WINE INTO WATER
this morning
as I walked past
the Methodist church
whose notice board
is always telling us
such things as
"Christ is everywhere"
I saw
two scruffily dressed
old men with beards
seated on the steps
outside
sharing a bottle
of cider
I could only assume
that it was Jesus
and one of his
disciples
and that
having been locked
out of the church
Jesus had seen fit
to perform a variation
of his water into wine
miracle
yet my instincts
told me otherwise
TWINS
I once worked with
a girl called Susan
who had an
identical twin sister
called Jane
except
she was a liar
and the twins
were so alike
that they were
in fact
one and the same
person
I went out
with both of them
• Colin Cross lives in Norwich (England) and has numerous poems published in small press zines throughout the UK, Europe and USA. He is a regular contributor to IS&T.
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Friday, February 29
Two poems by Colin Cross
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 29 Feb 2008 02:15 PM GMT
Thursday, February 28
Congratulations to Alexis Rotella
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 28 Feb 2008 11:31 PM GMT
Congratulations to American poet (and IS&T haiga contributor) Alexis Rotella who has just won the Japanese 12th annual International Kusamakura prize for a haiku she actually penned 30 years ago in Italy. Judges chose Rotella’s haiku about a fishing boat arriving safely back to shore over some 700 other entries — from poets in Argentina to Serbia to New Zealand and beyond. The haiku reads...near dusk – sound of the last fishing boat Those eight simple words won Rotella some US$550 and a trip to Kumamoto City, Japan.
New work by Samantha Desmond
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 28 Feb 2008 09:16 AM GMT
Fucking at work
Lust can happen in a second or a year But let me tell you it always dies. It can produce the sublime Butterflies being released en masse On your wedding day But remember lover, its also the shiny apple Each bite will bring us closer to divorce. Swimming in Sugar The pubic hair sticks together closing me off from any release. Only Semen could dilute The stickiness that’s sogging the brain, pushing me back into the sheets. It fuses my fingers together So I have claws instead of fists. I’m left defenceless To let the syrup drown me But for everyone else to say How sweet I’ve become You attract more with honey then you do with my brand of acid vinegar, Or so my mother taught me. She likes to make my father sticky toffee pudding- That’s why they’ve been married for more then twenty five years. 21st Century Helen Against the bricks of a garden wall, a rubbish bin for support. I had prophesised my own baptism for years – a dirty Cassandra soiling clothes. Now, mud was streaking up my thighs. Neighbours twitching curtains as I pulled back my legs. This is how I became nothing more than a fast fuck on a front lawn. • Samantha Desmond is taking an MA in Creative & Critical Poetry at Winchester. Tuesday, February 26
I was somewhere else - by Simon Abbott
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 26 Feb 2008 02:20 PM GMT
I was somewhere else
I was somewhere else when she said life is fine. Awoken to myself by the fire and the wine. Her words startled me but they do everytime She has a revelation of this kind. How long will this last? She said she thinks its for good. Strong with my grasp I said you’re misunderstood. This is the second today and I’m bored of you more. Can’t you just say that life is a bore. She stood above me, sand fell from her skirt. She told me she loved me, clasped my hand till it hurt. And again she ran, far out of sight. Reciting her plan as she does every night. College she shouted I’ll finish my degree And become an accountant, with authority. But I knew she’d return disappointed tomorrow. Awake all the night sulking shores of sorrow. Eventual fire to embers, the wine tipped to sand. In my dreams I remember the tight grip of her hand. Together we’ve been since our childhood pact. Now my only purpose might never come back. My eyes awake first, unaware I exist They appreciate the colours that the majority miss. Another line on my tally tells me its almost three weeks. I’ve been lying every alley and walked all the streets. Still I haven’t seen her. She must have left town. The unjust arena doesn’t want me around. The life I oppose for her I somewhat approve And when the tides at my toes I won’t bother to move. • Simon Abbott is a student at the Norwich School of Art & Design, where he says he is currently studying the art of mind manipulation. Monday, February 25
Two new concrete poems by Christopher Major
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 25 Feb 2008 02:26 PM GMT
Regular IS&T contributor Chris Major starts off the week with two highly topical concrete poems...
  Sunday, February 24
P.A. Levy reads a Victorian novel
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 24 Feb 2008 12:30 PM GMT
Victorian Novel
I first saw you half way down page four surrounded in a paragraph I knew it then that you and I would be more than just background characters but we would have to wait until the bottom of page seventy eight before we would eventually meet and then wait yet again until the bottom of page three hundred and sixty seven before we kissed if only this wasn’t a Victorian novel we could have fucked at the start of page six • P.A. Levy says... "I'm a Cockney sparrow now living in exile in the beautiful Suffolk countryside."
More postings to the webzine
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 24 Feb 2008 12:14 PM GMT
Starting this week we are increasing the postings to the Ink Sweat & Tears webzine from every other day to pretty much every day. We are doing this to help catch up on the huge number of submissions we are now receiving to ensure contributors do not have to wait so long to see their work published.
Friday, February 22
Two works by Peter Wilkin
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 22 Feb 2008 10:36 AM GMT
The Soul's Code
"In the acorn lies not only the completion of life before it is lived but the dissatisfied frustration of unlived life" ...James Hillman My soul is a well deeper than the depth of me all my ago's oozy with echoes a sinus of imagoes and long shadows cast by dragon's breath I am who I was dredges of star spills rusted creaks of space drips of iron-drops filmy trickles, orange pools of rusting pearls My birth was a cry seeded in Eden guided by mavericks and peculiar ladies blessed by the dawdling shepherds of arcadia, high-jacked through drooly lure of central revenue I don't though I must and what fury I feel coming late to the tree and finding only empty cupules – oh when will I learn to seek not the place but to follow the itch? The mental doctor The mental doctor keeps his madness hidden in a weather-house. It is separate from him: wrapped in the sodden folds of the rainlady's skirts. He is a fine-weather medic unsplashed by delusions and grey mizzles of gloom. Sheltered by sanitary sunlight, he apricates vainly in the swell of a saneday. Should brainstorms crackle angrily and minds begin to roar, he is never under the weather. He simply smiles wrongly in a restless shift of kindness and, as the very first droplet of lunacy stains the paving, beats a hasty retreat into his cloister – always slightly too quickly to witness the pallid figure of a woman emerging from the neighbouring box. Star-still and shrinking with shame, her sallow face is whelmed with uncried tearstains and glistens of rain. Drenched in crazy showers she is ever the other: caught in a deluge of projections. Bruised blue by a physic flung with such force, she is paraded naked under the watchman's gaze. Roosting in shadows, the doctor is bone dry, safe from the howling squalls that needlesting the cheeks of the rainlady. She stands and shivers, perished with humiliation. He is weatherproof and watertight; western and white (on the inside); his asylum is a suntrap where the beauty of the rain never dawns. One bright moonrise the heavens break down and empty a torrent of water onto the weather-house. The iron gears scrape and the slippery oil-shined wheel creaks to a judder as the mechanism sticks fast. Saturated and ratdrowned, clothes clinging cold, the mental doctor stiffens like a corpse, frozen in the gaze of the rainlady. Homeless and exposed, he feels the angst driving like nails through his veins. His knees collapse under the heft of his rood as, clammy and heart-hammered, he staggers to the edge of his existence. Suddenly, his breaking eyes fix on a figure. In the soft mud under the loom of a thousand crosses, the rainlady kneels weeping. Her arms stretch out towards him and, dumb with trust, he takes from her a cup and raises it to his mouth. At once, her maudlin ceases and the doctor, humbled with passion, stumbles under her devotion. She has given him the starlight from her soul ... the very all of her ... yet expects nothing in return. The skies clear ... and a violet tingling of wisdom begins to surge through the doctor's body. He has discovered the rainlady's being. In a flickering of death he has reached out and touched her for the first time ... and she has released him from the bedlam of his sanity. As indigo shades of nightfall gather, he lies down in weariness. Though the rainlady is no longer with him, he feels the heat of her breath as he drifts in reverie between yawling trees and Galilean moons. Her shackles of difference have been snapped and her spirit rises softly, now, in his paradox of faith. Morning becomes ... ushered in by a solitary birdsong; a hallelujah feathered with grace. A dewy film has settled upon the doctor's body and the first splashes of sunrise begin to bleed over the horizon. As he wakens he feels a true sense of purpose welling within him. He is filled with otherness. He sees no single part of the breaking day but is consumed by the whole colour of it. Bathed in salvation, he whispers a stream of blessings to the rainlady (who is not there but will always be a part of him), yet he feels no reason to offer her any more than his heart-flung words. Lit by amber shimmerings of ashes, he walks the short journey downhill to the scene of all his denials ... and the weather house has tumbled down. When the rain comes again, the doctor stands among the rubble of his crumbled hideaway. He removes his shoes and walks on the wetlands, feet stained green, shrammed with the pelt and the glory ... and all around him, as far as the brain can smell, the warm floods of summer swallow his soul safely. • Peter Wilkin says "I recently retired as a nurse psychotherapist, which has given me space to reflect and capture pieces of living in clusters of words." Wednesday, February 20
Three poems by Geoff Stevens
by
Charles Christian
on Wed 20 Feb 2008 01:08 PM GMT
BEHAVIOUR PATTERNS OBTAINED FROM PRINTED CIRCUITS
Made up with Rimmel but the wires still show your skin transparent the flesh like Pears Soap you are a robot of the age fed by impulses from the media and radio waves from an environment installed and maintained by The State. CCTV spies on you watches your every mood and move its unseen operators pushing the buttons and moving the levers correcting any deviation from the prescribed. You think that you are your own person but you are not a person at all but a toy being played with by the spoilt brats of governance. SEAFRONT BRIGHTON You have no reservations the signs in your eyes say Bed & Breakfast STONY PLACE (The Burren) Grey mud over which someone has ridden a heavy bicycle mud frozen into lava a huge rotting hippo or rhinocorus of a place the ribs showing through the carcass flowers from the Artic and from the Mediterranean like honey in the lion's entrails on the Golden Syrup tin both being visited by bees It is a graveyard of history with floweres ancient bodies buried here tombs of stone celtic crosses nearby inscribed by gaelic lorraine daytime and the place may be lit by weak sunshine and camera flash dusk and the sun dies with its blood light soaking into the limestone • Geoff Stevens is a regular contributor to IS&T - and also check out his pictures in the right-hand column. Monday, February 18
Mark Leech sees William Blake
by
Charles Christian
on Mon 18 Feb 2008 07:48 AM GMT
Burning in the Fires of Orc
William Blake is stalking me. I wish it was John Clare, but the city works in wheels and puts me down in the prophet’s shadow and night descends in flaming lampshot dark. I find myself at his door, see him sketching Satan, and I’m keen for bed but there’s so much London and Blake turns it turns it his eyes staring out Poland Street Fountains Court Leicester Fields Peckham Rye South Molton Street For the angels in the tree for God in Broad Street, I – but this is his illuminated stretch after me, me escaping what gave him strength, hurrying for the bus. Blake forgive me the spirits are still, I wheel no further than knowing the stops, a pattern for the great peace of transport. Take me from Albion’s complaint: I’m stepping out for light regions, Beulah. Kiss me Will, release me. Here I’m not whole. Let me sleep. South Molton Street Lips with his name. He holds a match to the window. Beautiful lips. He draws a line for them to cross. He draws steadily. At street level, someone gains access scatters coins brings in photocopiers. He draws himself crawling from the river. Lips in the sand. He has drawn the roads built since he was born. Lips at the window beautiful. There are people in the lamps below passing kisses coffee breath. He holds a match to the window. Lips with his name. • Mark Leech has two chapbooks out, London Water from Flarestack Publishing and Saint and City from Erbacce Press. "London Water is the result of double journeys – on foot and psychological – along five of the city's lost rivers, near whose course I lived during various emotional phases of my life in London. All the rivers were at least pastly piped underground and built over during the 19th century. Saint and City groups together two sequences and related poems: St Frideswide and the men she blinded walk the roads of modern Oxford; the narrators of ancient Saxon poems speak from city underworlds; legends come true on street corners. Everyday experience meets the unexpected, and their contact provokes passions and apparitions, and intense, adventurous poetry. Both are available by contacting me at www.markleechpoetry.com " Saturday, February 16
New podcast by Dean Parkin
by
Charles Christian
on Sat 16 Feb 2008 01:26 PM GMT
• Dean Parkin is an East Anglia-based poet and this is one of his latest 'sonic tinkerings'. Dean's second pamphlet will be published in March 2008. For similar words and noises visit www.deanparkin.co.uk Thursday, February 14
Two poems by Ritwik Deo
by
Charles Christian
on Thu 14 Feb 2008 09:04 AM GMT
Daisies on his pink shirt
Daisies on his pink shirt The stone crusher, buttoned up for BBC Hammers rocks into stones and stones to chips Shards fly Anger and spite from the stones losing matter and mass Blisters line the Nubian’s palm One leaches pus The other is a starfish in the white sweaty palm Cheeks pock marked shimmer in the sun Rouged For BBC. Ponderers will ponder Instead of playing That full moon We sang To the broken harp We sang Of broken men and sorrow of the lake lost Of frost framed willows Of moonlit stream Instead of breathing Frigid air We danced In swirling Incense of full bodied hair We danced To the joy of broken men on haunches Bleary eyes and closed palms To the smiles of the destitute Instead of whispering In each others ears We whispered To leaves We whispered To rotting logs Clad in bright moss And viper holes Instead of crying In tears on the crackling fire Bursting with angst The tree with his story untold We cried Of Ophelia And her muddy death Of love lost in strange places Justice comes in coal sacks said the tiny elf. Let me show yours, the elf said. And reached out inside the coal sack and brought forth a chip no bigger than his fingernail. “That Is what you shall have For coal is scarce And your role in this world menial” “Justice is for men of honour Not men of my extraction We study life Men of honour practice life” And thus I spoke to myself. Words came in whispers softer than the Scottish stars. What, but a clump of manufactured pain. Till it demanded, teasing out…strand by strand. Nothing remains but a shining bland plate. “Aye” Said the funny little elf “shed for salvation And you will do fine” Putting the chip of coal in my pocket, I strode forth. For a grand day that awaits. • Ritwik Deo says "I am a post grad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Most of my writing is dull and uninspiring; meant for the industrial wastescape. But then, every now and then I jot down the insufferables." Tuesday, February 12
Three poems by Bernard Gieske
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 12 Feb 2008 07:50 AM GMT
THE SUN’S STILL THERE
There’s the sun always the sun during the day rain or shine sometimes it thunders and sometimes it lightnings and clouds breaking op- en bursting white blizzards tornadoes hurricanes tsunamis on all the just and unjust and the sun’s still there not caring not caring at all. Some say it’s all God’s will. A BEGINNING white canvas all bleached what first a broad wash across the horizontal hesitation this is not art so much waiting for the details what will blend what will bleed so much there before we started looking now the changes the seasons the reasons WE CANNOT dam the emotions that plunge from our hearts. We can only channel them into foreign parts. • Bernard Gieske lives in Kentucky and says... "Poetry for me is a challenge. I enjoy reading it and hope to make my contribution." Sunday, February 10
Two haibun by John Irvine
by
Charles Christian
on Sun 10 Feb 2008 11:41 AM GMT
Sheep or donkey?
Sitting here at my PC at 5:48am, the sun yet to roll over the eastern hills, composing an obsequious email to the editor of some obscure online poetry magazine. Editors can be pernickety buggers given to flamboyant rejections, so pandering to their egos is essential. Well, if you want to be published in their crummy magazines it is. Few offer payment, assuming that the privilege of appearing on their hallowed web page for a month is sufficient recompense for any poet. The rhetoric congeals in my mind’s throat so I pause, gazing out my second story window across dawn-lit paddocks. I reconsider my submission, wondering if a three-line publication is worth prostituting myself to some faceless wannabe. decisions to make – over the back fence the old donkey brays Thorny business Heritage climbing roses adorn our deck. Pink and white, they attract thousands of bees. Heaven on a long stem. A couple of over-grown shoots offend my eye, so I fetch the secateurs to lop them. Two down, one more out there... I miss the top step and begin a short journey to the concrete paving. Half over the top railing I fling an arm around a bunch of rose stems, hug them to my chest. The thorns bite into my hand and bare arm, I teeter a moment, stop. A thousand nervous bees circle my head. on the thorns of a dilemma – all that bites is not necessarily your enemy • John Irvine writes... "John Irvine is an Old Aged Pensioner in New Zealand with delusions of immortal failure and a cynical view of life. He has a mole under his left arm, and a wife who hates pizza and tripe. He hopes to die painlessly one day without warning, and with a minimum of leakage. "He had a volume of poetry published in 2005 by Zenith Publishing Group – www.zenithpublishing.co.nz – of New Zealand called Man of Stone. It has been positively reviewed in NZ's Takahe magazine by Raewyn Alexander, in Valley Micropress by Tony Chad and given a thorough pizzling by Sam Smith of The Journal in the UK. John's pathetically grateful for all of that. He also has a web site where you can waste some time www.cooldragon.co.nz "He has been published in a number of print and online magazines, including Australian Reader, Wicked Karnival, Black Ink Horror, Illuminations, Sam Smith’s Select Six, Whispers of Wickedness, Scifaiku, Stylus, the NZ Poetry Society's 2006 haiku anthology and NZ’s own Magazine. And now he may be read in that truly amazing, splendiferous, astounding, heroic online magazine Noneuclidean Café. "Oh, yes... and Preshrunk Press has published a volume of meaningless poetry (by me) about rats some time in 2007, which has been cleverly illustrated by Australian self-confessed teabag squeezing genius Dave Freeman." Friday, February 8
Two poems by Fiona Boyle
by
Charles Christian
on Fri 08 Feb 2008 12:46 PM GMT
Speaking Volumes
When it grabs you, poetry is a book on a pinhead: pricking your soul, scratching your mind, dancing in your brain. Cheating Angel The wing of a soul tipped the sun that tilted the earth. The moon smiled, and a woman lit a candle for the baby she never saw. • Fiona Boyle is a second year student reading Creative Writing at Winchester University. Tuesday, February 5
BLACK AND BLUE by Peter Asher
by
Charles Christian
on Tue 05 Feb 2008 07:36 PM GMT
BLACK AND BLUE Maybe, it is a colour two shades darker than grief black. It has a blue cast to it. It goes through the hues: possibly; perhaps a little deeper than black – and, perhaps; possibly a tad deeper still than that, before reaching its true self – a colour colder than navy. | |||