Name Links to Poetry:
Dark verse from a master poet.
"How can I turn my back on gloom?
It's what got me here...."
"Eugene"—a thoughtful poem concerning the ridiculousness and lack of gratitude and awareness expressed by modern funerals.
Three lurid poems bursting with emotional rigor, rich metaphor, and deft experimentation.
"I turn on music to drown out/the percussive effect crawling beneath the pipes of my mind..."
"The whites are imitation ivory, the pupils, hammer heads..."
"His fingers become doors, cover his eyes..."
This poet is fearless. He writes completely unfettered by pretension, and his streams of words will resonate from your heart to your spine in waves of swarthy, raw emotion. John’s poetry represents THE example of how to write with honesty and guts.
"I smack my own face/like a shut-in/psychopath…”
"clouds that have disgracefully fallen/from the purple pain-swollen sky…”
Two poems by a veteran poet who ponders death and life with the finest edgy, hard-hitting verse.
"I fucking love to read my poems & play my conga/with a hat on the sidewalk for coins..."
"The Glutton" and "Roads"—two poems that weave lyrically with somber undertones and profound insight.
"traffic
courses through/like blood through muscle…”
Fluid verses that embrace the creative voice of the divine feminine and ruminate with surreal longing through "Disclosure" and contemplating "Minutes Before" death.
"She collects hundreds of leaves from every/storm..."
"The nurse/adjusts her body like a doll devoid of bones..."
The "Stranger" and the "Troubadour"—
"every man is/a vagabond and a poet..."
Unique, gutsy, and compelling verse that explores skin, sterility, and "Funeral Music"—
"My funeral music/will be filled with bawdy trombones and saucy/clarinet glissandos..."
Two
dark political poems as intriguing as their titles: "Opposum
Blues," and
"Hooray for the Red, White, and Tin."
Three poems by an unparalleled political poet with verse that deftly combines grit, surrealism, grimness, beauty, abstraction, and future-reality edge!
"chemically maintained mass produced/Americans coo over their cable TV..."
"her smile/across the perils of unclaimed possibilities..."
"as the economic hit men play/truth or Genghis Khansequences..."
"Through this time so sorrowfully past...
Oh, this endless scientific avarice,/To discover again our ghoulish genius..."
This poet is a master of surrealism, blurring and altering reality, and inviting the reader into other dimensions!
Two bold, tenebrous poems—"Living: This is Goodbye" and "The Absence or the Sum." Be careful: each line will bite you!
"I am baling wire/razor jaws..."
"before I slap him before I mount/an army of un-coffeed unhappy soldiers..."
Three dark poems that encounter tombstones, memories, Grandmas, and craziness through vivid images and metaphors.
"...the shells
of truth like blind
dull gray eyeballs
that fade and rot..."
Two wholly unique, concise poems: "A Dream of Death" and "Memorial."
Lurid prose poetry at its best. These three poems embrace visceral abstractions that will dive through your mind and into your skin.
Three short, somber, interesting poems by a previously unpublished poet.
Of course, death is also a lady—intriguing, beautiful, and totally seductive.
"Lady Death
wears
a lover's
mask..."
I leave you with the words of a true modern-day Renaissance man who is unafraid of "mapping the lower depths" and encountering self-awareness.
"...unable to escape/his bloated passions/inside pickle jars...
...his milk white soul/across red hot coal consciousness..."