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Really, we would love to have you stay but we would feel rude about that as we have left. As in gone, defunct, kaput. We aren't here anymore. Sometimes, when it's late and we are worried about dying, we do believe in reincarnation. So, maybe we will live again. We'll let you know if that happens.

1.5.07

Popular Ink/Indelible Kitchen Contributors in Inaugural Issue of CaKe Poetry

Clay Blancett, Copyright 2007

Indelible Kitchen contributors and/or Popular Ink writers Jay Snodgrass, Clay Blancett and M. C. Boyes are all featured in the brand, spanking new issue of CaKe.

Here's a sampling:


When you are dead you still dream

the difference is you are not sleeping
though these dreams are all you will ever see
anymore. they are not fantastic or even splendid
dreams. insipid and annoying, at best,
these dreams will make you try to open
your eyes to escape.

only, your eyelids will be gone.
it would be better if your eyelids were replaced
by something gory, say oozing puss
or the decaying wings of a bat,
but the world of the dead is not a tactile place. you cannot reach out
and touch the worms that are working their way
through the place
where your small intestines used to be. There is no place
where your small intestines were, because
you are no more. you are dead
and you are dreaming an eternal dead dream.

It goes something like this:

A man is riding a bicycle stiffly, formally, as if as if riding a bike is a ceremony of state where a certain level of deliberation and decorum is required. You have never seen him before. He is wearing a blonde mustache that offends you somehow. Yes, it is the curve, the shape of the whole thing—insouciant but not quite defiant. The mustache is twisted into handle bars and carefully waxed. Handle bars, mustache, handlebars, bicycle—this is not lost on you. Around the man riding a bike wind begins to swirl. That swirl picks up water from nowhere until the wind is a whirlpool that has somehow lost its way. A whirlpool winding down the street.

you wish it was just a simple whirlwind.
nice and normal. you wish
it contained some scraps of paper.
papers with words on them. words that were meant
for you. That is what you wish
was in the whirlpool
that you wish was a whirlwind
that is winding its way down the road
by the man with the pretentious handlebar moustache
who is stiffly riding the bike
with the blatantly yellow banana seat.

you try to lift your lids—
open them to something better,
something you know,
something you can touch.
to the grey cat lapping
water from the rusty pail you left on the back porch.
to your mother’s arm, her soft blonde hairs
glistening slightly
under the yellow kitchen light.
but dreams are all you have left
and they are not even your dreams;

they are everything that you ever saw
that you never even
remembered when you were living.

These dreams are filled with all those things
that were never of any consequence to you

and you will feel you are missing something
but because this feeling is of consequence
you will not remember it

and it will not be incorporated into your dead dreams.

still
you will long for it—
the marked paper,
the hair on your mother’s arm,
the grey cat,
the rusty pail.

you will feel an ache in your absent side,
an itch on your missing right hand.

your entire being is that of an amputee
longing to be reattached.

if only you had died better you think.

you begin to weep the dry tears of the dead
but even this you will not remember.
all that you will see and feel
is the moment of waking
of not knowing where you are
eternally.

M. C. Boyes


To see more cool pix and poems by the likes of Campbell McGrath, Maureen Seaton, Rick Campbell and others, visit CaKe at www.cakepoetry.com.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

awesome journal.