Do not join the hordes
of those Dead
long before
they actually Die.
Even when Life
boxes you in stationary
keep moving forward
with your Mind.
And when Hope
seems Pointless
or Evasive…
that’s when, in fact,
you need it Most.
Although Today
is dark and sinking…
drowning-man Cling
onto the Magic
possible in Tomorrow.
© Paul Tristram 2026
(Note: this week we are happy to introduce our readers to Paul Tristram. He will be the star of the show through Friday–LA)
I do like the ‘Rain’
accompanying
the brisk walk
away from
long overdue,
inevitable
‘Goodbyes’…
it’s almost as
if the Heavens
are applauding
your… ‘Decision’.
‘Solitude’ a little,
before the road
forward…
the words ‘Solo’
and ‘Successful’
hold hands
inside my self
-satisfied smile…
Ghosts remain
invisible to
those not Haunted.
© Paul Tristram 2026
(The Springs wishes to thank Fabrice for sharing his poetry with us this week. We look forward to his next time by–The Eds.)
Perhaps you resist what you can see so clearly
the words I am barely able to hold a secret
the moments I try to steal for a little glee.
Strange world we live in where love is taboo
that you cannot give everything to the one you love
without fear of a rejection that will vanish your heart.
You see, my dear, I too hold a heart in my chest
one that have been yours for more than a decade
I cannot quite see why it is so hard for you to welcome it.
I am but a little thing trapped in this world for a short while
brought to your realm in spite of myself by a strange power
I cannot fathom any other reason for my presence near you.
Today I see you from such a great distance, why
do you so remove all hope of a dream land without
the laughs, the gentle gifts, the lovely proximity.
It is a new year, perhaps an innate resolution
the space made of a void never to be filled
is it such pain for you to enjoy the future in peace?
Thus, I ask again, possibly of the universe;
what is so wrong with loving you when
I merely want to give you the peace of a loving heart?
Fabrice Poussin
I have had enough of these miserable hours
I ask that you will end my misery at her feet,
so, at last she knows I was true.
Interminable hours have gone since I met you
unaware of the gift your brought at my door
one that grew while I remained naïve of its reach.
What more may I require in this age when
the years had swiftly vanished and I remain
standing beside you, invisible, almost unknown.
Now, I ask that you take this shiny blade and
drive it through my chest until I sigh once more
resting a weary heart in your hands for comfort.
Not sure of the way to express my desire
for you, I am merely hoping to sleep and
at last be given the dream of you for all time.
Fabrice Poussin
It may not require so much to achieve peace
for just knowing that you exist
not so far that I could almost touch you
and I can close my eyes and dream of you.
The single thought that soon, I will see you
smile again as you ponder the daily tasks
makes my own soul grin with delight
and I can snuggle with this image
It is only a matter of days until at last
I will be given to the pleasure of hearing you speak
while your voice of pearls and diamonds
echoes in an everlasting song through the walls of the infinite.
And you will laugh as you always do when
a visitor happens to greet you in the morning
simply because it is you, and you enjoy the laughter
happy or not, the contagious glee takes place.
Guided by the duties at hand, you will walk in
surrounded by emails to answer, books to read
meetings to prepare and what must follow
as you plan for the evening at home and walk away.
Perhaps you will speak of the hard moments
the news, not always so good, of a distressed friend
a tear refusing to find its way to your shaking hand
and you may bite your lip to keep from a meltdown.
I know I am eager to plunge into your eyes again
to spend a few minutes cradled within your soul
so I too will smile, laugh, and speak of the sun
as it shines upon us and give you joy.
Fabrice Poussin
It has been a week and a few decades
memories impossible to erase of years
when a child, he worked the land in the
wake of a father who rarely played.
He recalls the ball games in tennis shoes
when he dreamed of the cleats his mates
boasted with the pride of a Pélé, while
they ran with the skills of a blind man.
The kid had so many hopes to be
just like the others in the village,
riding a three-speed bicycle to the woods
not the rusty wheels he assembled alone.
All the years he might have a vague memory
of the moment when none reminded him that
he too could have celebrated a birthday
if they had the time to remember his joy.
Christmases and New Years too
disappeared with little more than
an orange and a few chocolate candies
images in the mist and nothing left.
So many gifts never received, hugs never granted
memories with holes aplenty in a full world
where he saw so many smile at the presents
he would never know in a forgotten childhood
Fabrice Poussin
(Always a Stranger is the first of five we will be running by Fabrice Poussin this week. Dale is by far a better judge of poetry than I am, but I think just about anyone will see the quality in this poet’s writings–Leila)
I feel the crushing weight of all those lives
foreign to me, and I know they do not understand
the pain mine, factor that seems to define my existence.
I think of those who may have loved me once, who perhaps
care for me a little today, but they move on without looking back
they have their own lives to live, and I stay frozen as a statue.
I cannot fathom the immensity of this punishment,
a continued torture that ravages my body and soul
for decades, I have been condemned to aloneness.
To realize that I cannot be another adds to the yoke
as I am so thoroughly trapped in a life I am beginning to abhor
useless, ugly, unwanted, will it not end today?
Fabrice Poussin
(Images of the Mighty Django, by CJA)
The destroyer is coming. He wants to undo everything. It doesn’t have to be like that. A world where everyone is against you.
The dog is barking. It means trouble. He’s out in the yard causing problems, but you love it. The air conditioner kicks on. It’s loud and churns cold air, but costs money.
A creak under foot to the door. You look at the black house that looms on the hill. All the cool air is behind you then suddenly it’s in front of you too. Tombstones stagger down the hill—getting so big you can read one. It proclaims, from across the street, leering over a wrought-iron fence, like an unwelcome eye, “FOREVER MORE.”
Black shadows abide like open wells. One wrong step and you’re forever falling.
All the little American flags in the graveyard drop to their staff. Like they are “at ease” for the coming of night. The dead are still known by their rank in this world.
The dog is inside the living room. He is staring into the kitchen like someone is standing there. He won’t take his eyes off this apparition like they are holding the instructions on how to raise the dead.
This worries you—you worry a lot. You know God hates a coward. “What are you looking at?”
The dog’s toenails click around in the dark. The fan on the air conditioner is coming in for a landing. A bar of dying light is on your dirty fingernails perched on the keyboard. You never learned to type, but the words spew like a rabid dog’s drool. You send scorching letters then regret it.
An ear worm goes through your head again. A song fragment, like a subliminal message, has played for three days straight and it won’t stop. You fall into its guitar thrum and openly sing the song in your mind. You know this is not the cure.
Samsung, in white, floats up and bounces from edge to edge on the black TV screen, like Pong. The dog is bouncing around the room from corner to corner, just like this word, but you love it.
“Oh, my God, lay down you freak of nature!” Then a low streak runs through you, all of your wrongs—that you can remember—some you will never forget. One is earmarked to be your final thought, all cascade down from the black cloud of the past, “I’m sorry, Pooch.”
There is a heaviness in the air. The smell of rain and it hits, without God’s knowledge, and pounds on the roof and pounds on the metal air conditioner. Rain helps, but the rain is being channeled away from the land. The marshes, which re-energize the groundwater, are filled in. The destroyer likes this. He desires famine quenched by leagues of sea water.
A thickness in the throat. The words are getting hard to swallow. People of your generation, “Gen X” are dying at a rapid rate. They were the uproar for a minute, which now seems like a second. Where are they now? Buried in the Earth’s axis? Each previous generation must in its hypocrisy hold up the Earth. “The Lost Generation” knows this well.
You watch a lot of TV and feel like a power somewhere enjoys this. A power that reeducates your mind to seek laziness and comfort. A way and will that becomes the spoke and wheel of your life.
After a while you believe your ways are hurting you and doing no good. There is constant pain. The steady flow of apathy won’t quite erode, but there is no quicksilver of action. No heroics…
You’ve done something wrong when you were drunk. People are yelling your name out on the street. One or two want your blood. They’d like to shut your coffin lid. God hates a coward.
The dog is barking, senses trouble and does something. You want to stop writing these words. They are bothersome, maybe even loathsome to a reader, a fellow sojourner of the dwindled spirit. The vainglory of youth has vanished—you were scared then too.
What to do? Where to go? Then you remember another friend has died. Wait for the clamor to subside.
Take it slow to the mortuary. No need to hurry. Sit under the tree and read Emily Dickinson, ride in her “carriage of immortality.”
On the way, on the street, a fracas, becomes violence between two red oligarchs of rage. A fracture—one’s hurt. The other is slap-happy. A defunct phone booth bears witness, but wordless for a long time now. The lines of communication are down.
Cars are lined up, and the black hearse backs out of its embalmed shell. You are late for the departed but you are lock-step now.
Your friend in the hearse, in the new lines of a bronze casket, breathes one last breath of death.
Nothing left but…
Doornails, church bells and a brief farewell.
THE END
Chrisopher J Ananias (with our appreciation for Django)
Taking pictures, being a photographer, whichever comes first? Peddling a ten-speed through the limbering trees.
Experimenting with light—always light—can’t do much in the dark. Besides: wink, hide, have nightmares, make mistakes, reproduce, and tend my ghost.
For me, the artistic eye sees what it sees. Assuming I have one, right? A brown eye that combs through the trash for artifacts. Hoping to see Van Gogh’s spirit glimmering schizophrenically off the jags of a beer bottle.
I’m ready… I’m harmless now. My ten-speed and me. Camera aimed. I got something good—a spiderweb.
I hike my bike by the cemetery’s gate. “Look at this Grandma.” I say over a tombstone, but say it anyway and show her—been a minute. SEE. She always had a dark-side.
I wander around and get interested in wind vanes and lightning rods.
Christopher J Ananias
(Adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s Baal)
Funny, it took the prospect of God’s unleashing the Flood to instill a spirit of co-operation among the animals of this earth. Noah was quite persuasive, really. In all, there was only one creature immune to his warnings of the catastrophe to come and that was the dear old ichthyosaurus. He greeted Noah’s weather forecast with a breezy “Nope, don’t believe a word of it.” The other animals exchanged a knowing look amongst themselves. “That ichthyosaurus,” they said, “deaf to reason, stubborn as they come, always was.” The ichthyosaurus nodded in agreement, but added that, seeing as he was the oldest creature of the lot, he knew a thing or two about probabilities. And to his credit, he conceded that such a deluge as predicted by batty old Noah was indeed possible – in fact, even quite likely, given the almighty mess made of things down here. “The point is,” said the ichthyosaurus, “I wouldn’t book passage aboard that Ark if Flood were guaranteed!”
And I must say, all considered, such a sentiment strikes in me a sympathetic note – to the extent that, were a similar predicament to loom, and the first drops fall, and there still be room on the Ark, my response would be to sit down and contemplate the fact that very shortly, where earthly matters are concerned, I shall be well fucking shut of it!
Geraint Jonathan
(Image by DWB)
Saragun Springs 