. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A N D R I V E R J O U R N A L - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Welcome to the Sand River Journal. Our goal is to provide a dignified setting for some of the better poetry in the newsgroup rec.arts.poems. Contributions are solicited from articles posted to r.a.p (not excluding works by fellow editors), and we vote to determine the final content. The Journal is posted quasi-monthly in ascii and TeX formats to r.a.p and related newsgroups, and is archived at gopher.cic.net/11/e-serials/alphabetic/s/sand-river-journal and at etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetry/Sand.River.Journal. These archives include PostScript versions which feature publication-quality formatting and can be printed on most laser printers. Poems appear by authors' permission and constitute copyrighted material. Free transmission of this document (electronic or otherwise) is permitted and encouraged, but only in its entire and unaltered form. To inquire about individual poems, contact the authors by their email addresses. We take no responsibility for the fate of this document, and claim ownership only to any poems we have authored. Erik Asphaug (asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu) Zita Marie Evensen (bu016@cleveland.freenet.edu) John Adam Kaune (jkaune@trentu.ca) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Issue 11 - Fall Equinox 1994 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ------- Abelard ------- They took the wrong parts of me, my love. Oh, the Canon knew what he wanted: a boring revenge, very quid pro quo and Biblical of your uncle, to take from me what had offended: not quite the mote in his eye, but it served. But he could not take my heart, my mind or memory: and those live still. The blood flows into them because it has no other destination: and it is still your blood, flowing through me now in lux perpetua, in memoriam. Kenneth Wolman woldoc@woldoc.jvnc.net -------------------- The Aviary: Midnight -------------------- A desire wakens me. Sounds - something like rain dying out - rise from the aviary beneath the bedroom. I hear the birds' dulling chatter. The brazilian cardinals and purple finches, aroused, sing to calm themselves. Impotent, I have know the immunities of darkness, its coolness like the rain that relieves a fevered world. My lover remains sleeping. The birds are calling me back to their own listless flight of sleep. My back touches her back; my ankle rests upon her calf. If I turn to her, it is because a second world calls me. Jim Brock brocjame@fs.isu.edu ----------------- of lovers leaving ----------------- it only rains like this in august when the perseids are falling. when another year is disappearing. you were born in the month of lovers leaving. the month when the sky takes its steroids and pushes up and pulls up and chins up and in the end pummels you with all the force of all the tears he wouldn't cry for you. this is august. it only rains like this in august. in september he is gone. leaves swing down from the trees skitter down the pavement. the rain puddles down to them and smooths them to the sidewalk. JJHemphill jjh54139@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu --------------- Twilight Dancer --------------- Time Loosens her laces unties her bindings Toys with her shoe She stirs A night flower burgeon opening in the twilight She sheds her veils secretly in the intimate and sustaining darkness The smell of her fresh and raw Timid and pink She blushes . . . In full bloom with the Dawn William C. Burns, Jr. burnswcb@gvltec.gvltec.edu ----------- like a kite ----------- washed against a beach of clouds tight hold tight against the wind just a bit longer higher then run dig those toes in stop sit breathe you've done well now more string Michael McNeilley mmichael@halcyon.com ----------------- rectangle, square ----------------- dear marjorie i am full of hope these busses stop at all the right stops my night is round is without hunger pleasure clean sheets stop i wish i could tell you how much i miss you relate my wonder at lights along the plaza wisdom delight continue dear with you a converse is always true, always honest always giving. once burning only coal i now take most things to be fuel without question you've made a good habit of being just as old as you need to be even when the needle dropped from full down to mortal you die more slowly than anyone else i know i thought of you as the last panes of glass were placed in the windows of the building across the street. Kerry shetline@bbn.com ---------- madversity ---------- Go away. She is weary. She cannot be disturbed. Simone has nearly perished from pleasure. She really meant no harm, yet she drove him toward a difficult bargain. Can't you see it broke him? He claims to be numb. Why must you flinch at the first hint of madness? Please pose your questions carefully, or he will disappear. He seems to be strong -- yet defenseless. Dennis Snow dhs@world.std.com ------------ At grandma's ------------ Terrible terrible terror terribly terrorized terror horrible horror horribly awful terrifying terrorized terror the depth of african violets purple in grandma's apartment on the windowsill where the paint opens cracks of enamel flowers her hirsute lips parting in a voice of tears she says my name and it is like a disease and I feel guilty that it is my fault that she is like this perhaps it is because of me when she calls my name and I do not know what she wants but I do not have it as she takes in the form of giving as if the tasteless food placed on the table in cracked dishes moved by the frail hands were a display of her poverty rather than of a good heart and I think to myself that she must be an actress but I do not know the play so stumble along in my role as best as worst as I can. Ralph Cherubini ralph@bga.com ------------- thank you for ------------- being a dear a female dear and close friend i send you my sincerest thank you and desire that you may offer onto someone else that which you have given me i see neither gain nor goodness in spinning acrimony there is no fellowship in felony my dear and close thank-you recipient i now put this note to a cleansing end as once you put a friendship to a messy tangled me now my once friend once my dear and close friend for which i thank you Marek Lugowski marek@mcs.com ----------- God is Dead ----------- god is dead she said we buried him on that hill long ago in wormy earth and since then everywhere flowers bloom without shame zazu an79015@anon.penet.fi ------------------------------- by the river of swirling eddies ------------------------------- how were we two small people looking at the river yangtze pointing to yellow water and floating mandarins clapping our hands with glee how are we two lonely people looking at the old river from opposite banks of a yellow ribbon like reading an ancient scroll pictographs of man's flailing against the eddies of recycling histories zita marie evensen bu016@cleveland.freenet.edu ------------ Despair 1991 ------------ The soft wildflower scented air mingles with his tobacco and old urine. Panic, panic, panic beats my heart, a poisoning the beauty of the day. His tongue, an old gray slug licks away at my innocence. Though he is old and feeble, and I am young and strong, I am paralyzed. Guilt, guilt, guilt surges through my being stealing away that microscopic shred of too flat-out self respect that I had tucked away. In a burst of despair, I pull free and run, run, run up the hill, through the buttercups and poppies, begging the air and the sunshine to wash away the disgust that my stopped up, locked in tears cannot. I sit on a sun baked rock and dangle my toes in the liquid silver song of the creek. Light dances across the surface, lulling me, hypnotizing me, mercifully taking me away from my horrifying new discovery. I know now that it will never matter how big grow, something in me will not let me protect myself. My body belongs to everyone Very effective ending. but me. Sherry Van Dyke svandyke@inferno.com -------- untitled -------- what goes around silently visions empty a mirror The complexion is simple tooth and dimple a face Lip inflated and blue a womb renewed deadend what encircles the standstill pop-culture landfill truth? maura catherine joan conway conway1@muvms6.mu.wvnet.edu ----------- burial rite ----------- searching for a path from birth unfamiliar grass gives way beneath my feet, stands tall as each stride moves onward. old scents return at the center of the park, approaching the sod and stretching a finger to feel the chilly skin that nurtured our undoing, to caress limbs woodenly as she aside ambrosia a rainbow shudders under a grimacing half-smile, its head silken with scales reaches down to determine if I've learned any answers. did I come with weapons or bearing memorial flowers? and sprouts legs and arms anew. in a grove beyond the coils, a plot of land set aside long ago where crosses stare marked with brief titles. yes, I remember _wild idol_, she murmured, _even in death you'll cling to symbols_. to place a pear atop the grave before I turn away. if only I had bothered to plant the seed than leave the barren core in view again. the tree holds itself upright, from its fingers dangle tattered ribbons. we should get out of this graveyard. Steven Lyle Fitzgerald sfitzge@unix.cc.emory.edu ----------------------------- yesterday there was balancing ----------------------------- yesterday there was the beginning of a poem like the beginning of an i love you forming on the tips of unpracticed lips. it was there while lying flat. the grass on my back. the fire ants biting the sun biting too. this poem bloomed yellowly. growing then falling. and falling away. the edge of the i love you stayed. balanced precariously on itself. it balanced all day yesterday. there was balancing today. JJHemphill jjh54139@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu ---------------------------- Central Park, February 1861: An American Portrait ---------------------------- 1 It is a fetid skating pond. Frederick Olmstead's imperial vision sits beneath tissue on his workroom vellum, his budget frozen like the brackish ice before the promise of impending war. Squatters and beggars will fuel the Republic's salvation. Uprooted like the peat of Ireland, they rut with their animals in cholera shanties that surge and sway like drunken ramparts on the heights behind the awful pond. In Brooklyn, Walt Whitman, a newspaperman possessed by the demons of poetry and contradiction, lures home boys and girls who excite the nighttime streets with their squeals of release. His verses are the scandal of the age, condemned from the pulpits, recited by his cabal of admirers: married women locked in weekly estrus with their husbands' butlers amid the fallen fortress of whalebone hoops. 2 On an overcast February afternoon, too late and gray to catch the best of the light, the photographer comes to the pond from the wrought-iron fronts of lower Broadway to test a new lens. He has seen 100 frowning virgin brides this past six months, a genteel stew of copulants taught that they must never move; and too often has been called in an epidemic summer to an undertaker's parlor to photograph the sorrow of another infant's corpse. Now he will gladly breathe the cold, find it bracing after the smothering reek of a City he dreams as an endless abattoir where dead babies cry and dangle from velvet-covered meat hooks. 3 The pond is a sensorium undreamt of even in ancient Rome: a common sewer and shitheap where the smell of squatters permeates the light; and, amidst raucous giggling, the wild motion of windblown scarves, hats and bonnets desperately grabbed for in the air, slipping bodies, and the razor scrape of iron on the ice. But for him today, the stench is the fragrance of forgetfulness, inhaled to the heart from a frozen dumping-pond. Erecting his tripod, he sees a young man openly clutching the breast--ample even beneath her winter cloak-- of his lady-love, who laughs and squeals aloud, "Can'cha woyt anither hour, boyo!" It is a place without the artifice of gentility or conquest, only the energies of desire, of passions that burn through the cold. And then there are the two boys: accidents beyond the accidental swirl of bodies and the pigfarmer shanties on the heights behind: emerging from the maze and motion, the pair stop still, watch him at work, voices shouting "Hey, mister! you here for us, mister? make our tintypes, mister!" These are not dead, nor sacrificial. Through his lens, for 10 motionless seconds, the boys become part of the light, frozen on the plate, for him an image of his City, immutably young, forever taken out of Time. When the photographer dies in 1894, the skating pond where he stood has long since vanished, filled in and landscaped as a path for English-saddle riders and broughams. Clearing out his studio and workshop, his wife and daughters find the image of the boys. They are still smiling: they have never stopped, and the wife and daughters smile back. They could not have known: one of the boys had died in 1881 in a Bandit's Roost knife fight over a woman. The other lives to a great age, dies in 1932, having forgotten everything even as he forgot the photographer as soon as he turned and skated off. 4 The motion continues, something convulsive at the heart, beyond the power of the lens: a terrible orgasm and overturning of the earth, the immolation and self-consuming resurrection contained in the seismic motions of the City itself, at every moment crushing, sweeping outward toward its merciless, unfinishable destiny. It rises and it writhes. Self-proclaimed Confederate spies camp in Prince Street saloons, buy drinks for Union officers invalided home after Antietam, proclaim Darwin a prophet, and pray aloud in his name for the death of the ape in the White House. Flags of the Grand Army of the Republic fly from City Hall while immigrant Irish mobs, driven from their land by chattelage and starvation decreed by Victoria's ministers, riot against conscription to the Civil War, and burn the living body of a free Negro. Whitman flees to the Capital, wanders the hospitals, dazed, hears the crackbrained gibbers and cackles of gangrenous amputees: bathes their bodies, dresses their wounds, writes down their final letters home, and returns after Appomattox to a minor sinecure extended by a grateful Federal government. When the Calamus poems reveal his amatory tendencies, he is summarily dismissed, only to fade, disappointingly, into Respectability, the special hell of Sages. Olmstead receives the budget to build his Tuileries. His workmen, recruited from the shanties, plow under their homes, drive 14-year-old girls to stand in crimson silk under the gaslight. A drunken laborer drowns in concrete and Carrara marble when the foundation of Bethesda fountain is laid, and rests where he used to keep his pigsty. 5 The Park built, the City grows northward to devour it. The squatters' shanties are replaced and replaced again: mansions and museums rise where squatters bred the shoulders of the building City. The Plaza Hotel comes to rest on the New York palimpsest: legend says that the first guests of the great house in 1907 flee in horror and dismay because they can hear the ghostly copulations of the displaced squatters. Far downtown, beneath towers rising to entomb the past, the common graves of nameless Negro slaves undermine the Stock Exchange. Kenneth Wolman woldoc@woldoc.jvnc.net ---------------------- I Would for Thee Alone ---------------------- I would for thee alone this temple raise Of animate muscle, hot blood and bone. You'll wander through its ancient walls and ways; Take rest awhile and lay upon its gentle stone. F. Scott Cudmore scudmore@peinet.pe.ca ----------------------- Girl at the Hotel Exile ----------------------- These Sundays I watch Father practice on the tennis court; it is an indulgence of his I humor. I like it anyway: the red, Hawaiian clay, the yellow balls, the white shorts, and the brown skin are movie colors. I drink Cokes. Life, I tell my father, is full of hotels. Mother takes the defeat hard, and she stays indoors, still cursing the effete generals and the communist students. Now that I want to be an American, now that I wear make-up even though I am but thirteen, I buy sexy novels. I read my family's story in The National Enquirer. What I could tell would sell big: how Mother dances through the kitchen naked and drunk; how Father has taken to situation-comedies; how they embraced me after we arrived, after I had broken open my doll's head, revealing the tiny diamonds I had smuggled from the palace, Mother crying, "My Jewel, my Jewel." The story I know is something else. That my parents no longer love is nothing. Me, I am only watching them in this warm, American paradise. We are wealthy. I am not so young. I know a boy at the swimming pool: his skin is browner than mine. Jim Brock brockjame@fs.isu.edu --------- Sunflower --------- The massive head, swollen with seeds, yields to the hungry beaks of chickadees. Wings brush the papery fringe of yellow as I would have them brush my face. Small black eyes watch me carefully. The sunflower lolls its head in the August heat and the spiral seems to rotate, grow heavier, ripening as the minutes pass. I have grown heavy too, giving birth, and had that moment when I had to yield. Followed by emptiness and relief. Nancy Boyle Vickers nancy_vickers@fso.com -------- Jennifer -------- Twilight brings you here to me. Between the satin sheets of day and night We lay embraced, reality Forsaken. Hidden from the sunlight's burst, You trust desire to overcome our odds. And no one bleeds, and no one hurts Tomorrow? Jennifer, I'll leave you now, Untouched this once before again I fall Without recourse, into your well Of pleasure. Brandt brandt@hathaway.pgh.pa.us ------- . . . . ------- no words even less thoughts as for the feelings... I've lost those a while ago just a cigarette fuck everything I don't want this anymore no, nothing's wrong I'm just sick of it goodbye elle elle@wpi.wpi.edu ------- ProLion ------- Gregory, Gregory Shedding your skin like summer night Under the orchard Lions like the morning sky Just as they like To nestle their heads in fair maiden's Lap, sweet of earth and blessing. Lions like the rye that brushes them, Taking bloom, taking bloom Gregory that once was, Will always be, circle to circle, Pressed farther down, Gregory that holds all to night. It has been a year, unmet. Bethany Street beth@cnet.shs.arizona.edu ------ Melvyl ------ 1 I wrote you a poem. I walked up to the pub this afternoon Complaining about my emptiness, How I had nothing inside of me. When I remembered Watching `Eugene Onegin' from Glyndebourne And Lensky going to his fatal duel, And how I had then used Melvyl In far-off California To determine your presence, while Sitting in Bath at my computer. So I wrote you a poem. I only write love poems. This one has to be circumspect. Something between Rabbie Burns And `The Ball of Kirriemuir'. I wrote you a long letter. You have all my news. And all my books. Here is your poem: 2 I looked your family name up in Melvyl, the University of California Library Catalogue, seven million volumes. and there was your grandfather's dissertation from Leyden, 1911, title in unreadable Dutch. your father's and your mother's books, your cousin's novels in Holland. And finally your own little set of publications. I have only one book in California. Now I know you are back in London. Working away as ever with the children round you. It is good for you to be home. You must visit. There are twenty years and a dozen books to discuss. Douglas Clark d.g.d.clark@ss1.bath.ac.uk --------- 192 Miles --------- The 192 miles that seperate us are connected by a single piece of blacktop. C.Devillo Thomas x93thomas3@wmich.edu --------------------- High Tide at Midnight --------------------- The island pines stood silent on the night The moonless summer tide surpassed its height. We slipped the tippy dinghy from the dock And rowed across the stars' reflected light With quiet slurp of oar and clunk of lock To see the glassy blackness gulp the rock. How shrunken, unfamiliar, was the shore! Submerged were ledges lichen-dry before; On foreign floating room our boat could pass Down newly-liquid inlets, to explore The shallow drowning of the roots and grass By fingerlets of inky moving mass. The world was full, suspended at the flood, Convex, dark-bellied, an unbidden bud Of fathom-vast unflowered force profound; All nature seemed to sense it in the blood And, trepidatious, uttered not a sound. The crystal sky seemed closer to the ground. I'd never known a higher tidal rise, Nor seen such fascination in your eyes, As if the moon, your sympathetic mate, Had flexed its gravity, to your surprise, Let slip a glimpse that made you contemplate The pull of interplanetary weight. We sculled the cove, cliff-lifted from the clay That sucked our tar-pit footprints yesterday; Our flash-light -- mirrored, filtered, dimly downed -- Diminished inconclusively to grey, Then, gloaming-deep, the mooring-buoy found, To surface yearning but to bottom bound. Spin-drifting, whispering, wondering on the grand, We rocked -- oh, how I pressed your pretty hand! -- Then pulled against the Proteanic tide For cozy cottage, on our circled land, As, vortex in the void to either side, Galactic phosphorescence whirled and died. Matt Waller mnw@alpha.sunquest.com ------------------ The Honors Scholar ------------------ Every day he sleeps from dawn To dusk. Night shifts from day, And there he is, expecting a bullet Behind the counter of a deli. It's happened before on the night shift, But it's all right, he tells me, I don't plan on dying Though I worry when I tell them To put out the cigarettes. There the folk in this backwater town (Backwater because none Could see him for what he was Even if he shed skin and bone And blinded them all) Order without noticing That the young blonde man Cutting the bread Has the soul of genius; The cool light of perception Intensifies his grey-blue eyes. No, they're just waiting for the food Served from the fingers of a poet. He would have been best As a British pilot during the Big War. At dawn, After some dangerous mission He'd be sitting at a rough wooden Table, drinking coffee While watching the sun begin To ease over the horizon. He'd hold his warm cup with Strong poet's fingers, Golden light catching On his unshaven face. After cleaning the grill, When things are quiet At the end of the shift, He mixes syrup, and milk Into his coffee. He drinks that while The light begins to slide Over the land. You know, he says, I hate coffee. I just like to watch the dawn With the heat between my fingers. lilith lilith@netcom.com ------ Sunday ------ a black squirrel slices through the leaves of my front yard he carries a green spiny thing hurrying away from me here in my white bedroom I have nothing to eat but no one to hide it from grey cars slide by they sound like rain on a distant wind Michael McNeilley mmichael@halcyon.com -------- untitled -------- shallow heart & mind I shouldn't mind he shines alright . . . . . . in the deep dark ness faint light and glimpses of the making of the universe of perfect cruel love . . . so I don't mind that shallow mind Wlodzimierz Holsztynski wlod@black.box.com ------------ three tenors ------------ 1 but when, you asked yet when will when be? you see. it is like this - i listened to three tenors three magnificent magnificent magnificent vibrations from living chords which should be for what why three warm apples in the sun - i like cold fruit fresh from a pile of ice shavings crisp cool juice slowly dripping down my face my breast slowly mixing with my hot-sun sweat 2 i cannot deal with neapolitan ice cream too much too much flavor give me placido lento vanilla pavarotti como chocolate' and carreras of fresh strawberries 3 often i dream i am a silversword on the slopes of kilauea - just me a solitary silhouette in a field of sharp stones i listen to the cymbals of comets crashing on jupiter - i am a nebula blue shifted red shifted i walk on a balance beam i am high cheekbones ojos negros piel canela in my veins run the blood of tenors asian - iberian - european singing the arias of a nebula zita marie evensen bu016@cleveland.freenet.edu ---------------------- Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ---------------------- The drunk, on Seventh Avenue South, sways, eyes searching for the focus with damaged sensors, looks at us, slurring "Tha's a beautiful girl you got there...sir": "sir" my sure barometer of the life still to come because the word slashes me open in lieu of a razor; and leans forward, extends his hands in supplication, lowers his head at her, staring cuntward, and begins to loudly croon "Embraaaaaace me, my sweet embraaaaaaaaceable you" in a whiskey-and-testosterone basso cantante to make Melvin Franklin sound like Marlene Dietrich, transfixing with bloodshot lab rat-eyes and the message: not of Dom Perignon in fluted glasses, drained at Twilight Time in the Afterglow of Love by dignifiedly spent lovers, but of the beast made with two backs in a garbage dump beneath a yellow moon, of willfully drowning in the Sea of Love. Kenneth Wolman wolman@netcom.com ------------------- the threefold music ------------------- 1 breath on me, cricket-whispers! gesturing in summer's heavy air - at dusk in slow crescendo... evidence of brisk wind's song on water. Weird whip-poor-wills repeating, winding through the constant bleat of small frogs. A Symphony. 2 The sweet laughter mingling with lilted, echoed phrases: politics & philosophy in Portuguese. the swirling sound of foreign voices - small benchmarks of recognition punctuate strong flows of words between three friends: praise, disdain, solemn vows & contemplation. A Melody. 3 rough-strewn epithets in English amidst a backdrop of crackling glass. Bottles on rocks: a thick 'poP' to end the conversation. A few young mouths, loud radios. Murmuring beneath the exchange, the solid throb of engines. A Cacophony. John Adam Kaune jkaune@ivory.trentu.ca ---------------- Dirige Domine A Funeral Sonnet ---------------- Quomodo sedet sola civitas! Quenched are the eyes that lightened every street, silenced her step, her salutation sweet -- gone is the city's glory, our gold all dross. Now comes the winter of our bitter cross. To us bereaved remains but to repeat cold litanies, and slow with mournful feet measure the vast vague outlines of our loss. O child, did I not too taste bitter death? My flesh, which you and she shared and adored, lay once in earth -- ah, I am rich with pity! Yes, mourn your loss, grieve deep, but know God's breath breathes where it will, and all shall be restored -- I swear it, by my death! -- in spring's fair city. Fr. John Woolley jww@evolving.com -------------------------------- Hyde Park, Chicago: Winter 1991 -------------------------------- Lonely crinkle of glass on the street Slick of ice, winter licks the pavement Trickle of slush in the sewer. Buzz of city lamplight Hum and growl of cars with tired suspension and cracked, dried skin. Metered hissing, thumping, quiet roar of music, voices. Cold wind, chapped lips, salty, watery nose. Key slides in, skipping over the tumblers -- turn, push Creaking stairs and solitary handrails Open, slumping swivel chair blues, curling smoke and dry, dry martinis Droop the eyelids drop and wintry air sneaks its way in cracks, open lightbulbs stare at cobwebs, corners dusty-bugs and water drips in sinks. Divide, conquer the sheets and crown the pillow -- the kingdom slumbers, the army sleeps. Eric J. Blommel eblommel@netcom.com --------- Surrender --------- the rains have come to stay this season streetlights swim upstream struggling in the current that gushes through the iron grates a bird shivers alone black against the bruised sky but i have turned my face to the smothering sun finding warmth in my surrender Jody jupshaw@hfm.com --- Him --- In my mind's eye, I see a flower, opening its petals black with dust and wind a hummingbird a whistling blur darts in to suck the nectar of sweet chaos, startling the timid soul within. Tanah Haney thaney@ivory.trentu.ca ------- the kaz ------- we sat with saki and sushi swapping sex theories and fantasies then we toasted tired debauchery as i listened to my friends - and i listened carefully because they were buying the saki and pouring it too but my main concern of the moment was getting my sufficient share of that seaweed paper and green horseradish - oh how i love the dainty trinket food - wrapped up so neatly and organized like the clockwork and conformity of mitsubishi factory workers when the last little ceramic flask of saki was finished - plates cleared - we agreed that sharon had very nice thighs and that i had a very attractive nose and that pat looked better without his mustache then we made a tentative agreement with our last cup of saki that sex between us three that evening might be a pleasant bonding experience we paid our meek polite and always happy waitress then left Peter J. Tolman ug958@freenet.victoria.bc.ca ---------- Transience ---------- You never knew or so I used to tell myself how little I really slept most nights I slept with you. And as the morning blues so similarly the sky where I am now so many miles away I feel the same impatience with lightening blue. Lying then, while the sun stole again another good evening, watching, all the more closely you sleep I'd stretch the minutes with concentration and feel the same as then, here now against the morning sky that ticks, to me insistently away night and dreams, if not sleep, to the inevitable harsh alarm. Michael McNeilley mmichael@halcyon.com -------- untitled -------- Carelessly tossed aside an orchid wilting. A not-quite-scarlet shoe with a very pointed heel in my way. Tight arms. Slight charms. Too slight, but tonight, mine. Vaguely fading, hazy waking, softly dreaming still. Liz Farrell efarrell@ossi.com ------------------------- White Autumn, Bare Autumn ------------------------- Let us return, and hope to discern the concern that you showed to me when the branches were bare as we lay in the grass and let the sky shadows pass over us and all that was there Let us revisit the falling of the ashes and the quiet turn of your lashes which you held closed over your eyes when the fire between us burned through the loneliness of the dark and the twisted passages of the heart until one of us put flame to what we had learned Let us reconsider the reason why that warm season seemed much more deserved to the starving who dare to change the conventions of passion and consume the vagaries of fashion which now seems a little more fair Summer for us lay down and slept and through the silence of August the two of us crept onto the pale skin of Autumn, as it breathed and awoke and all over the land it extended its cloak Shrouding us in snow, and stealing our worth and the weight of our stillness finally driving us to earth White autumn, bare autumn The snows have moved us apart, now And now it's winter and I understand nothing. Keith Loh lok@helix.net --------- Jethzabel --------- The leaf, the star, the lighted moon and me, Connected by the strings we cannot see. A bird, a plume, the pen with which I write -- Her feather puts my thoughts down for the night. A warm breath atomized by winter's frost In individuality is lost. Erik Asphaug asphaug@lpl.arizona.edu -------- Feathers -------- When the Green man began to hum The mockingbirds complained and flew. But then he screamed, "You've hurt me and I am undone!" And they thanked him for a song they knew. He's quite certain now, he'll never understand. Spends his time meandering ... Green man pandering ... Rearranging rented cubicles And puzzling scraps of paper into different fitful views. "No, that's not the way it was ..." "How was it then ... more twisted?" "God knows! I don't ... nor do I know why Those mockers keep on squawking." "Stay! Stay! On the ground little hummingbird, You're much too small to fly!" JJWebb jjwebb@cruzio.com