poetry

The Girl Who Tilted the Earth by David Henson

A waitress finds her

wailing and convulsing

‘midst porcelain and tile.

A fighter, she held on

‘til methadone prevailed.

Her history scares

couples wanting to adopt.

She grows up wandering

in a forest of fosters.

When she’s thirteen,

a man sneaks into her room,

puts his hand over her mouth.

She takes to the streets,

her body her coin.

Robbed of innocence

too soon, the child

leaves her own behind

at a storefront.

Tempting fate once

too often,

she imagines floating

high above rooftops

and rickety fire escapes.

She crashes so hard,

the earth’s axis tilts,

imperceptible but real.

Like her life.

(end)

David Henson

(Image provided by DWB)

Saragun Verse: It’s Like Fentanyl for Lazarus

Plan A

i

I used to be of the night

Never ate, drunk at dawn

Gods be damned, laughter so bright

Not knowing only slaves write songs

ii

Ahab’s lovely light landed on me

On summer staircases, tenement eaves

Below winter stars in wrong skies crossing

Greedy time knew nothing of me

iii

The devil clock chimed one morn’ at three

The deathnight spoke the mind of the Boar

‘Stupid girl, the master marked the cards before you were born,

Innocence is over, come now, find an oar.’

iv

No more nights of putting the wrong key in the lock

Nor philosophies over blasphemy and cigarettes

Nor scorning those who have children as a form or revenge

A strange method of payback for having been born

v

Then comes nothing, and nothing echoing more

‘T is nothing that makes only more

Of its stern self perpetual, redundant, sane

The ugly thing that happens when time remembers your name

Plan B

Re-read Plan A over a good snort of Methadone

Then snarl snarl at the dying of the light

Give your deepest weakness the finger and rise like Lazarus

People were made because the beasts won’t laugh at us

Mime by David Henson

The mime motions for a volunteer.

A young man emerges from the crowd.

The mime tips an imaginary hat.

The young man likewise.

Chuckles mingle among the onlookers.

The mime holds his pretend hat

to his head, leans

against an imaginary wind.

The young man does his best.

The mime nods.

The mime presses his hands

against the walls

of an invisible box,

crouches and pushes

his chin to his chest.

The box is shrinking.

When it appears the mime

is about to be squashed,

he strains his hands above him

and, arms trembling,

struggles to his feet.

The young man tries

to imitate the maneuver,

but the invisible box

continues contracting.

The young man’s mouth opens

in a silent scream until

he disappears.

Someone holds up a phone,

shouts Viral video!

The mime sweeps a bow,

motions for another volunteer.

Twenty hands shoot up.

(end)

David Henson

Ars Longa Vita Brevis

Juan de Valdés Leal was a Catholic,

a devout believer in the four

last things: Death, Judgement,

Heaven and Hell, as illustrated

by his paintings, the postrimerías.

Acutely aware of the brevity of life,

and that Man’s faith and works

would be weighed in the balance

to determine whether he entered

Heaven or was condemned to Hell,

he also adhered to the idea that

Ars longa compensated for Vita Brevis,

so, his canvas entitled In ictu oculi

shows a skeletal, hollow-eyed Death

standing on the right gazing at us.

The fingers of its right hand

are touching the adage In ictu oculi

to snuff out the flame of life.

A coffin is tucked under its left arm,

while its left hand clutches a scythe

that has raked over the baubles

of earthly glory: a tiara, a crown,

books of science, rich vestments,

the accoutrements of high office.

Death’s sinister foot presses on a globe:

mortality is the great leveller.

Life is over in the blink of an eye,

but the art of Valdés Leal lives on.

Tony Dawson

Penned in Blood: A Valentine by Dale Williams Barrigar

William Carlos Williams, famous

local doctor, spark plug

of his landscape, set of wheels

for his community, delivering

babies among sexy

poor people who couldn’t,

or wouldn’t,

always pay, and some of them

I loved a little too well, and one of them

I loved,

much too well.

Herman Melville, harpooneer

of Moby Dick, became an Inspector of Things

with no visible promotions

for nineteen years.

But I was working

by the seashore, near the sailor

who broke my heart, which usually

made me feel better, because,

by now, I was

the mystical mariner, and the sea

was in my eyes

wherever I was.

Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote

and was windmill-tilting

Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Dapple, Rocinante, and

Dulcinea, gorgeous, beautiful Dulcinea,

the most perfect love,

romantic angel,

with such a long pen,

was a tax collector on horseback

for too many years.

People would throw things at

us.

And I wondered

how I had become

this.

I said to myself,

“How have I become

this

weary, sad-eyed, wine-soaked,

broken-hearted old soldier

with a bad hand from that long-forgotten

sea battle no one seems to remember

but me.

Next, I was a slave,

captured by pirates.

Later writing many

chapters of my only, endless

book while locked up

in their jail.

For something I probably didn’t do

and don’t remember

if I did do it.

Because someone stuck up

was down

on my energy.

As a noble Roman said somewhere, in jail

being where

more than one good book has been

penned.

For love.

In blood.”

Troubadours By Dale Williams Barrigar

Two teens talking

around the turn table

in 1983

A.D.:

“Maybe they were just unseen,

trouble-making vehicles

for bringing new, pure and cool,

lasting, low, good, flute-like hill tunes of old

to the people’s plains.”

“The trenchant word that well stings the eyes

of the soft heart from the eternal, hidden streams

at earth’s core.”

“Sometimes…”

“So soothing to a needy few…”

“Law man, doctor, debtor or fake, banker,

horse-back tax collector or user nurse, draftsman

or driver, musician, druggist, jailed, and jailor,

sailor, librarian, book thief, art thief, drunkard

delivery dude, public urinator…”

“Traveling teachers of all kinds blood humming

the Underground Railroad songs of another America

across a Missouri of the modern musical mind…”

“All the black and white rappers, sax, trumpet,

Charlie Parker, guitar player,

and she, she, she.”

“Was a Wichita piano player who landed in East St. Louis

on the dime

and somehow she died

on the morphine line.”

“My Christian Science

Fiction

Kiowa

Cowgirl who always pushed it

just a little too far!”

“On purpose!”

“Rise from the provinces, be normal enough

most of the time but always

further along.”

“And she seemed too young.”

“And that was the end of her one,

good song.”

Crime Fiction By Dale Williams Barrigar

Even if you

tell yourself you

don’t want to become a writer,

the truth is

you will have to become a hardboiled romance writer

of a different kind.

(There is more than one kind

of everything).

And what you will have to write

is your own life

(if you want to save

your own soul).

Or think of writing your life

as your own endless film trip

(not strip)

you are making, tragicomic.

Where work is play

and the play is your work

and you are usually more

of an antihero.

And you get to take all the things

you have been handed

by Life.

And create the script, and fall

in love.

And so you nurture it, love it, write it down.

Hide it under your bed

(when you have one), fix it when it

needs fixing.

Know it’s good at heart, in its heart, and keep it

that way.

Let it go.

But don’t ever let the it of it go.

Send it and get it sent

straight back at you

by the greatest editor

ever known

demanding ever more

difficult

and life-enhancing

corrections.

Life of an American Word Scholar: For the Incarcerated Writer, Future, Past and Present By Dale Williams Barrigar

“And I may dine at journey’s end

With Landor and with Donne.”

– William Butler Yeats

1: Now at the end and you know it.

2: Then, you find the stub of old pencil in a pants pocket.

3: And because you looked like a worn-out poet in some lights to a certain lonely soldier, she came on delicate tip-toes and gave you toilet paper, through the bars, with her long, deadly fingers, wearing nothing at all.

4: So now you blow her another kiss and wave her fondly away so you can begin to scrawl with your long, strong, starving hand.

5: Like the black, reaching, screeching, raven-filled tree branches at the shuddering culmination of earth’s last winter’s tale in the occupied village above your mind.

6: “…Not the end,” you write.

7: And you write it again and again.

A Nightly Poet Struggles to Say Goodbye to His Drama Queen Then Says It By Dale Williams Barrigar

Baby, this is not my choosing but I

got to go now and I

cannot be

put by

nor set aside for later.

Lady, I’ve got to go now, I’ve got to run,

I don’t know why or where, really,

and I definitely

do not have any idea

what the new road will be

holding.

But I got to fly

like a fucking arrow back then.

And I’ve got to go now, so I can fly again.

I was allowed to fly, back then, with the Word,

on the back of the laurel

wren, and in only this I cannot be, I will not be

put by.

Sweet Honey-pie, I’ve got to go now but no, I do not know

what you’ll do now

nor how you’ll get by.

I will be undone by all of this I know,

Female Deer, my

Dearest.

Now and far more later too, some day or suddenly.

And the road, it’s too long.

And the price of this midwestern song

is a red wheelbarrow

of sorrow.

Actress please stop

sighing

and don’t start

crying.

And try to remember me

in your prayers.

But not in your dreams of tomorrow

because life is still beautiful

but we

are the fallen sparrow.