Patrick Theron Erickson

Walter Ruhlmann

Michael J. Shepley

Tre entro tre

 

 

Patrick Theron Erickson

Danse Macabre in Three Acts

 

1. THAT VOODO YOU DO SO WELL

 

Snuff and slash

 

is why all your film noir

is cult status 

 

Give me

the black and white negatives

so I can see

the bones in your face

 

And I’ll tell from the prints

what ghost goes there

 

stepping and fetching

with your hotfoot routine

 

and that chicken

that would have

crossed the road

 

like a chicken

with its head cut off

 

if its throat wasn’t slit

 

and you hadn’t danced

the night away

 

awash in its blood.

 

 

2. BLOODHAVEN

 

The blood of ghosts

is a thin gruel      

 

whether they are

thin skinned

or thick

 

thick witted

thin and cruel

 

And their wraith-like

rapier quickness

is grating

 

when we are

in the thick of it

 

thick with them

thin skinned ourselves

 

Let there be no

bloodletting then

 

and no bad blood

between us

 

no blood wedding

no bloody feud

 

For blood in the water

and a feeding frenzy

 

is either the breakfast of champions

or the banquet of fools.

 

 

3. BODY COUNT

 

A body

soon to be

bodiless

 

if the body snatcher

has anything

to say about it

 

A body

soon to be

disembodied

disemboweled

 

if the coroner

has anything

to do with it

 

Quite an undertaking too

if the undertaker

has anything left

to undertake

 

a blot

on some ME’s blotter

 

a cadaver

for a cadaver dog

 

soon to be

a rescue dog

 

if the body count

keeps going up.

 

 

Patrick Theron Erickson, a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City just south of Duck Creek, resonates to a friend's definition of change (albeit a bit dated): change coming at us a lot faster because you can punch a whole lot more, a whole lot faster down digital broadband "glass" fiber than an old copper co-axial landline cable. Secretariat is his mentor, though he has never been an over-achiever and has never gained on the competition. Patrick's work has appeared in Cobalt Review; Poetry Pacific; Red Fez; SubtleTea; The Oddville Press; Literary Juice; Poetry Quarterly; and will appear in the Fall 2015 issue of The Penwood Review.

 

 

 

Walter Ruhlmann
An Elusive Whore

I feel like a slippery fish.
I know lust is in me.
No matter how it came, it is here,
and will stay forever.

Days and dates have passed by
and each one was marked by
another conqueror
an angel or a brother of joy.

Virtual hunks, concrete chunks,
I have seen many hairy branches,
tumid loaves, hot, moist tails.

Once again
the tempting blinking eye
lured me into watching them coming,
performing acts of indefinite pleasures.

It is when memory of a night
came to me from the past
from the muddy depths
the blurred corners once buried.

A visit to the city of loons,
a street mostly where flesh dwell
and collapse on undone bed of awe.

Holiness left this place
such a long time ago,
roughly when the dragons and the sprites waged their war
and no one won over the other.

A city of wonders,
wandering and crossing all its streets and boulevards
in the quest for someone
to blow off straight away.

Serendipity,
the place offers many lucky numbers,
warm and prepared for business.

Although I did not hear it come,
his heart beat faster to explode in his chest,
I sensed the tension through his thighs.
That's when he baptised me with sperm.

Only a while after
the rain fell over me
to wash away guilt stains.

Christened

So you wanted me to become the next angel,
the good Samaritan.
You thought socialization came from the church
and war and lust and roguery
and all evil this world has born
from radical socialism.

When the ghosts of Hollywood and Francisco
appeared on those films and postcards,
you could not deny you too had been lusted
by the most incredible frenzied hazards.

My summers never belonged to some ascending virgin
assuming only the brightest times of motherhood
recreation, procreation and procrastination have fertilized

that brain of mine, thus emitting the words I spit and will carry

on vomiting since you prevented me from grace.

You could have sent ten thousand SOS,

this would not have changed a bit

of what I am and what hides in the depths of me.

More like the Whore of Babylon,
riding the beast,
cherishing every quakes and shakes from its flanks,
when its upheavals prick and cut and nick,
categorizing the calamine mix into the necessary anointment,
adorning these rash on my skin, caressing all my torments,
never easing excitement.


The Magpies Have Come

Corvids make me think of an empty body*, not an empty skull,
smartly mirroring inside their head, the brain cells flatter ave classes.
Wise bird, clever kind, black-billed, crook-beaked, savant thieves.

Attacking the clothes lines in the garden encircled by bamboos –
we grew them to prevent the neighbours from peeping in our land,
the magical kingdom we had built in the north.

Other lands, other times, more magpies flew over our shelters,
omens for the spider-monkeys climbing high the front of the building,
taking everything they could away from us, and from the past.

A foot for the daisy, a fool deciphering envy flirting with lust.
The magpies danced with me when I dug our master lady,
a jail for the coward, the coy boy seducing J's lovers.

Why should I like those birds? Birds at all as it comes.
Reptilian heritage, heirs of some forgotten scaled beasts,
hiding their true nature under a black and white plumage.

* “corvid” is a homophone of “corps vide” in French i.e “empty body”

 

 

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and Beakful, and runs mgv2>publishing. His latest collections are The Loss (Flutter Press), Twelve Times Thirteen (Kind of a Hurricane Press), 2014, and Crossing Puddles (Robocup Press), 2015. His blogs http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr and http://nightorchidswork.blogspot.fr

 

 

 

Michael J. Shepley

Winter Ocean Storm

Over SF

 

                                     And like cold black anger

                                     formless, ever changing

                                     figuring frightful power

                                     growing over silver streaked

                                     sea's heavy roiling lead tossing

                                     sleepless in its evening sea bed,

                                     sun soon smothered behind the dark

                                     mountain of malice growling crawling closer

                                     casting cold shadow ahead, as salty

                                     long sigh of winter wind will rise. It devours

                                     distant Farallon islands like snails’

                                     eating foot feeds and then, haughty, high storm

                                     at last cracks its insane electric whip

                                     and with thick thunder from

                                     its white worm-glow underbelly

                                     spills a million glinting

                                     minnows in a slow rain on

                                     these holly wreathed hills.

 

 

In November Wood

                                            for A.                                                 

 

                                      Come racing through the woods

                                            on a horse of thick dark smoke

                                            on the hugging soft earth path

                                            through the wild burning leaved oak

                                            carrying a veritable pitchfork  

                                            of electric fire, the Devil

 

                                                stopped and spoke

 

 

                                      Wrapped in a burlap hair cape

                                            that made him hard in the dark

                                            to clearly see, he cried out madly

                                             in voice brittle with edgy stark

                                            fear, as brittle as the cry of

                                            the rasp file on the weeping saw

 

                                                "Hear you! Mark

 

      These warning words well!

                                            There are many monsters worse

                                            than those from the fires of hell.

                                            Such a curse follows hot on my trail

                                            with his freezing paws into this dell

                                            dead on my footprints and fast."

 

                                                then he was gone                                     

                                                          terse shadow

                                                                   into the night

                                            Pell Mell.

 

                                           And after about ten seconds

                                           of very deep and serious consideration

                                                I cut out as well

 

 

An Untranslatable Unindelible Image

 

                                      The there then smoke

                                        

                                         it was in

                                           silhouette mountains

                                                       it was winter                                      

                                               it was in               

                                                 a sky blue

                                                 more blue

                                                     than clean water

                                                        as a see-      

                                                          through     forever

                                                          ever could be

 

                                                                                               

                                              A blue         

                                                 too preternatural

                                                             too damn true or                                            

                                                     maybe just too new          

 

 

                                      It was winter there

                                        was this small paper house

                                          there in the shallow fold

                                            of mountain and fir

                                              and long soft shadow

                                                and there was smoke                                         

 

                                            For an excuse

                                              for this poem

                                                for this mere mortal

                                                  zen of is

                                                    and then am

                                                     finally beyond was

 

                                      And the smoke

                                         wrote like dripping

                                           down Asian scroll ink

                                             froze in a phrase

                                               in ash white        

                                                 over some silk

                                                   soft cloth of

                                                     too true blue

 

                                          Wrote in cursive

                                             ephemeral ideographs

                                               a short verse

                                                 I could see

                                                   but not understand

 

                                                since this scene

                                                  was, of course,

                                                      in Japan       

 

 

 

Michael Shepley is a writer / researcher in Sacramento CA. In the area of poetry over the past decade and a half he has caught ink in three dozen publications for around 50 poems. In late 3014 and early 2015 his poems appeared in print in California Quarterly, Muse International (India) & Seems. Xanadu has promised to publish the poem Way Beyond in its next print issue and recently his poem MARCH was in DM du Jour.