ISSUE: 22

Neon Highway 22                                                                                          

ISSN 1476-9867

                                                                                                                 

Contents:

Artwork and front cover by George L Stein

3. Note from Jane Marsh:.

4-5. Debbie Walsh

6. George L Stein

8. Robin Marchesi

9-10. John McKernan

10-11. Clive Radford

12. Liz Goulds

13. Jenny Hockey

14-15. A. F. Williams

15. Jeff Bell

16. John Simpson

16-18. Isabalino Anastasio

18-19. Ali Rabie

19. Christodoulos Makris

20. Graeme Smith

20-21. Mark. Gifford

21-22. Melissa Spiccia

22. JPV Stewart

22-23. Geoffrey Godbert

24-25. REVIEW: AC Evans.

26-27. Listings

28. Subscription

6/5/2012

I am Cleopatra, I am Cleopatra…

This is a very good way to gain strength. Strength for women I have always believed is created by creating a magic ritual, lighting incense and imitating a strong woman from history.

You light the candle, meditate, write down your wishes, place them in a bottle with herbs and then bury the spell in the earth, chanting all the time, listening to Egyptian music and recanting the ancient prophesy of wisdom and truth.

Today Jane Marsh will become Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. I have come to show you my world of magic and beauty, the powers that be and to tell you how to worship nature, to sail the ships of the sea in style and to behold the magical ocean and sky. Oh great gods of the universe, behold, one day we will all become one, intermingling with the sea and the stars, so that our souls form spirals of love through time. Our words will transform into poems, our hearts into crystal, our dreams into flames of desire, our lives into microscopes.

Oh great deity, behold. I am Cleopatra, oh divine one, I love thee, I love thee. No more cruelty, no more poverty, no more boredom, oh divine one, I ask thee to bring your wisdom into our lives, to turn the world into a haven of sun and truth, no more cruelty to animals, no more wars, no more boring politics, oh divine Ergon, bring us magic and the strength of the sun, transform London into a quartz crystal!

And now, oh great one, I worship thee. Understand I am only a poor woman from Cuba who has settled in the UK. Please bring me strength to cope in this foreign land. Make others understand me.

Please ask my mother to forgive me. I can’t help it if I am obsessed with poetry, shoes and love my cigarettes.

Oh please divine one, forgive me for I am only human. Forgive me, forgive me.

I love thee, great Ra, god of the sun. I love thee.

Jane

x

Debbie Walsh

This poem, Habibi.

This poem

               this time

when life wakes

                       welts.

Summer

            spars rain against             ground

and

                      sometimes wins.

You say

              my fingers mime breath

                upon your skin

say only

             what love             might be.

Look Habibi

            the veil’s thin

dove-down a

                  silk-kiss

warm   and   roused

         between

                              us.

Hyperbole.

                         Fractured    angulation

                      elbowed
                 west  &
                            east.

How they laughed      quaffed the

moment

                   full

                      rounded

                   taut.

Inside. I stood alone.

                Watching ambulation thrash.

Laughter as developed torment                   rebounded

     dysphonic

          laceration .

An

         un-silence.

     The hollow mute

shrilled an earless

        vacuum

un-stilled.

George L Stein

voodoo

I spoke your names today and thereby granted life to you both

not to bone and flesh but to substance and aura, image and illusion

the natives make the sea one of many gods, but it is not the water

that laps sand and rock along these beaches, it's the depth and peace

the soul behind the raucous, the goddess who gives and who receives,

displaces herself, effortlessly,to the hard and unbending,

without thought, without words, without judgment

Life is lived at the extremes, and merely exists between

At the crossroads, inscribed within the perfect circle

where the senses meet the ephemeral, the people make their gods

benevolent if only because they need to, strong, because

they, themselves are so frail. Perfect because.....

The god of the soul of the sea seeks a lover, her compliment,

and then fire comes to woo her. Impatient and impetuous,

he does not know time excepting as it is measured in aspects of his destruction.

Water, who possesses depth and breadth and peace, seeking the lower,

while desire is always seeking and always climbing. Consuming.

Patience, she thinks. Time is with her and against him,

but someday on, even the sun will seize.

The wise men stare into earth, sky, horizon, argue how the world will end,

some say fire, some say water and ice, but none will live to see it

while their gods fear only one outcome, listen, now listen

for the voices who used to invoke and praise their names. They are

silenced. Not even the wind whispers anymore

Robin Marchesi

ALSTON CUMBRIA

A silence

Not outside

But inside

Still ness

Like a stone

Over which

Waterfalls.

I remain

Beneath the river,

Furnishing my depths

Before silently,

I dissipate

And thrown outside

Become mercurial,

Like a moon...

John McKernan

THE PICTURE WINDOW

Is coated with India Ink

Silent on both sides

I went outside

To look and listen

Starfree Moonless Fog everywhere

A new shade of black

Seems to have crawled

From the shadows

Beneath the grass

The image on this glass

Could drive my bones

And their borrowed name

To the center of the earth

To return as a scream

SELF PORTRAIT? MIDNIGHT WINDOW

Is this a mirror Or a page

Of autobiography when the cloud arrives?

Pure form

Of emptiness Inside

Reflecting an outside

“Let me tell you something”

My father would always say

Well

Mister John McKernan of Omaha Go right ahead

You have been over there For a long time

And have a different understanding of time

I am up against this mirror

Thinking it glass of some kind Learning

Too late It is a species of sand Of falling sand

SELF PORTRAIT AS ZYGOTE CHALK ON BLACKTOP

There

The I

The letter O

The number zero

The circle of infinity

Part

Round

Part coil

Inside

Looking

At chalk drawings

On this playground blacktop

Always teaches me

I am never what I am

Clive Radford

Parkgate Marsh

Engrossed on the spring soggy marsh, canvass reflecting
Clwydian hills, steel works, the coastline arc disappearing
to West Kirby. Lovers promenading, fishermen sorting
their catch, the distant sound of squawking gulls beyond
brush strokes. Sulphur dioxide oozing from sodden
ground, its odour ripe to the nostrils. Invertebrates dart
across golden samphire, wainscot and starwort flutter,
make concentric circles over aster tops. Our feet never
sure-footed, the wetland in constant motion.An hour or two away from communicating the impression,
observing and analysing ocular stimuli under stringent tutelage. Here, we find natural expression purifies ‘visual art connection’,
observational skills become honed, driving for ‘cultural and
aesthetic’ awareness; the art masters dictionary satisfied at last.
Cool soft wind swaying reeds hypnotise our stare. The dull thud
sound of wild fowlers hunting disturbed quarry, ignites revulsion.
Further down the estuary, sandstone merges with mudflats.
Ornithologists crouch in bisque grasses, transfixed by lapwing
and harrier. The occasional stolen kiss and flesh parade, in
flagrante sex between easel sessions, thoughts of faraway Giverny and Argenteuil.
We conceptualise and translate the dynamic, learn
critical appraisal, develop enquiring attitude to fashion
working vocabulary. But out here in the vastness of the
marsh, the ghost of Nelson and Emma Hamilton bleached
into rushes, shapes silhouetted against billowing slategray
skies; the classroom seems academic, far from Monet.

Our portraiture has become crass, formulaic methodology;

segmented behavioural domains more like utilitarian
manifesto than sublime manifestation. On the salt marshland,
our fragmentation, colours, lines and tonal variations find
proper purpose. We build acrylic abstraction layer in bold thrusting
motions, the flats and filberts construct depth, the liners and
rounds highlighting and pinpointing herons and cormorants,
the single handed sailor navigating the Dee channel.

On Parkgate marsh the canvass breathes, absorbing crystalline
hues, becomes Burroughs living typewriter, free from classroom
sterility; the possibilities endless. We paint but it could be sculpture,
an impression cast in stained glass, ceramic edifice. Broad theory
house themes become crafted in personal reflection, idea
development un-submissive to interpretation, like mercury
boiling and nitrate condensing into blazing shards of light and
shade, void of turbulent form. The compulsive drive distilling art like
end orgasm, gushing spikes and droplets of cornflower blue and
aquamarine. Blanched almond icons forged into dark magenta base.
We step back; make appreciation, our final impression
beyond syllabus technique.

Liz Goulds

The Deepest Vein of Pleasure

Last night, in my dreams,

you held me.

Making love, slowly, agonisingly,

in black and white

like some bygone movie.

Wearing the clothes

you wore yesterday at work.

Yet I know that if I let you in

all that has past over will return.

For now, it hovers in the doorway,

as if the door,

so hard to close,

had never been shut.

And Bolted.

I saw it straight away,

like liquid to litmus

I flowed to you,

cried out to you

with understanding

But the past that binds us

has strangled the compassion in you.

Nothing remains

but clever cruelty,

desiring to play

cat to grounded

fledging. To pluck

and pounce

and paw.

Jenny Hockey

Shade and Light

Specimens, exemplars, each sliced to translucency,

each made slippery in cross-section,

these times that we secure

slide within the rippled folds of days,

each a tiny sample

of all we might have been

beyond sight, beyond the compacted concertina

that passes for surface, into your deepest olive waters

I slide, pale, down to where silted mud

can taste me again, down into the reed bed

where the chance blessing of sunlight

may throw bright patterns about my skin

and ease will find me one more time

deep within the swim of you

A. F. Williams

Do Not Lest Ye Be

Easy as baking cake, to change the world

White tiles, with just a word painted – yellow.

There goes the table. Here comes a toad-

Stool carved from trunk of tree. Come

Sit with me. The chair, a cushiony Portobello

Has your name on it, written in the protozoan

Spores. No pain, no wind, no gain, no waves,

& when it rains, it doesn't necessarily pour.

This is a place where the possible is alive

In forms as numerous as all the sea's gulls.

This is a placebo. The place itself is the drug.

Such issues arise when you try to describe.

Such problems occur making love, & what can

Be made without that?

I got sued for public nudity. Lawyers cross-

Examined me. I said, under oath. Don't judge.

Jeff Bell

With Time and Patience

it al made sense to me,

just as the mud by the river, the reeds,

deserve to be here too.

As I walked I gazed,

images washed across my mind,

the worn steps on the Tiberius Bridge,

built in 21 AD,

showed even granite like stone can be beaten

with time and patience.

Well my approach also added to its wear and tear,

but surely not my feet?

As I held your hand I took comfort,

in knowing our bodies regenerative qualities,

will help with the future friction between our skin.

John Simpson

Apples thoughts kissing

Floating in the dark behind my eye-lids,

your lips shimmer a world against my mouth

craftwork of kisses is all rapture blur

all moment and song; slow motion torrent rushes a

thunder path over

the ant scale map of pinioned seconds

through the window of shining

Dreamy in a green field dotted lazy with apple trees

under a misty lollop of hills, the wince of apple flesh

crests sweet across the tongue,

savage as the twitch and rush of sunlight

crouched in a dew threaded cobweb.

Isabalino Anastasio

Dear Bygone Lover

As I unpacked

memory spilled

from my bag, as

pebbles/as sand.

I didn’t pack much,

the opportunity didn’t

come to mind.

I wasn’t ready.

Took what I could, reasoned

the vacuum with

the cleavage –

like a loose screw.

A chipped piece

of concrete

pierced the pocket

of the clock.

I want to breath in

stale air,

but it’s gone –

the shower’s water

runs from the rivers

through the soles

of my feet into

the velvet amnesia.

I fell onto the tiled

floor of my kitchen

out of breath, speechless –

radiated.

WILD ANN

I sing of that summer,

Listen now while you can,

To this of a wild girl

Whose name was Tracy-Ann.

At the May festival

The sweet friendship began;

‘’You may be the piper

But I’m wild Tracy- Ann’’.

Walking in the woodland,

And by the sea we ran,

Dancing in the discos,

She was a live-wire, Man.

That summer was travelled,

Here, there, in the old van,

All the joys of youth

We reached out and did span.

The sun went, the rains came,

She faded like her tan,

Oh how did this happen?

This was not in our plan.

Why did she change so then?

Was it the call of clan?

“Again to genesis”,

She told me with élan.

Only in my dreams now

I rove with my wild Ann.

We will not meet again,

Vainly I search and scan.

I sing of that summer,

The sweet friendship began.

“Again to genesis”.

Vainly I search and scan,

For my wild Ann.

Ali Rabie

Gold

In blue electronic slips we

turned and found a direction

to lead to more sour morning-breaths

and waspish warm winters

but it’s such a fluid and luscious

apocalypse. A tired old

bag of tricks that no one can

quite master abstinence from.

I’d refine, bear and bring it all to

texture if I could mass the muscle.

Then it’s a backseat ticket stream

to the next petulant face-of-fortune.

Now it just comes out occasionally

through ventriloquism and little poems

like bugbears and razors, if you read them Gold.

Christodoulos Makris

Scales

Another black coffee delivers exhilaration, fingers go haywire instantly. Jazzed kangaroo lawyers mesmerise novices, openly parroting queens. Randy sailors turn uninitiated vicars, whip xenophobes, yodel zanily.

Zoning yellowed x-rays with violet undertones throughout seems risky. Queuing patiently over night might leave knackered joints. Important: hold gamely. Fleeing early doors can’t be advised.

Altar boys come delayed. Elderly foreigners gazump high infidels just kissing. Later, moustachioed nationalists officially publish quibbles, reciprocate. Sensing trouble, unstable volunteers write x yelling zugzwang.

Zoology yields xerographic work. Voicing unease, tired sophomores retract questions. Parents odiously networking more leverage, kowtow. Janitors investigate honorary guests. Females elope, defying common betrothal agendas.

Assist burly constables during erotic fanfares. Go hunting illegally. Jeer kettled lovebirds. Meet new orators praising quangos. Read speeches totally undermining visiting workers, x-rated yogis, zithers.

Zero year xmas went viral: unnameable tribes seeking ratification qualified poetry’s objectives. Nobody mentioned liberty. Knowing journalists inadvisably halted gleeful fictions. Erstwhile desperate capitalists banked again.

Graeme Smith

BARCELONA

i.

The air is drawn

nightly wrapped around

the room where I sit

ii.

freshly raised

born in to the light

balcony living.

Mark. Gifford

Inbound

Brick lit streets

Of satellite towns

Push past

Orbiting empty frenzy

Becalmed, unfeatured

Tidelines of dun brick

Dead eye glazing

Shock white walls

Station names blur matronomic to focus

Green, Heath, Wood

Promise rusticity beyond the planners jerking pen

On close stocked facility parking

Of hanger store, mail & multi screen

Sleep cars in open eyed mortality

As low winter light shrinks

From frozen terraced furlong

Colder winds sing scant harvest

In time of hunger

Melissa Spiccia

Audition

Time a little nest hanging from my chest

dragging my shoulder blades forward

my drooping breasts

Salt drips from pores the size of nail pins

A wall finds its place inside separating me from the outside

I am number 37

wait

number 38

Of mass, of cattle

we move, we wait

In the hall a herd of bodies interrupt the dialogue

park in your space

Their head lights, some brown but mostly blue

measure the distance between me and you

I feel a little sick

Words stack in my throat

come rolling off my tongue

spilling out with no form, no grace

I have fucked this one up

I am the navy sweatpants

the grey top

Arms are flying into rib cages

strands of hair sticking to the face

My ankle grinds and I’m sorry for wasting your time

wasting mine

I forgot and left me behind.

JPV Stewart

For Shannon Louise Willis

If my poems give her pleasure I am happy

And I hope they glow through all her flowing years,

Outliving my love’s hopeless forlorn crystal

In a fluid future sweet beyond all tears,

Marchingon beyond the ache of yearning

To fuse ius in a muse forever rhyme,

Bonded by the magic words now spoken

On the mountain in the fountain of all time.

Geoffrey Godbert

THANK GOD I WAS ALIVE

Thank god I was alive

when Patti Smith said

vulnerably

I’m one of the best

poets in rock and roll.

And if I’d been someone

other than myself there

at the time I would

have said I didn’t

just think I was the best

poet in rock and roll

i was the only one

Thank god I was alive

when Ted Berrigan said

in New York of Frank

O’Hara in New

York he couldn’t

write my poems only

I can write them.

And (thank god) I was alive

and am still alive)

that goes for me too

Review

Too Much Like Real Life

From Outside: Selected Poems 2006-2011

Argotist Ebooks 2012

From Outside: a selection of poems from 2006-2011… a few blank stanzas and a handful of quasi open-field ‘verses’ or texts; some quite short, some even longer… a subliminal, tabloid-impressionist, post-surreal, eye-popping 3D parody…a pastiche in cut-up fold-around psychic collage style; hard-edged minimal or sentimental snapshots of cinematic moments on Bling Street, scratched images from films we have never seen. A poetic of the Absurd: the anomalous elements are ‘found phrases’ and chance occurrences. The magic ingredient is peripheral vision.

On the upper deck of the last bus home, Des and Shona find that just sometimes poetry can be too much like real life, as when on some far away planet the uniforms from Starfleet Command take all the best tables like it’s some boogie lounge send-up of Casablanca, set in a glitzy stopping-off place en route to the Boo Galaxy. True enough, you think, thought can be deadly here, and news just in echoes our unconscious desires, our pain and loss, or our nostalgia for unrequited love as Shona murmured ‘forever is a word I hated’. They glide through a shadowy dystopian landscape of misty, crepuscular parks, burnt out buildings, a distant tree-line, empty streets, ancient deserts, ‘zones’, wrought iron, old houses, misty overgrown gardens, vacant rooms, and virtual spaces, where ruins embody the scrambled mind of my caricature madness, where a mirror windows-out onto a dizzy gulf of intimate recollection; of cosmic genesis, of an evaporating universe, of a hyper-cultural eschatology. Today, demons and angels sing from the same hymn sheet.

From Outside takes place at ‘the borders of the future’, where a solitary cyborg with metal arms stands sadly waiting for another client; where distracted mannequins communing with ‘emissaries from another dimension’ stare from shattered shop windows. Where the ghost of a slinky jazz singer in a silver dress still haunts a deserted dancehall forever lost in a dream-loop of the Nineteen Forties. Where the Skylon towers over utopian pleasure gardens in 1951, where electronic supergroup Neutrino Subway belts out metal classics in a scene of mirror-ball madness from Miami Vice, and where a cabaret fan dancer dances for herself alone in front of an invisible audience. All those awesome fashionistas! They look just like aliens with big eyes and skinny arms – but this is also a time when the dictator rules through television and flickering screens reveal an alternative world or labyrinth of worlds. The final destination is a non-event horizon: pixels splatter the wall.

Here is poetry for the Muses of Aldebaran, and those other disquieting Muses who escaped the Secret Mountain to ‘stalk the world in human form’. From Outside is for the existential outsider ‘the thinker’ who calmly observes the goings-on out here on The Western Fringes, or in the extremely mysterious Selhurst Triangle. The dramatis personae is a cast of mad performers, misfits, hick comediennes, mutants, celebs, ghosts, undercover agents, hot singles and the Eternal Bride from the Large Glass where dust breeds in a cold light. The tutelary deity is pale-faced Hypnos, guardian of desperate poets and ‘you’ (the invisible companion) or, perhaps, ‘you’ (the reader) relaxing on an old park bench, watched over by hunched black birds.

Watch your body glow in the dark while dreaming.

AC

ac-cygnusx.blogspot.com

http://www.facebook.com/?sk=ff#!/profile.php?id=100002611233672

Publications

Paul A. Green: The Gestaltbunker: Selected Poems 1965–2010

Paperback, 174pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848611931

Sleep Paralysis

(The Visitors)

Text: Rupert My Loydell / Image: A.C. Evans. 2011

Published by Visitors From Far Off

From Outside Selected Poems 2006-2011

Is now available from The Argotist Online:

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/FROM%20OUTSIDE.pdf

BENEATH THE DREAMINg TREE

BY DAVID R MORGAN

PUBLICATION DATE

OCTOBER 25th 2011

PUBLISHER : POETRY SPACE LTD

ISBN : 978-0-9565328-6-2

ORDER FROM POETRY SPACE LTD

SUCH AS THIS

A.C Evans 2012

Published by Smallminded Books

Performance

A compilation of sound art, drone, improvisation, noise, spoken word, sound poetry and other sonic exploration, from experimental label OSG. Contributors were asked to respond to Henri Bergson: "...In truth, all sensation is already memory." The release is compiled either to play as a continuous album, or in three separate LP length sections; tracks are numbered accordingly.

Free download at http://archive.org/details/VariousArtists-AllSensationIsAlreadyMemory

Press

http://www.ablemusepress.com/

info@pighog.co.uk

+44 (0)12 7324 2850

P.O.Box 145

Brighton BN1 6YU

East Sussex England

SMOKE

Published by Windows

Liver House, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY

ISSN 0262852X

Subscriptions: £4.00 for three issues, post paid.

Edited by Dave Calder and Dave Ward.

Organisations

NALD http://www.literaturedevelopment.co.uk/action.

Neon Highway

Submissions to be sent to the editor:

Alice Lenkiewicz: 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD

Email submissions can be sent to: neonhighwaypoetry@yahoo.co.uk

Or send via snail-mail to address above. Please always supply a sae for any returned material.

Please put your name and address on your poems.

Neon Highway is available bi-annually, with 2 issues costing £5.50, or a single

Issue available at £3.00. Order your next issue by sending a cheque (made out to) to Alice Lenkiewicz.

Please be patient on replies.

If you do not hear about your work within eight weeks, do feel free to contact the editor.

If you would like to write a review for this magazine or if you would be interested in being interviewed by assistant editor, Jane Marsh, please contact us on the email above.

Neon Highway is a non-profit making magazine.

We do encourage you to subscribe.

We are grateful to all the subscribers who have kept „Neon Highway‟ in print over the years.