The days have come unhooked from passing time, its little Brio trucks are off their tracks; the past and future mix to make their rhyme, with pieces placed at random in fresh stacks. Clear memories blend their present, future, past. The days stretch out, and yet the months fly by – you turn in circles, facing first, not last. As childhood deepens, old age pools go dry. Behind its smoke and mirrors, whores and pimps, its harshly lovely playful attitude, reality is thinning – you now glimpse an indescribable infinitude. The game is won – your enemies are no more, yet you don’t end it while you max your score.
In memory of Alexei Navalny, killed at the IK-3 penal colony, 16 February, 2024.
1. Rough and chivvying cold winds blow The helpless dead leaves to and fro. Leaves have no say in where they go But we’re alive so can say no – Let us praise those men who show Resistance to the easy flow.
2. Navalny, prisoner in the snow, In numbing twenty-eight below, Has paid the price for saying no; He’s gone the way we feared he’d go.
That’s Putin, making sure all know That retribution comes in tow For those who won’t go with the flow. ‘All dissidents will finish so,’ The message is: ‘Go with the flow, Or you too could end on Death Row.’
I imagine his warders: Did they know A twinge of guilt at this, or show Regret or shame? I doubt it. No – Why should men let a conscience grow When they can just go with the flow? When life is so much easier so, When every television show, The papers and the radio All radiate a conformist glow Incessantly, so all men know Life’s comfier with the status quo. It’s only awkward sods say no, Go their own way, not with the flow. Those have a dangerous row to hoe, And who can blame the average Joe For on the whole deciding: ‘No, That’s not for me. I’d rather toe The line, collect my wages, know I’m safe and needn’t undergo What brave men have to suffer. No, Go with the flow, go with the flow.’
3. In Moscow brave girls risk a blow By laying flowers in the snow To honour him for saying ‘No’. Brave girls. I admire them so.
*****
George Simmers writes: “This poem began because our local Arts Festival announced its theme as ‘Flow’. Which made me grumble a bit: was I supposed to write stuff about how nice it was that rivers flowed? Not my style. But then I thought about people who go against the flow by saying ‘No!’ and that suggested a subject and a rhyme scheme. It was only after I’d scribbled a few possible lines that I came across a photo of young women in Moscow placing flowers in the snow as tributes to the murdered Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny. In some towns, such protestors had been arrested or beaten up by the police.
“It’s thirty-odd years since I visited Russia. That was at the time of perestroika and hopefulness. We had a contact in Moscow who took us to see the sights, including the Arbat, a popular meeting- place. He said: ‘Can we stop and talk here for a few minutes? I ask because a few years ago If I had been seen here in conversation with a foreigner, I should have been arrested.’ Freedom was precious then, but repression returned.
“Navalny was a lawyer who campaigned against the corruption endemic in Russian political life. In 2020 he was poisoned with Novichok (probably by the Federal Security Service) ; after hospital treatment in Berlin that saved his life, he returned to Russia, even though he knew of the dangers. He was immediately arrested, and ended up in an Arctic Circle corrective colony. The exact circumstances of his death still remain unclear, but while in prison he had suffered from malnourishment and mistreatment.
“Writing this poem I remember Auden’s words: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Auden pointed out that political poems make the writer feel better, but have no positive effect in the real world. He was right, as usual, which is why I mostly avoid writing poems about politics. But I don’t really see this as a poem about Navalny. I could have chosen to write about Alan Bates and his twenty-five year battle for justice for postmasters, or about Kathleen Stock and others, who opposed the dangerous ideology of the Tavistock clinic. Going against the flow matters everywhere, not just Russia. The form is monorhyme, mostly because that’s how the poem started, and it wasn’t too difficult to keep going. Monorhyme is easier than it looks, so long as you choose the right rhyme word to start with. Don’t try it with ‘month’ or ‘silver’.
“Nalvalny’s death made a news splash in February, but since then more recent horrors have displaced it on the news pages. So maybe this poem will do a little good as a reminder of a brave man. Thank you for re-blogging it.”
The poem will be part of the film ‘Wordflow’ (a film by John Coombes with a soundtrack of stories and poems by Holmfirth Writers’ Group in a continuous showing from 10am-4pm), presented at the Holmfirth Arts Festival in Yorkshire on Sunday,June 16th, upstairs at the ‘Nowhere’ bistro, Norridge Bottom, Holmfirth, HD9 7BB.
George Simmers used to be a teacher; now he spends much of his time researching literature written during and after the First World War. He has edited Snakeskin since 1995. It is probably the oldest-established poetry zine on the Internet. His work appears in several Potcake Chapbooks, and his recent diverse collection is ‘Old and Bookish’.
It was the ravage of the scene that shocked: the concrete torn by trees and ragged grass, red guts of fuel pumps over splintered glass, the wreckage clawed by climbing vines and mocked by moth and rust. There in concentric rings obscene graffiti spelled out every sin. (The smell of something even worse within.) It’s like we saw into the death of things. But what about the ruins I can claim? What of the loves that I have let decay, the hand withheld, the times I didn’t say I’m sorry, didn’t pray for you by name? We leave shell stations, call them what you will. Neglect is the unkindest way to kill.
*****
Kelly Scott Franklin writes: “Originally sparked by an ekphrastic prompt over at Rattle Magazine(declined; first published in Ekstasis Magazine), this poem was ALSO inspired by a real abandoned gas station somewhere along the highway through the mountains on the way to Knoxville, TN. But I think it had been cooking in me for a while. I took a trip across the American heartland, from Southern Michigan to Central Kansas, and was absolutely depressed by the neglect and decrepitude. I stopped at a rest stop to use the restroom somewhere along the way. The restroom had a sign that said, “We take pride in the quality of our service. If anything in this restroom is not up to your satisfaction, please contact the management.” I looked around the restroom and there was garbage everywhere. Everywhere. It’s like people have stopped living the basic human things. The poem was also inspired by my troubled relationship with my late mother.”
Kelly Scott Franklin lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters. He teaches American Literature and the Great Books at Hillsdale College. His poems and translations have appeared in AbleMuse Review, Literary Matters, Driftwood Literary Magazine, Iowa City Poetry in Public, National Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews can be found in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Local Culture, and elsewhere. https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/kelly-scott-franklin/
Two hundred million sperm in one ejaculation; and we are standing firm and spouting with elation, though but a single germ survives to incarnation.
And much in nature throws vast clouds into the ocean, where myriad embryos become a magic potion consumed by all that goes with food its only notion;
yet one or two survive to adulthood and, later, will make the species thrive and serve up like a waiter new young crowds that arrive like cargo crammed on freighter.
This is how nature lives; we should not think it foolish eight billion of us gives but forty fierce and mulish posthuman narratives, godlike as much as ghoulish,
in retrospect appearing nature’s plan for how we cross to Nietzsche’s Superman.
*****
This poem was originally published in the Amsterdam Quarterly, although without the final couplet. I usually allow editors to make changes if they suggest them, and often the changes are an improvement that I retain. But in this case I’m afraid the science fiction speculation may be lost without those last lines: the idea that the present billions of us are on the point of being superseded by the first handful among us who achieve a godlike state of posthumanity… and that this ratio of 200,000,000 seeds being sacrificed to achieve one mature adult in the next generation is not unusual in nature.
Because it would have gone like this: Hello, hello, hello. (You never like me, did you? Where was this friendship 15 years ago?) You’re looking wonderful. I wouldn’t kid you about it – you look great. (You hefty cat.) And Jeffrey – are you married? Oh, you are! Three kids? However did you manage that? (For God’s sake, someone point me to the bar.) Me? I’ve just spent the summer in Tibet learning some basics from a Buddhist nun. It’s an experience I won’t forget. (As if you cared.) More crab dip, anyone? (And here’s the Great Class Bore. You’re still the same.) Forgive me. I can’t quite recall your name.
*****
Gail White writes: ” ‘Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion’ is humor based on truth. I’m now 78 and have never been to a class reunion. Nobody who likes me would be there. I didn’t make real friends until I went to college and started meeting people who read books.”
Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion’ was first published in Light Poetry Magazine and is collected in her chapbook, ‘Sonnets in a Hostile World‘, also available on Amazon.
When I was in the printing biz, in magazines (I worked at MS), under my office door was slipped a neatly-typed-out MS, its cover letter curt and snippy, return address in MS. And what a scoop! New drug (its doses prescribed for MS) a fraud! The source, in bold defiance, a chemist with a MS. I showed my boss. “Yeah, right!” she reckoned, and canned me in a MS.
*****
Daniel Galef provides this key to the various standard meanings of the abbreviation: “Ms. Magazine; manuscript; Mississippi; multiple sclerosis; Master of Science degree; millisecond.”
Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, was published last year. ‘Letters to an Editor’ was published as part of his being the Featured Poet in Light Poetry Magazine. He is currently working on a book of comic poetry and wordplay, as well as on a PhD from the University of Cincinnati.
The sun is always setting, always setting on your day; you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away. Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn? Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?
The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled; but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world: it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land, and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.
The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds; and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set, and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.
The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice; I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.
*****
Sometimes I’m told that my poetry is too bleak. But I think that’s only so if you want everything to stay as it is now. If, on the other hand, you expect change, and that change will ultimately provide more benefit than loss to the universe as a whole, then <shrug>… so it goes.
This poem has 14 lines but is hardly a sonnet. It was recently published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. Thanks, David Stephenson!
Cock a buggery doodle doo! I’m bending to lace up this buggery shoe! You’d be buggery bad-tempered too If the buggery cock Woke you buggery up At buggery, buggery five twenty two!
*****
Annie Fisher writes: “When our grandchildren were very small, we would sometimes visit to help with child care. The children would often burst into our bedroom early in the morning yelling ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ (Probably encouraged by their parents). On one occasion my husband was staying with them for a few days without me. On the second day he sent me a text at the crack of dawn. The text read ‘Cockabuggerydoodledoo!’ and so I understood that his day had already begun! I thought ‘cockabuggerydoodledoo’ (a case of ‘expletive infixation’, Google tells me) had irresistible rhythmic force. My poem is, of course, based on the traditional nursery rhyme: Cock a doodle doo! My dame has lost her shoe, My master’s lost his fiddling stick And knows not what to do.“
Annie Fisher’s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry (this one appeared in Snakeskin) for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: (2016) and (2020), and is due to have another pamphlet published in the next couple of months with Mariscat Press. It will be called ‘Missing the Man Next Door’. She is a member of Fire River Poets in Taunton, Somerset and a regular contributor to The Friday Poem https://thefridaypoem.com/annie-fisher/
How brashly brave, embroiled in this brief life, we chance our challenge to the unchanging gods! Strike poses, strut the strident stage of strife, take optimistic oaths against all odds.
Fearless of foes, false friends, futility, we wrack our reason to reach, undestroyed— though usually of no utility— a burst of brightness bettering the void.
*****
Although I prefer to maintain an unobtrusive persona myself, I subscribe to this philosophy of bravado existentialism. The florid alliteration suits the message.
This poem is published in the current issue of Light – thanks, Melissa Balmain and all.
I found myself in bed with an old man. His beard was silvery, his scrawny chest a rack of ribs, his loose-lipped mouth open and toothless as a baby. There he was, there in our bed, as if he owned the place. He snored and grunted like some ancient king asleep after a banquet. But what feast had led, dear heart, to this? What partying? He turned his head to me. I saw his face— a travesty. Some metamorphosis had happened in our sleep, my love replaced by a bag of windy bones. I need a piss, he muttered, and got up. O then I knew what age had done to us, and who was who.
*****
Helena Nelson writes: “Everyone experiences it eventually. You glance at your own reflection in the mirror and get a shock at how old you look. So that’s one of inspirations for this poem. The other spur to write this was a dream I had one night, though in the poem it’s intentionally unclear whether the experience is or isn’t real. I started with near rhymes in the octet and moved towards perfect rhyme at the end to convey the shock. I do hope the reader feels that shock at the end.”
Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems, one of which appears in the Potcake Chapbook, ‘Lost Love’. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.
Form in Formless Times 