Your Candle Burns Brightly

by David Milligan

When the darkness blocks out the sunlight,
When a friendly soul is nowhere in sight,
When the mist blinds my eyesight,
I pray to Brigid and feel her sacred light.

"Mary of the Gaels",
Your boat charts a course beyond the Skye*,
Your candle burns brightly among the stars,
Your spirit makes me high...

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Copyright 2003 David Milligan (wy605@victoria.tc.ca).
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Test Pattern

by Terry Scott Boyke

The house was not plumb and the wind knew it.
In winter, the drafts would break into
whistles and spook the old dog; who would
pace the linoleum in search of calm.
Sometimes, field mice would cozy between the
cinder blocks and joists and wait out
the storms, only to have the mutt paw their retreats
in protest.

Mostly, the shades would stay up to take in
the moon and stars, but with each cold snap
down they would come to hold the dying heat.
On snowy nights, the man and woman would retire
to the foam-fill by midnight to sleep below the
vinyl headboard with its chewing gum warts
or linger a little longer with the residue
of alcohol and the ashes of death.

By 1 am, the little boy would be alone with the glow
of the space heater in the downstairs kitchen and
the drum of ice pellets on the corrugated roof above.
In the dim, he would raise the shades and press
his face and fingers against the frosty pane.
He always liked the taste and feel of iciness.
Beyond its makeshift lens, a lone street
light would reveal tomorrow's fate.

By two, the little boy, wide awake yet half asleep,
would secret down the splintered stairs past
the cobwebs and the clutter to the front room where
he could hear the whistle loudest. He would turn on
the TV and scrutinize its test pattern and consider
what came next. Bouncing furtively on the sectional, he
could feel the wilted tips of the philodendron and imagine
the tentacles of a beast preparing to eat him up.

By three, the wind's whistle would become a melody
and the field mice and the mutt would have settled in
for one last January. The ice pellets would have turned
to snow flakes too muted to stir the snoring man
or the sotted woman. And the little boy would
doze off on the front room rug; his dreams of no school
unfazed by the fading warmth of the space heater
and the expectant glow of WNBT.

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Copyright 2003 by Terry Scott Boyke (terrysb@starpower.net).
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Sketch of a Tractor in Bavarian Landscape

by Paul Murphy

I am a Munich street artist
spawned by our great father
the father of all street artists.
I paint from postcards
scenes of the Dom,
little sketches of the dancer
Lola Montez and portraits
of Cosima and Richard Wagner.

I am a Munich street artist
I look at his terrible flowers everyday.
at Odeonsplatz I throw
my coat on the ground
at the space he fell
I can't see the spaces history
falls into, but I can see
his face, the terrible flowers

that rise up out of the cracks
in the pavement, that fell
where he fell, terrible
flowers that yawn and devour
men. in the Haus der Kunst
a waving woman
on the landscape
a tractor is thrumming

I am painting the tractor
the terrible flowers
the waving woman
the dancer Lola Montez
Richard and Cosima.
Nietzsche is dying
Achilles is born.
Mars and Venus masturbate

the flower stems
the terrible tractor
the waving flowers
the thrumming woman
the thrumming waving woman
the stems of the tractor
tyre metal steel plastic leaf oil
observe the terrible thrumming woman

so that the tractor is born.

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Copyright 2003 by Paul Murphy (clitophon@yahoo.com).
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Willow Tree

by Annette Nasser

Do you have any thought
for the willow tree
and how it bends over backwards
to fit the needs of man,
with her whipping noise
singing in the wind
as her shade cools others
choosing to sit under
branched-out arms?

Do you have any thought
for the willow tree,
standing so eloquently
and not made for climbing
with its delicate form
swaying in the breeze as if to say,
"I'm here, look at me, don't walk away.
I'm just as grand as the oak and elm
and even the maple tree."

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Copyright 2003 by Annette Nasser (Mystnerth@aol.com).
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Calendars and Heartstrings

by sean satake

Your battle cry is now a whisper

Never thought you could change
It's funny how
the work always comes to an end
yet the blisters still remain

I look at
the scars you gave to me
it's a wonder that
I'm still sane

and it's funny how
even though I know better
I still light up
when I hear your name

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Copyright 2003 by sean satake (MTsean@webtv.net).
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No Time for Anything!

by Luke Buckham

the air doesn't age. it surrounds my faces.
it surrounds my face in changing temperature
and tells me about the seasons, opens my eyes
to tell me more than I need. when I close my eyes
because they've been told too much
and open them again in the same air
of summer in a different year, I'm playing
in front of my mother's eternal house
next to the moment's highway that makes
my peripheral eyes shiver in the sight
of its faint treacherous blueness,
its shadows of gasoline and murmurs
of dangerous adulthoods. across the pages
of the cruel calendars and off their numbered months
I am spending my whole life chasing a grasshopper
so that I can watch it spring always ahead of me
from tall grass to tall grass in broken sun,
my eyes jumping with it sometimes seeing
only the long circuits of grass bending
and then leaping quickly back up
just before they touch the ground
as if the grasshopper was a ghost.
that afternoon lost in the calendar
my mother asked me to pray
and just like those grasses I sprung back up
before my knees of grass hit the calling ground.
since I didn't humble myself then ten years ago
I am connected to my unhumble self now.
the wind is the wind of every day of history
but no history will happen today because
I am going back to the same grasses
to watch a new grasshopper
snip the air to clever pieces with his leaps
over the nothing ghosts of the insect dead.
now I'm old enough to stay up late enough
to hear in the darkening half of the world
his darker cousins the crickets build
their little violins and hop a little slower toward
the silent highways waiting for us all.

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Copyright 2003 by Luke Buckham (aworminmywall@hotmail.com).
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2003

by Prasenjit Maiti

Making love to you is like blundering someplace else, meeting people people people as you do not stoke my nothingness even once, our memories hanging ever so loose and forlorn like broken tiles that line the inglenooks of our sorrows . . . Allow me to teach you an old trick or two: you take me in your arms like eggshells and teach me what lovemaking is all about: I may not be aroused when you are to fall back on our memories and do nothing else . . . That evening was like your full lips in bloom so mindless like our holidays spent like prayers in rains and lovemaking . . . You never miss me around your lips licking the froth of evenings alone in winter woods or crying and rising and falling like waves breaking against the endlessness of passions . . . You light up a cigarette as I'm swept ashore and walk holding hands with my envy toward the celestial gates . . . My tongue twitches in fury like the bitch of a winter all around as the sand and the salt and the tears of the ocean rise like litany in unison . . . You run into me across the waterfront where the beach lies cobble-stoned and panting in season . . . Our eyes water as your cigarette smoke is blue against the ocean and sky . . . My envy and I walk in silent camaraderie toward no tomorrows

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Copyright 2003 by Prasenjit Maiti (pmaiti@cal3.vsnl.net.in).
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