Wednesday 21 May 2014

Contemplation

You confuse me,
weaving webs of the most intricate threads.
Magic lingers upon them
like dewdrops,
like teardrops that fall
like waterfalls,
unchecked and unguarded,
beating against your doors.
I beg you to let me in and 
show me the fire I saw burning faintly in your eyes. 
Or was I mistaken?
Was it not a secret shared with me 
but a mere chance encounter
of eyes you failed to disguise in time;
and the glimpse I stole
was not you baring your soul,
but instead, an accident you have since worked to rectify. 
In which case,
forgive me for having crossed the line you drew between us.
Let us return to distant gazes
and graze upon our fields of thought;
alone in our togetherness,
comfortable in the silence of never knowing, 
and never needing to know. 


Amina Bhatti, 
Nottingham, UK. 
(abhatti1994@yahoo.com ) 

Monday 5 May 2014

Age-Strife


“Disgracing the National stage,” is how 
the critics-cum-sages deemed the disas-
ter. Who reads the Business Post anyhow?
The morning after the death of pizzazz.
Irrational heartrace- an unwelcome
rerun- ti-titi-tum- fourteen hours straight, 
no sign of abate, owed to eleven
everlasting seconds of silence. Age-
ing in an instant my opening-night-
hopeful face, painful pinpricks of sweat, snot,
skinburst bubblewraps, belying freeze-dried 
tongue and Gobi desert gob. Which. Will. Not. 
Speak. 
Somewhere- a line striving for utterance,
dying to fulfill its function. Someplace-
smothered, submerged in subconscious quicksands,
absent, abstract, somehow lost in face-space. 
Is it something I can ever trace? I
remember thinking. A line crafted by 
most skillful hands, from where brains abound, and
are enwrapped in feels. Lost in Translations…
Meanwhile, unimpressed and restless, gawking hawkeyed, the overpaying theatre attendees. Vulturine in the stalls. Envulturing in the circle… 

Cue tumbleweeds through dust filled wind
Cue stage-manager half-truthfully excusing ‘technical malfunction’
Cue career-killing bad reviews
Queue never again the paying public to see me
Cue trapdoor opening, me swallowed whole, emblazing my soul in the gallows below
Cue… queue… ‘What’s my CUE!?’ 



In those eleven eternal seconds: a flashpause of serenity. 
A memory. An episodic apparition…

Summer. I’m a footy-mad kid, and truck-driving dad surprises us. A visit. 
Caterpillaring kerbside up the Cul de Sac- armed with spirited 
tales of slanted people with limpy accents- dad and his manly monster mobile.
I dive out in front, a new ref’-conning trick, a self-trip, but concealed.
Hoodwinking whistleblowers is the name of the game. But on that day,
seeing father’s face displaying the pain I feign, two insights I gained:
That he loved me at that age, and all’ the world’s a stage.

I should've been a truck-driver

Bar Reward
London, 
UK




Friday 2 May 2014

Eternal Memory


Eyes met 

tears wept

tasted lips

felt hips

golden ring

guilt brings

a memory 

for eternity.


Susan O'Reilly

Wed the White Ceiling


I often imagine the white ceiling swallows me.
I melt into its whiteness, pure immaculate surface,
melting inside it would also mean spreading my blood
and all my organs onto the snow-like painted area,
large square unstained above the bed, the sofa, the settee,
the floor boards on which I often lay, day-dreaming,
anticipating other nightmares to come, to form, to be grown,
more to escape from or jump over to feel within the norms.

I attend the absorption and all my body stretches until it blows out
and a blood red patch as large as I would end if I crashed from
the top floor of the world highest building ever formed
splatters, morphes, moves and moulders into an inconceivable
mirror reflecting the worst imaginable thoughts stacked from the beginning of my life.

Walter Ruhlmann,
France

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. His latest collections are Maore published by Lapwing Publications, UK, 2013, Carmine Carnival published by Lazarus Media, USA, 2013 and The Loss through Flutter Press, USA, 2014. Coming up in 2014, Crossing Puddles through Robocup Press, and Twelve Times Thirteen through Kind of a Hurricane Press.
His blog http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/