tell you something-
John Coltrane is Claude Monet. (break)
At
6AM I was sitting in the tenement hallway playing with a big fat cat.
How awesome is that? It's a solid-shape communist era building, but let
me tell you something else; I don't hear any army choirs lately, for the
times they are a-changin'. For better or worse, who knows, but I hear
those two go hand in hand.
Coltrane
Listen to
Tunji. How do you describe that shit? I mean, how do you describe the
atmosphere? I'll tell you how - goddamn cyberpunk, Blade Runner or
something, 6 years before Dick wrote the first one off his drug-crazed
mind, 20 years before Scott screened his best movie ever, 22 years
before Neuromancer mindfucked sci-fi like a giant mecha fucking up the
unhappy contra-cultural rollercoaster hurtin' for a soulmate, 32 years
before the unmistakable Global Communication
seventy-six-minutes-fourteen-seconds-long imagist scene straight back
from the Kenji Kawai soundtrack riddled future (and, well, past), 41
years after Zamyatin spat out the truth about We all mad on maths and
love and the insanely beautiful combination of the two (fuck you Huxley,
and fuck even you, Orwell; fuck you), a goddamn 93 years after
Dostoyevsky cried out for sweet Jesus and killed sweet Jesus in
existential futility. I'm saying that Coltrane was the prophet at the
top of the skyscraper, man. He dreamt of dystopian landscapes and
megastructural industry and Africa in smoke spirals from the old
Earth-heart of darkness Yeats could never even imagine.
Yesterday I met a man from Shelmire who wore pink trousers and ate Exquisite bananas, brown and rotting, as if they were his last meal for The night. He leaned into my ear and whispered the meaning of life:
At every stage of development there comes a time when we must Notice the importance of our accomplishments, cherish our loved Ones and regret our mistakes and insults. God wants us to believe That we were put here for the purpose of disproving his twisted Hypothesis that man is inherently evil. In fact, we are born with Every innocence possessed by the dove, the dog, and the damned Regression of our grandparents.
Meanwhile, as he’s saying this, I can’t help but notice the goatee Eerily sprouting around his mouth. His teeth are as white as the Angels that betrayed him, cast him aside and cursed him to below, Never again feeling the Almighty love. I tell him I’ve never felt It either, and for a moment he puts his hand on my shoulder, as hot Now as it’s ever been, even though the blistering cold of Shelmire Generally makes temperatures drop rapidly, as if by some need to Lament the damage fire can do. By this point I’m very confused, Eying the other passengers who boarded with me, whose faces now Seem to all blend together as they pass by us, heads hung down and Sobbing their late arrival to final judgment.
Previously I’d been a church going man, with a wife, and three Insignificant runts running around the carpeted lower floor. And Every Thursday night I’d tell them I was having a late beer with Co-workers in an old fashioned pub off the corner of Deverouex St. Everyone believed me, and I thought I got away with it. But, no.
Obviously, the man continues, no one really escapes the amazing, Finely tuned insight of Him. And now He is punishing us all.
People line up behind the man as he throws the banana peel aside and One slips, breaks his neck, and gets up again. We all laugh at the “fallen” Eternity. Actually, the man was quite nice to stop and chat for at least Ten minutes while everyone else arrived. He says just as many are going to Royal white clouds and blue skies behind the golden gate of Heaven. You could go with them if you choose, or come stay with us, and burn.
