Category Archives: Uncategorized

Stephen Gold: Bored Room

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It ran up the flagpole
To not one salute.
No win-win was won,
We ate no low-hung fruit. 

The long view was taken,
We kicked every tyre.
No needles were moved 
As we sang to the choir.

There wasn’t the bandwidth
To see this one through.
Would the paradigm shift? 
We just hadn’t a clue. 

Our cutting-edge plan
To abolish cliché
From the meetings we’re forced
To endure every day

In the final analysis
Found no defender,
So we took a step back 
And right-sized the agenda. 

*****

Stephen Gold writes: “I didn’t have any deep philosophical reasons for writing it. It’s just a wry dig at corporate crapspeak and how often very bright people find it irresistible.”

Stephen Gold was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and practiced law there for almost forty years, robustly challenging the notion that practice makes perfect. He and his wife, Ruth, now live in London, close by their disbelieving children and grandchildren. His special loves (at least, the ones he’s prepared to reveal) are the limerick and the parody. He has over 700 limericks published in OEDILF.com, the project to define by limerick every word in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is a regular contributor to Light and Lighten Up Online (where this poem was first published).

“Buzzword Bingo” by Zach ‘Pie’ Inglis is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

J.D. Smith, ‘Monday in Las Vegas’

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The skirts are off the tables.
A bucket’s on the floor
Until the plumber shows up.
In comped rooms, whales still snore.

An escort takes the day off
For visitation rights.
McCarran’s slots are ringing
With scores of outbound flights.

Housekeeping finds stray bits of
What happens and stays here:
Pawn tickets and a red chip,
Three shoes and one brassiere.

Booms or busts in housing
Roll through the neighborhoods,
And long-haul trucks deliver
All necessary goods.

Lit hard against the evening,
Severe and even grand,
The Luxor’s daytime profile
Recedes into the sand.

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “What happens behind the scenes—backstage, in the restaurant kitchen, under the metaphorical hood, what have you—has long fascinated me. Most of the time we don’t get to see the mechanics, the furious underwater paddling of the duck.
“In my experience, nowhere is the gap between the making and the made more pronounced than in Las Vegas. In the previous century a town of about five thousand people has grown to a metropolitan area of a million or so and well beyond its ecological carrying capacity, now accommodating a major airport with slot machines at the gates. Entertainment of all kinds depends on relatively low-paid labor, and pawn shops can be found off the Strip but conveniently close to it.   
“The city’s artifice if not hubris arguably culminates in the Luxor Hotel, which my friend the writer and editor Henry Perez has called “the world’s largest piece of kitsch.” I would also call it an embodied non sequitur. A glass pyramid with a massive Sphinx, it imitates the most famous structures of a civilization based on floodplain agriculture, generally not a viable option in Nevada. The Luxor is part of a small break in the desert, and my money is on the latter.”

This poem was collected in The Killing Tree.

J.D. Smith’s seventh collection of poetry, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published in September by Broadstone Books. His first fiction collection, Transit, is available from Unsolicited Press. Further information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.

Photo: “Why I hate Las Vegas” by mayhem is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Iambic heptameter: Simon MacCulloch, ‘Jasmina’

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Jasmina is the doorway, Jasmina is the key;
Jasmina walks the path beside the pearl-infested sea.
The angels peer bewildered from the god-infested sky;
Jasmina is the only how that doesn’t need a why.

I see her in the morning in her robe of melting frost;
She visits me at noontime when the meaning has been lost.
At evening she invades the nooks the spiders thought their own
Till night demands a moon; she stoops, and hurls it like a stone.

I used to think her complicated, now I know she’s not
(A how that doesn’t need a why has little use for what).
I used to think she’d care for me, if only for a while;
I used to think a lot of things before I saw her smile.

I never hear her speaking though I think she has a song
Which many claim to know although they always get it wrong.
She feels like furry gossamer and tastes like perfumed smoke;
I often hear her laughter but I never learn the joke.

Jasmina is a destiny, Jasmina is a doom;
Jasmina is a woman but with stars within her womb.
The demons peer demented from their hope-infested hell
And beg her for a story, but she hasn’t one to tell.

*****

Simon MacCulloch writes: “Jasmina is a slightly offbeat take on the great western goddess motif (Aphrodite, the Virgin Mary etc). It is not based on anyone I know.”

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of print and online publications, including Reach Poetry, View from Atlantis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Spectral Realms, Black Petals and others. Jasmina was originally published in Blue Unicorn.

Photo: “mask” by new 1lluminati is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Blank verse: Gail White, ‘Eve Discusses Adam’s First Wife’

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You tell me Lilith has become a fiend,
a vampire, a screech-owl, one who preys
on children (I‘ve had three and she has none),
sentenced for disobedience to run wild,
hideous now, howling for all she lost.
You tell me I was taken from your side
that I might always find a refuge there,
a warm and nestling creature like the cat,
safe from the free but haunted world of dark.
And I’ve adjusted splendidly, I think.
My apple fritters are the best you’ll eat,
go where you will.  I keep domestic life
tidy and clean.  I never stir abroad
for fear of Lilith’s shriek and bat-like wings.
Yet when our first son killed our second son,
I – the good mother and obedient wife –
had one quick moment’s envy of her life.

*****

Gail White writes: “You won’t find the story of Lilith in Genesis, but in later Jewish commentary.  She was created simultaneously with Adam – God made them out of mud – and she used this joint creation to claim equality with him.  The world was not ready for Lilith as First Feminist.  She was banished, and Eve was created within Eden and presumed to be more docile.  I tried to give her a little flash of independent thought.”

First published in Blue Unicorn.  

Gail White lives in the Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats.  Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon, along with her books Asperity Street and Catechism.  She appears in a number of anthologies, including two Pocket Poetry chapbooks and Nasty Women Poets.  She enjoys being a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine.  Her dream is to live in Oxfordshire, but failing that, almost any place in Western Europe would do.

Photo: “Adam and Eve (and Lilith, the serpent) (Notre Dame, Paris, France)” by runintherain is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

A.E. Stallings, ‘Anosmia’

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Without it, what is lemon, what is mint? –
Coffee and chocolate, caffeinated brown.
Ghosted by a sense that takes no hint,
I feel let down.

It’s hardly tragedy that I can’t tell
The milk’s gone off, eggs rotten. It’s no joke
With other things though – no internal bell
That signals smoke

(The toast burned or the house on fire). Sweet
I have, and bitter, I have sour and salt,
But without smell, no flavour is complete.
There’s no … gestalt.

It’s something I’d predict of old, old age,
This weaning from the welter of the world
The better, perhaps, to leave it. I’m no sage,
I’d rather the impearled

Jasmine flowers – fragrance of the stars –
Light up the brain’s grey matter, and the hurt
Of memory, the human musk of ours
In an unwashed shirt.

‘To have a nose for’– isn’t it a skill,
A wry intelligence, a kind of knack?
What thought trails do I lose, untraceable,
What wisdom lack?

I miss the laundry scent they call ‘unscented’.
Like a depression, it makes it hard to write.
What is is less, less there, half uninvented,
And I, not quite.

But there are days I almost have a whiff:
I slice a lemon open for the crisp
Sun-saturated redolence, and sniff
And stand in the eclipse.

*****

A.E. Stallings writes: “My sense of smell is coming back gradually, but it was completely wiped out for about six months! Unnerving.”

‘Anosmia’ was first published in the London Review of Books.

A.E. Stallings is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry. This Afterlife: Selected Poems was published in 2022. Her forthcoming book is Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon

“Smell” by Dennis Wong is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Ruth S. Baker, ‘Moneykind’

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That kind of money is swishy and flashy.
That kind of money’s a bore, I find;
That kind of money is fishy and splashy.
That kind of money is not my kind.

My kind of money is somewhat quieter.
My kind of money won’t hog the stage.
My kind of money’s a long-term dieter:
My kind of money is slim for its age.

That kind of money is horribly tethering.
That kind of money one’s better without.
My kind of money’s enough for anything.
(Anything more I’ve forgotten about.)  

*****

‘Moneykind’ was originally published in The Asses of Parnassus. Ruth S. Baker writes: “It was triggered really just by catching myself out trying to feel superior to people with that kind of money!  As for bio, I’ve published in a few journals on line, mostly on animals and visual art.”

Photo: “Cooperate game companies have too much money and control of the market” by The People Speak is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Tom Vaughan: ‘Is This It?’

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Well if it is, and this is it
then what will be will be
and time will toil and time will tell
if there’s a guarantee

that at the least and at the last
the daily here and now
which now and here are thick as thieves
will be transformed, somehow

and either way, here’s my advice –
lie back and think of all
the ups which came between the downs
before your curtain call.

*****

Tom Vaughan writes: “There was no particular trigger for this poem, apart from my fitful attempts to be Stoical about the state – and weirdness – of the world. But just at the moment the anger occasioned by the former keeps breaking through.”

‘Is This It?’ was published in the current Lighten Up Online.

Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and three poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance; and Just a Minute, 2024, from Cyberwit). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines, including several of the Potcake Chapbooks and frequently in Snakeskin and Lighten Up Online. He currently lives in Brittany.
https://tomvaughan.website

Photo: “man-relaxing-in-the-grass_8954-480×359” by Public Domain Photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Oliver Butterfield, ‘Self-reflection’

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Y’know — it ain’t a lot of fun
negotiating one-on-one
with the person in the mirror who
is staring blankly back at you
with hollow, soporific eyes —
but you penetrate his deep disguise,
and then it is you realize
that you’re in for loads of gloom and doom
cooped up within this little room
all by your empty, woeful self,
all, all alone, with no one else —
and the guileful guy you’re talking to
isn’t talking back at you —
’cause he knows there’s nothing left to say.
But the sonvabitch won’t go away.

*****

This poem was originally published in Better Than Starbucks. I have been unable to find Oliver Butterfield, I only know he retired and closed his law practice in Kelowna, British Columbia. I’d be interested in seeing more of his poetry.

Photo: “Man in the Mirror” by airguy1988 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Bruce McGuffin, ‘Tunnels’

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A snowy field — sun sparkles on the ice —
Devoid of life to those who do not know
That underneath a furtive swarm of mice
Live out their lives in tunnels through the snow.
My dog, who finds them out by smell or sound,
Runs snorting through the snow in wriggling glee.
Then back and forth ecstatically he’ll bound
Until some mouse has nowhere left to flee.
For so it goes with mice as well as men,
Those tunnels where we run turn into traps
When forces that are far beyond our ken
Play out their game until our ways collapse.
Do waiting mice envision what impends?
That somewhere up above a canine snout —
Deus ex machina to mice — descends
To pierce the snow and pull those trapped mice out?
Few things in life will make that dog as glad.
The mouse may not rejoice — its life is through.
But whether killing mice is good or bad
Depends completely on your point of view.

*****

Bruce McGuffin writes: “When I was a boy winters were longer, colder, and snowier than they are today, and I had a suitably adapted dog: An 80 pound husky of indeterminate parentage. By which I mean a local ski instructor took his Siberian husky to Alaska one winter and she came home pregnant. We named him Frosty. In my defense I was 7 years old. His favorite pastimes were eating, sleeping outdoors in the snow, and hunting. Dogs roamed free in those days, and he brought home squirrels, mice, and more than one skunk. Frosty also bit the older boy next door after he punched me, which made Frosty The Best Dog Ever.
This poem started out as a paean to The Best Dog Ever, but slipped the leash and went off in a different direction, as poems sometimes do. It turns out that some of my favorite poems are the ones that get away.”

‘Tunnels’ was first published in Better Than Starbucks.

Bruce McGuffin grew up in rural Central NY, where children and dogs ran free through the frozen woodlands in winter, and waded in the creek all summer. It was ok if you like that sort of thing. His graduating class voted him Class Intellect, which was not exactly a compliment. Spurred on by lack of economic opportunity in that region, and the desire to know more people who didn’t think reading books was “weird”, he spent too many years in college then moved to the Boston area and worked for 37 years as an engineer in the field of radio communications. It was fun. Now semi-retired, he lives in Antrim NH with his wife Ann and occasional visits from two children who come for the skiing if not the company. His poetry has appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, The Asses of Parnassus, Better Than Starbucks, and other journals.

Photo: “Sniffing the Prey” by Emyan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Richard Fleming, ‘In Grace’

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The present is arcane and strange
and any recollection left
of what has happened in the past
is vague and liable to change.
Of future plans, he is bereft,
for nothing now is hard and fast.

They give him multicoloured pens
and paper, as one might a child.
Familiar voices interweave.
He sees, through a distorting lens,
people who wept, people who smiled,
that, one by one, stood up to leave.

He is content. He lives in grace.
What matter if the moments blur,
if his nocturnal thoughts are grim?
He has escaped himself: his face,
a kind of absence in the mirror,
comforts and somehow pleases him.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “Getting old is like exploring new territory without a map: nothing prepares you for the subtle changes in body and mind. Is a moment of forgetfulness just that, or an early indication of approching dementia? We cannot know what strange highways a decaying brain takes us down but I like to think that they might lead to a place of contentment, where the burdens of age are laid down and replaced by some measure of contentment. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in this poem.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: Richard Fleming post