Benjamin Blake ~ Tony Walton ~ Stanley Wilton

Trois par trois

 

 

Benjamin Blake

Whatever Gets You Through the Night

 

I've been searching for years

For a place not found on any map

Though they whisper ceaselessly 

From inside the confines of my skull

Those inhabitants of that sacred place

Who seek solace from the sun's brimstone touch

I can feel them under my skin

Carving vague directions by needle-point

I beg you to come for this ghost of a man

Midian! Midian! 

Your name is all that has kept these bones together

The hope that one day

I shall stumble across those towering wrought-iron gates

Where I shall finally be home

With the kindred Nightbreed

 

 

The Midnight Liner

 

Ice frozen time

Thawed as the clock strikes 0

A new dawn reoccurring in the dark

Inevitable

A meteor shower

Raining on a barren landscape

(the moon keeps this heart afloat)

(as it commands the endless tide)

 

And each day I drown

Beneath murky waves

While trying to find Atlantis

 

 

Amateur Operatics 

 

A matinee

Opening Thursday at the Operating Theater

Make sure to get your tickets

Because I heard they’re showing skin

 

Curtains open

She dances like a fevered lunatic

Tearing open her hospital gown

To expose the hole in her chest

 

We’re mesmerized

By her eyes and by her behind

The pointless pantyhose

That leave nothing to the imagination

 

Look, but don’t touch

Believe it or not

This show’s not for your pleasure

It’s to suck the soul right from your aging body

 

 

Benjamin Blake was born in the July of 1985, in the small town of Eltham, New Zealand. His fiction and verse have appeared in numerous journals and magazines including, The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, Morpheus Tales, Black Petals and DM. He was a contributor to the 2012 anthology, A Feast of Frights from the Horror Zine. His first poetry collection, A Prayer for Late October, was published in 2013 by Hammer & Anvil Books. His new poetry / prose / photography collection, Southpaw Nights, will be available in early 2015. He currently lives in a cabin, somewhere in the New Zealand countryside. Read more of his work at www.benjaminblake.com.

 

 

 

Tony Walton

Night Scream

 

This night has nothing to be ashamed of,
and just staggered in this place at last call -
drunken and unshaven, a kind of
fuckless orgasm with no one to
tuck it in bed.

This night has roamed across concrete,
faced neon beer signs in liquored mirrors
with hollowed eyes seeking reprieve
in thirsts and pleasures sought. 
This night is curious.
This night is weak.

This night is drenched in vodka, diazepam -
forty miles from nowhere, wild and
bewildered in a ceaseless thrust.
This night aches.  But then we see this:

Two bodies galloping against each other
under cool sheets, a shudder, then
a glow of silver on her snowy thigh, drying.

A bond, however fragile.  Until morning
when it takes flight and then it's gone?

Oh, who the hell knows,
but I do know
this night will stay in bed.

 

 

Visitors

 

They come for you-

in old fashioned hats,

from where you don’t know,

to fuck you hard against every wall

you’ve built up.

 

They know how to pick all your locks,

break through your firewall,

blocking all exits.

 

Out of mirrors in small rooms with

flickering televisions they stare into your

flatness outlined in twisted sheets.

 

You give them food and wine,

trying to appease them.

You smoke with them, but they never mellow.

They’re like gods of a certain kind and

know all your devices.

 

Imagine what they’ve cost you in

Priests, lovers, advisers?

 

They’ll come for you and

they never stop coming

until you die, or

they die in you.

But, maybe there’s

something else wrong,

besides

them.

 

 

London 2009

 

As I turn left off Oxford Street
cloaked in a low sky and shuffling

along with the other furrowed brows

I search for the accent of my youth
"Tomato" or "Tomahto" or "Tomata"
"Aunt" or "Ant" or "Auntie"

Punching my cold fists into a
Harrods jacket I enter the tube,
shortly reaching another
grey gray station and soon see
a pub with an old fashioned
clock against the liquored mirror,

damn, it's way past our meeting time

and am I at the right place? 

I really could go for 
comfort food now, we need this

connection

"Buffalo Wings?" Or is it "Fish and Chips?"
Maybe "Saltfish?"

Which of these do I want?
Eh,  it's too late for such a

search.

A sudden hiss of wind

angrily flaps my jacket, and
a raindrop

taps my shoulder-
as a stranger does when they have
wandered and need
direction.

 

 

The rain falls.

The sun falls.

The fog falls.

The days fall

from the harboring arms of mothers.

 

I walk alongside the parceled flats,

pausing at a low bridge and look out at

the steel dusk of the Old World

as the wind swings my bag like a beacon

against the cold.

Oh, come now – and dance with me

Caribbean.

 

 

Tony Walton is a Caribbean writer living in the Cayman Islands. His works have appeared in Storyteller Magazine, Moonkind Press, Whisperings Magazine, Mountain Tales Press, Out of Our Magazine, Poetry Bay Magazine, Burningword Magazine, Wilde Magazine, Nite Writers Literary International Literary Journal,  Avalon Literary Review,  Iceland Daily, East Lit Literary Magazine, Boston Poetry Magazine,  Eunoia Magazine, Olentangy Review, Carnival Literary Magazine, Verity LA,  Phantom Kangaroo, Tincture Journal,  Star 82 Review,  Seltzerzine, Literature Today, Morphorg Magazine, and, now, DM.

 

 

 

Stanley Wilkin

A Kind of Life....

 

Thin white light dryly crystallising

        in air bleak with dust,

Shadows decked with ancient portraits-

silence impaled.

 

      Beneath the glittering floorboards

rodents scurried, smelling out crumbs.

The damp had spread like a mutating virus.               This was where

the old man walked, grappling with pitiless memories

until the end of his long life.

 

In this garish, gargoyle haunted house

amidst the enduring pine trees he was born

to a beautiful mother. Her death

scoured his child’s heart, leaving only barren thoughts

in a dull land. Above the antique fire

his father’s portrait, a reckless fantastically bewhiskered hussar

astride a mighty horse, his epaulettes like fringed

dinner plates, his embroidered jacket gloriously

covered with silver tassels and golden buttons,

smiling bravely, sabre aloft as if flying into battle.

 

Surviving Crimea,

             his father died in the hot wastes

of muddy Kingston, ravaged by disease,

flitting through the overheated air,

attended by his creole mistress, whom he loved, his

mummified body transported back to the calmer climes

of his estate and stored away in a mausoleum; for eternity

transfixed by rotten relatives. Sharing their future. It was, after all was said and done,

a wonderfully unlikely fate.

 

In meagre revolt, the old man when young ran a finance house

where he never once met a lovely creole girl.

Confined within

its rubric confines, he grew passionate over money-an un-ripened husk

counting dry leaves.

 

How slow and quiet moved his sullen years

entering and exiting each decade, grasping

with evacuated passion.

First a millionaire and then a MP, ruling

his tiny world with his father’s distant élan.

Loving a troupe of stately women, loaded down

with jewels and raging with syphilis. At fifty,

his obsessive purity weighed him down

like a metallic tear. He shared

his lovers with the king. The king shared his cigars with him,

and on sallow autumn nights, occasionally,

his deeply satisfying burgundy.

 

No man or woman loved him

in the greyness of his life

he planted his emotions

in uprooted dunes, concealed his friends

in shifting sand

               leaving no clear

marker in his dissembling memories.

 

Age came like a disease in a cavalcade

of bruises, boils and mottled skin.

Time became less a glorious panorama

Than an un-scalable wall. Shuffling along his dusty

halls he’d stop by the windows and spend hours

fixed upon his father’s picture, staring

triumphantly at him from the past. At such moments,

the sun dancing across his ruffled forehead,

he’d feel jealous of the dead man’s youthful

love of adventure, and his rousing life amongst

beautiful women in a hot passionate land.

 

At inopportune moments, sick at heart,

he’d rage against the dead man’s

                            unremitting thirst for his wife-

                                rage against his mother’s groans at night-

                                       his mother’s dark screams of pleasure,

still made him howl.

 

 

STORM:

 

It was such a superb day

saturated with light,

a long day, filled with evolving mists,

the energetic calls of gathering birds

and calm lapping winds.

 

In the gardens, amongst the holiday debris,

the children excitedly played,

music mingled with equable conversation, the postman stealing by

in the shiftless shadows, shielded by formless cloud.

 

The town made news that day-

disappearing as the weather closed in.

 

My mother arrived home from work

loaded with groceries, tired, dumb.

My father soon followed. They fleetingly

kissed and made dinner together in the evolving half-light.

Our neighbours evacuated their gardens.

The rain began as we sat down, striking gently at first

and then in madness.

 

 

Of terrible storms that broke through the town

strangling, uprooting trees, slicing away

homes, a gurgling pulsating fury of air, ice and rain

that lasted four days.

 

Unremitting, it brought huge waves in its wake

from the tortuous sea. All along the beaten

coast people choked and drowned,

their corpses tipped

out onto beaches huddled between ravaged furniture

and drying plastic shopping bags,

swollen limbs nibbled at by fish and crabs,

and scattered throughout the streets

       picked at by dogs,

       a feast that set them up

       for the coming cold weather.

 

Fleeing birds

squalling overhead in clamorous flocks, plucked

from the sky and shattered on rocks;

The cats had a field day until

becoming engulfed too in marauding waves

deluging the land.

 

Foxes screamed from the hopeless

shelter of water saturated dens;

only jagged ruins remained,

futile gestures to a once-only god.

 

Towns inland were wrecked by the hurricane bursts

and all fell silent as the storm

fled like a Viking raider back into the sea, dragging its

spoils. 

 

Drifting in the nearby river,

my father’s ballooning corpse set off

for the closest city. My mother’s settled

eventually in the silt even further down,

stubbornly waiting for her husband.

 

Always late. In life and death, he was a tardy man!

 

Reaching higher ground after stumbling through

woods and newly formed marsh

I endured. God was good to me that day!

as the waters grew calm and receded I returned

an orphan, a survivor, amongst the dead.

 

Water is in my veins,

beating rhythmically,

my mind filled with flotsam,

floating needlessly

and like my parents, I drift

towards an infinite, unreachable sea.

 

 

Time: Passion

 

What did the old man say as he walked into

the yard? Can you remember his expression? Was his

face red? Was his voice, usually so soft, ripped through

with the hacking sounds of suffering? Did he speak of me or

other women as his memories jiggled about, bouncing balls in opaque

glass, popping up, briefly seen then tumbling back down?

 

I loved him once. Oh, fifty years ago,

in a time of music festivals, casual sex,

his cryptic smile a rapier sign to hopeful women, his voice

detailing elaborate visions, a rough-edged tinder-box

accessed for sudden ignition.

Tanya, his besieged wife, armed with a corrosive tongue,

fended us off, obscene words flying from her pretty mouth

like acidic spit, worn away by dogged distrust, driven insane by childcare.

Even now she haunts my generation,

a frowning face in the squalid shadows.

 

 

When young the old man sought attention

and still does, but in other ways. He no longer flirts. No. But

his blunted eyes seek an audience

for his well-thought out pantomime, knowing well

how to elicit applause. Have you seen him

walking through town in urine-stained pantaloons, his

torso naked, darting challenging looks at passers-by?

Once, that marvellous man was admired!

He made love with scrupulous finesse, sending

nervous fire through avaricious female bodies. Now,

a sucked-out palimpsest

each shrunken stare a half-forgotten event!

 

“His mind has gone. He’s a sad, bad old man!”

Sadie, my arch daughter, slightingly remarks when he saunters through town.

She has a PHD and is proud of her intellect. He disgusts her.

He carries his shrivelled body tauntingly,

his involuntary gait, his movements, vaguely remembering

when and how often he used it well.

 

“He needs to be put into care! Put away!”

Her envy is etched into her aging face

as she stands beside me, thinking of effective cures

for old age, a battered brain and perished lust.

Obligingly, I nod. I pretend to agree with her pejorative vehemence

knowing that she loathes him for making me happy,

for compulsively drilling pleasure into my every limb, aperture and pore.

Unable to conceal the indignities of time, neither am I able to conceal

an ancient satisfaction.

 

Frequently seeing him in town, I know what he has become-

a thin wrecked wag, always drunk. I say nothing.

By the afternoon he is abusive and

unzips his flies to the laughter of taunting teenagers eating burgers in the mall.

He was like them once. He derided old men too, wishing

they would go away and die. There wasn’t sufficient air, he believed,

for both young and old. They had exceeded their share.

He’d yell insults, holding the grateful hand

of a beautiful girl, as later he held mine, falsely believing

in infinite youth: firmly believing that the old are other people.

 

 

In the dusty streets, parboiled in an insistent

sun, I leave him to his minor despair-I refuse to evoke old vellum thin

memories that will yet again eviscerate his soul. I refuse to

restore that flirtatious grin, that far-seeing look that turned my will to dust, that

caused me to lie down in the grass by the river’s edge,

my greedy contentment clutching at my heart.

From the corner of the street I watch my first love

act out each day a further stage in his death, bottle in hand, phlegm

running down his chin, his shrunken penis flapping like a tiny bird.

 

 

 

Stanley Wilkin is a lecturer working in London. He now also teaches privately. He has published in various magazines, such as Suspense Magazine, Black Petals and Gold Dust, and regularly produces academic papers. Bienvenue au Danse.