Tag: Poetry

Cartoon Suicides by Aqeel Parvez

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Cartoon Suicides Pt. 1
you can kill yourself while dreaming. i mean it’s socially acceptable and you can do it in a much more entertaining and lighter way than out here. you could clone yourself no problem, into a samurai. you’re kneeling say. the other you is on some yojimbo shit and flies through the air, slicing your head clean off. samurai champloo style, no cap. headless corpse now. your noggin rolls around in the warm grass. the sun god opens a fat mouth and swallows the strange warmth of dreamlike delusion. all I mean to say is that when your therapist gives you some ‘tools’ they won’t mention this neat little trick.

Cartoon Suicides Pt. 2
monday, regent street, 5.36pm. a lorry is speeding towards me. i cross the road anyway. halfway or so, i trust my timing and close my eyes. my legs still moving. i imagine perishing. seconds later i open my eyes; i am still here. does this mean something, must it mean something. i’ve had a right week and toying with death takes the weight off. there are moments when i wish i could overcome my instinct for survival. those times we’d rather be dead than stuck. i close my eyes and I’m chainsawed to death by a masked man. the only bad dream is waking up. the only threat is monday morning.

Cartoon Suicides Pt. 16
later, I’ll stand by the disaster sign. melt tabloid filth. succumb to a glorious chartreuse. pills for the delicate. this fuck-me reality. wake to muck. dream in Gatsby and wake to bedlam and pathetic coffee and pathetic living. notice how if you write it the French way, pathétique, self-pity is suddenly an art form.

Aqeel Parvez runs a podcast / press / events called MALNOURISHED INTELLECT & Poets Talking Bollocks. Check his IG: @ap.writer

Humanmade by John Biron

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The secondhand smoke is relaxing
I’m up to my ears in Sunlight
More smoke, more something like breathing in
More, all there is and in an endless sprawl the shaggy carpet stained with fluids,
some human some human-made,
I can feel at peace like a rope of cum shot onto the sidewalk.
The comfort of erasure,
without ever knowing what they had just narrowly escaped.
And some people laugh at immature things well into their maturity
I don’t wanna be the villain, ma, really
I know you aint raised me to be
So set me right again
I listen to my boss tell a story about how big his cat’s morning shit was
How it was discolored
How it puzzled him incessantly
I try to hold the silence of the Sun
Squeezing, ending up with blood under my nails

An aw shucks kinda humble guy who hopes to inspire the nation ❤ @JohnBiron90196 on twitter

3 poems by Louis Packard

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hypebeast hunter x hunter

sold a half to
a good friend
for the low
emo tunes thu the
headphones over hoodie
gonna fight jim morrison in hell
motherfucker never shot a gun
feeling like my home country
constantly at war with
mad as hell
my enemies 
still deserve the best
another call ignored
life without purpose
fine dining at home
making the peppers hotter
making the planet hotter
i’m already hot enough
but i appreciate the consideration
considering getting 
inspired by
the beauty surrounding me
every dam day

caffeine headache at the buffalo wild wings

blow’d out bong water 
onto my bed

the same song 
the hundred’th time

dehydrated on purpose
for no reason 
on a fast bike
for the long nite

double dog doing the dishes

screamo rocks
neil young rocks
soundtrack sucks 
on the tony hawk pro skater remake

i love to fav ur little tweets
lying next to each other
on my bed
two cute squirrels in the tall grass

louis packard lives in chicago, his wife is sleeping on him and their cat is sleeping on her, his new twitter is @ermgrrrrr, his chapbook “rootbeer renaissance” is coming out from wonder press in the summer and he is currently working on a full length of poems/short stories, please buy the chapbook and reach out to publish the full length or he might grab the third rail at work o_0

3 Poems by Grozny

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Floridian Ennui #1

Sunburned at the Waffle House
Plastic Pistols
Should have bitterants on their slides
So that when you put a Glock in your mouth
Whether vertically, so the shell hits a ceiling
Or horizontally, so it hits a wall
You have to be certain of what you are doing

Lament for the weird guy at the circle K in Floridian No-Mans Land

Werewolf car novels you’re writing
and a cosmopolitan accent
calling some dip-fiend camo wearing gray-haired bugger a chocolate addict
and askin me strange questions
shift in the dead of night
checkin out my arnold palmer
the first 13 miles of a long stretch, homeward bound.
hope you can get out of this mess 

2019 Game store poem

in 2019 I watched a girl with blue hair in her late twenties turn in a short XBOX 360 to a local game store
the store doesn’t exist anymore
but then they had posters so exposed to the sun they had turned blue
master chief parti-colored aquamarine post 9/11 dreams
She talked with the counter guy about old Left 4 Dead war stories
kevin ruined her run with molotov, hitting the witch.
She forgot to sign out that day and I saw the name
some mall emo shit with an X-X and an emoticon and i knew then
she was the last of some strange beast
she was the last of a dying breed
too rare to live, fuckin whatever
she was the sort of person guys in 2000s with a modicum of art talent made comics about
gamer girls or some bullshit like that
and i knew she had pierce the veil in her playlist that would play ad infinitum in her shit-out car
and while the engine vibrated the entire damn rig she’d reminisce 
she probably was better than her buds
but never good enough for pro
and got a job in IT
and she’ll die in her early forties from a tragic preventable accident
and in those brief flashes of life
she’ll see kevin fucking up her molotov run

GROZNY is a surrealist writer hailing from the wastelands of Florida. He uploads poetry and short stories on https://grozny1992.itch.io and music at https://grozny1992.bandcamp.com . His Apocalyptic Internal-Collapse novel, Longtime Sunshine is in progress, and a release date is soon to be announced. A poetry compilation will with luck follow afterwards

Maze by Josh Calvano

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I was downtown the other day for a short bit
It’s been a while
First there was a police car with sirens, then fire trucks, then I watched someone shooting up on the
sidewalk in the sunshine
“I used to be a professional thief”
He says swaying on the spot with one eye shut
“I would never steal from here though; it would be like trying to escape a maze”
I give him a good ol retail
“Yeah, haha crazy”
but secretly i understood what he meant
every day I wander only the safest corridors
free will has evaporated from me
NPC pathing
Through this maze
I’m just trying not to get lost

Jay Calvano works as a supervisor at LEGO in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, When he is not doing that he enjoys long walks into the void and browsing the internet he can be found online on Twitter and Instagram under the handle wutadisaster.

3 Poems from Phallic Symbols by Cletus Crow

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Literary Dystopian Society 

There are too many words I don’t know. 
The poets are coming to kill me. 

The Masochistic Slug

If you need a shoulder to cry on. Oh baby. Yes. Just like that. It burns. 

My Religious Beliefs

A ghost without a sheet is the breeze. Strong winds are a bunch of naked ghosts running a race. A tornado is when they get lost. Their tears are the rain, obviously. The sun is a big ghost on fire. The sky is the biggest ghost. His nail clippings are the moon most nights. The clouds are dandruff or cum. 

Cletus Crow is a writer. He is a weirdo. Phallic Symbols is forthcoming from Pig Roast Publishing. 

OSTKREUZ by Thomas Huntington

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the shape was a lower case ‘l’

or maybe a tick

a bit of lettuce

made of plastic

:in a pile of my spit on the wall at OSTKREUZ

think thin plastic

like you could stretch it around but

it would retain its shape unless

you stretched it too much

I was wearing a HD camera 

strapped to my head and 

looking through the viewfinder

I had made a very good/not very good

attempt at fitting in

I touched it to make sure

very gently so it 

wouldn’t freak everyone out

but everyone was 

already pretty freaked out

Thomas Huntington is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. He has written for Grattan Street Press, Apocalypse Confidential, Post-Human Magazine as well as a column for Bruiser Magazine. He is the founder and indentured servant of Soyos Books.

12 Poems by md wheatley

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Closing your eyes
Doesn’t mean
Life doesn’t happen

*

I can see
Thru the window
The world in bloom

*

Theo said,
Don’t worry. Don’t stew.
You’ll start happening too.

*

God said,
Watch me light this shit on fire
(Talking about the sky)

*

What if
I cut off my ear
Like Vincent?

*

What if
We kissed
In front of Mona Lisa?

*

What if
Words that meant a lot
Still mean a lot?

*

What if
The stratus blanket
Fell and smothered us?

*

Dog spelled backwards
Is God
But you knew that

*

Enuf spelled backwards
Is fune
Which isn’t a word

*

Thinking about
That Cummings line of poetry
Tattooed on Tiny’s arm

*

Thinking about deth
Because how do you
Not

md’s a husband, father, and writer living in charleston, sc. he wrote a book called what a heaven could feel like. he’s currently working on 2 more books. visit his website at mdwheatley.us.

Art credit: Mike Andrelczyk

2 Poems by Francesca Leader

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When We Meet Again


It will
Be
An earthquake—
The kind
Where
One plate
Overrides
The
Other—
Subduction,
I think
It’s called,
Which
Sounds
Like
Something
You’d
Do to me,
If I let
You.
And I will—
I know
How
Much you
Love
To be
On top.


You Won’t Find Things as You Left Them

Go ahead—go back to that café.
the cake will NOT be amazing.
you’ll leave muttering that they must’ve changed pastry chefs,
or swapped the real stuff out for Butterkreem. ®
rewatch that movie you obsessed over in your teens;
meet the first man you slept with for lunch;
spend the weekend in the last place you remember being happy.
it won’t do shit for you,
I promise,
because
it’s the tongue—
more than the taste of things—
that changes.

Francesca Leader is a Montana expat and self-taught writer. The Chicago Review of Books recently quoted one of her viral “rejection letter erasure poems” from social media in an article about important, established poets. It kind of made her day. Connect with Francesca on Twitter at @mooninabucket, or on IG at @moon.in.a.bucket.

Two Poems by Adam Paxton

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Bang Home The Trifecta!

Watching basketball late at night.
McCollum Bangs home the Trifecta!
A 63 year old man said that.
Colour commentator.
Bangs home the Trifecta!
What a ridiculous thing
For a grown man to say.
I say it’s late at night,
It’s three in the morning,
If we’re being specific.
Slashing, sideways rain
Is whispering to my window
The candles do that dance
They do. Cinnamon incense
Strokes my central nervous
System. Sending smoke rings
Of such size, If I had a basketball
Baby you bet your sweet bippy
I’d Bang home the Trifecta!
I’m high on light-to-medium
Strength semi-synthetic opioids.
I took three of ‘em
And washed it down
With a chamomile tea.

I Banged home the Trifecta!
Is this a ridiculous thing 
For a grown man to do?

Did I Get You?

I keep having these dreams where a giant snake
Bursts out of my best friends arse while he’s shitting
And he shouts for help, so I run to find him there
On the bowl
Legs akimbo, this snake is the girth of, like, 
Brock Lesnar’s fucking neck,
And it unhinges its jaw and out of it
Emerges its true face instead of a tongue.
It’s the face of Draco Malfoy,
From the early films, say, the second one.
Chamber of Secrets. Yeah, with the big snake.
Basilisk. Cool word. Anyway, this thing,
This Draco Malfoy-face, extended like,
What, five feet? Out of my best friends arsehole
I can’t break eye contact with it.
And it just says ‘Scared, Potter?’
Then pauses for a second to sneer at me,
Then suddenly kinda zips back inside my friends arse
Like a deflating balloon or some shit, just
Sucking back up in there with a whistle,
That sounds like ‘hwoot’.
And my friends arse,
It isn’t even prolapsed all to fuck or anything,
My guy must have a really good sphincter.
And he just looks at me and he says
‘Did I get you?’ and raises his eyebrows.
And then the dream ends.
Jung could probably tell me what it all means,
But honestly I just think it’s something 
My best friend would probably do
If he could. If he could source the snake, (tall order)
And Draco Malfoy circa 2002. (fat chance)
Or if he had the flexibility (hasn’t got it in him)
I think he’s got the sphincter for it though.
‘Did I get you?’ Shit yeah dude.
Shit yeah you got me.

Adam Paxton, 28, is from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in England. He is an English & History Undergrad and Creative Writing MA at Newcastle University. He’s unemployed as fuck. He’s writing an autofiction novel provisionally called You Could Be More (but it probably won’t end up called that cause it sounds like a self-help book). He tweetos at @TheSuicideJones.