Tamara Turner- Poem & Photo

December Prayer

 

I said a little prayer today

As heartfelt as any other

Asking God to please turn on

The sun warm and bright

Bringing light our way

To keep the cold winter away

Just for a little while please

So I can go out to play

 

 

 

Tamara currently lives in southern California where the sweet sun chases away the snow.

Tim Gardiner- Three Halloween Haiku

the old house –

ghost of a boy

at the window

 

 

a jack-o’-lantern’s

toothy grin glows –

scarlet leaves rustle

 

 

my black moods –

the lawn stained

with witches’ hats

Richard Schnap- A Poem

 SOUNDTRACKS

When I was a young child
Eager to please my cold father
I would listen to his vast collection
Of classical music albums

And when I became a teenager
Desperate to fit in with my peers
I would listen to late night radio
With its repertoire of progressive rock

And when I grew into adulthood
Determined to destroy my past
I would listen to the raging anger
In the anthems of hardcore punk

But now that I’m older and wiser
And the seasons pass swiftly by
I listen to the wind’s soft ballad
Lulling me gently to sleep

Paul Tristram- Three Poems

What The Hell Have I Been Born Into?

In my mind’s eye I can still see him
walking as clear as yesterday
one step forward, two steps backwards,
mostly swaying to the left-hand side.
Down the Midnight Dram Road,
on his way back to his Council House
tucked in the middle of Caewathan
following a night in ‘The Colliers Arms.’
Singing a little bit but grunting a lot
“Yesterday is dead and gone……..!”
and sometimes trying to whistle
as the full moon shone down smiling
all over his drunken head and shoulders.
The gravel, stones and coal dust beneath
his unsteady feet hissed and crackled
loudly into life at his wayward presence.
A cider flagon in the pocket of his long
Winter coat and two thirds of a Woodbine
awaiting its cue behind one of his ears
and as he turns back out onto the road
and into the light he would frown aloud
and almost whisper the very same words
“What the hell have I been born into?”

© Paul Tristram 2014

In A Tangle

With thoughts confused and muddled,
spirits feeling just like a parachutist
who jumped, narrowly avoiding disaster
to end up dangling helplessly from a tree.
It’s almost impossible to finger-pick
a knot that’s invisible and stays always
frustratingly just out of stretching reach.
There’s a crucial piece missing from
the untitled diagram, a delinquent hand
has smudged out the middle of the problem
from the now useless classroom blackboard.
You can indeed feel ill when in fact
you actually register as being healthy.
You can indeed feel bad when there is no
logical reason for you to feel anything but good.
No one cares, understands or perceives
you standing on tip-toes upon that precipice.
It’s that unseen equation that keeps the reality
of the situation from everyone but yourself.
Sometimes your only recourse and backup
is the knowledge and strength that the knot
within you tightens with temper and panic
but unravels slowly with patience and time.

© Paul Tristram 2014

Straw Grasping

To fall backwards
into that nothingness inside of yourself.
The blinding pain
from mental and emotional injury
which makes you scream and shudder
like a wounded, trapped animal.
It is the very doorstep of SUICIDE!

But to turn around at this very point
and fight back against the tide of shit,
face first into the fear, guilt and shame.
As betraying ONCE friends
point envious condemning fingers
from the safety of the side-lines
at your unwashed, malnutritioned
drunken body and cowardly laugh
at your orchestrated fall.
When every straw and ledge grasped at
you had to find for yourself, by yourself.
Until from the floor
you rose and crawled
rose and stumbled
rose and fell
rose and crawled
rose and fell again
rose and crawled
then rose and walked
and walked and walked and walked.

Knowing that you now
owed nobody alive anything at all.
You had done it completely by yourself.
That the weaknesses they pointed out,
the drunkenness and mess
were in fact strengths.
You straw grasped thin air sometimes
but you made it through
that Bastard Mountain
out into the sunshine, blue skies
and lush green meadows beyond.
Learning valuable lessons with each step
about your inner strength,
stamina, resourcefulness, determination,
the fight of your Phoenix Spirit
and the absolute power
of your Universe-Sized Soul.

© Paul Tristram 2013



Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.
 
You can read his poems and stories here! http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/

Virginie Colline- Monster Haiku & Picture

Monster Haiku
 

Monumental dark
a monster is watching you
by the Pont des Arts

 

                                       Willy Ronis - Ombre de l’Institut de France, Paris

Virginie Colline lives and writes in Paris.

Arif Ahmad & Shanzeh Ahmad- A Poem

You go girl

Look around hard wherever you are

Do you see the circus of the men, by the men, for the men

In all shades of gray

Egocentric, narcissistic men

Where class act is only a handful

And the rest of us just pretend

Dispensable, lesser beings, always second, the inferior sex

Here women are held primarily in a support act

For as and when needed

Though first up in taking our yelling, our beating, our abuse

Women's lib sounds so romanticizing, so glorifying, so neat

Bullshit

For it fails to realize, it struggles to exist

Whichever way you slice it

The pale blue dot remains testosterone laden

Male dominated, male driven

Except

That one girl who may chance to challenge some of this and change some of that

The girl with a facial droop and a reconstructed skull from a bullet that traveled her head

This girl may save us men from us

God willing, Inshallah

You go girl, Malala

Donal Mahoney- Three Poems

The Parish Carnival

That's Bernie's wife on the carousel

laughing and waving her arms.

Once again she won't get off 

even though Bernie is yelling

next to the concession stand

jumping around in his wheel chair.

He's finished his cotton candy

and wants to go home. 

He probably has to pee.

He never goes anywhere 

except to the parish carnival. 

He loves the cotton candy.

He says it's the same as when 

he was a kid years ago 

before he fell out of the tree. 

He needs Stella more than ever now

to push his wheel chair and she does

except when she comes to the carnival 

and gives old Bernie a big plume 

of cotton candy and hops on the carousel

laughing and waving her arms 

once a summer every year.

Old Drunk's Advice to an Anxious Beau

I’m no expert on marriage

but you asked me so

here’s how I see it, 

decades removed from 

making the same decision.

If the woman is pretty, 

has a voice you want to 

bathe in forever, she 

may be the right one.

But at my age or yours

I would marry only

a woman who made me 

grunt at the zenith.

If she did that,

I’d buy the ring.

Waiting for Peter

If I hadn’t died, I’d still

be bouncing along

in that Greyhound bus

through the mountains

swigging a Coke.

Don’t mind being dead but 

dying almost killed me.

When the bus hit the boulder

I flew out the window

and was tossed in the air.

My head hit the rocks.

No one survived.

They found us later

covered with snow.

But it’s nice up here

on a cloud waiting

with the others now.

We wonder what’s next. 

Moments ago an angel

landed and said Peter 

would soon be here.

 

 

Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Jens Nicholas Jebsen- Three Poems

Jewel [She.]

I held a jewel in the palm of my hand,

She was hot to the touch and burned my skin

Lilac blue, I had found her nestled deep beneath the land

And as I coveted the stone, I felt a lurch come from within

I dropped the jewel, and she thoroughly embedded herself within a crack

Then I stared obtusely at my flesh, at the fresh, sizzling burn

And as close as the gem was, I realized I'd never get her back

And further more, all things considered, that I'd never learn

The Jewel smoldered away, emanating hate as I languished above

And eventually I walked away, hoping one day she might forget

There are few things in this world as mercurial as love

Derived from our desire, defined by our regret.

The News

The television blares; three killed in some heinous crime

And patriotic bombs kill thousands somewhere poor

A local man with a plan get's a morsel of our time

The prize is sensationalism, albeit sanitized for gore

Next up is Hillary Clinton, reminding us that AIPAC owns our ass

And now three professional loudmouths slug it out on the Six o' clock news

One says a half-truth, another advocates moral cowardice en masse

And a third shrieks "Terrorism. That's right. You lose."

The Television blares; twenty children died today

Ingredients for such a massacre can be purchased at your local store

Corporate stooges attempt to keep their constituency neutered and at bay

The prize is complacency, for now and evermore.  

Valor  

I saw the whiskey bum by himself on the beach

His meager possessions strewn here and there about the shore

An empty pint, a well worn and slightly torn leather coat

A  lone sock divorced and fuzzy like a peach

 Created a shrine to his service, comprised of relics from the war

His eyes were two stones, cold and grey as the pacific itself

His leathery skin had a junkies unmistakable pallor

He languished, destitute, within the confines of his cell

Long since having fallen of life's continental shelf

And I thought "What would the president think of the tract marks on his arms,

Given his record of service and valor?"

He shot me wry smile, and as if reading my mind,

Said, "Cheer up boy, why you look so sad?

I got all I could ever need or be right here.

And I know it looks like I'm in a bind,

But this shot I'm cooking up is gonna be the best I ever had."

Day after tortuously sluggish day

I saw the life drain from his crumpled form

Until he was nothing but fetid skin and a heap of ragged cloth

Then the fire department came and took what was left of him away

To L.A.N.C,  just another casualty of Operation Desert Storm.

Jens Nicholas Jebsen is a poet from Los Angeles. He is a devout lunatic with a penchant for the subversive.

Richard Schnap- A Poem

PRISONER

I have seen him
In the backs of buses
Like a man condemned
To solitary confinement

And I have seen him
Through liquor store windows
Buying a cheap flask
To help loosen his chains

And I have seen him
Begging on sidewalks
As if a stranger’s coins
Will grant him parole

And I have seen him
Talking to himself
Like a man convicted
For someone else’s crime

Nancy May- Three Haiku

turtle on turtle

pebbles on the shore

ebb into the sea

spring dawn

a bouquet of flowers

wave on wave

waves roll on cliffs

no show on our

wedding day

Nancy May has haiku published in Haiku Journal, Three Line Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Inclement Poetry, Twisted Dreams Magazine, Vox Poetica, Eskimo Pie, Icebox, Dark Pens, Daily Love, Leaves of Ink, The Blue Hour Magazine, Kernels, Mused – The BellaOnline Literary Review, Dead Snakes, Danse Macabre – An online literary Magazine, High Coupe, A Handful of Stones, Lyrical Passion Poetry E-Zine, UFO Gigolo, 50 Haikus, The Germ, Boston Literary Review, Be happy Zone, Every Day Poets, Cattails, Ppigpenn, Creatrix Journal and M58.
 
She is a monthly contributor at The Camel Saloon and Poems and Poetry. She has reached The Heron’s Nest consideration stage twice and the Chrysanthemum consideration stage once. She is working on her first haiku collection.