Write At The Park with Purple Mark ---William James

 

Souls of the dead

The souls of the dead rise up to bang against the lids of their coffins. In the dark they scream for justice. But nobody can hear. Nobody who live topside or who breathes swiftly moving air can hear. Maybe they don't even care that the soul of their loved one was buried with the body.

At the stone planted in the ground, a child cries out thinking that the soul of their loved one is someplace else. But the soul is not. It’s not even right there beside them, comforting them in their grief. The soul of the loved one is not there, frustrated trying to hold a corporal hand as the grief stricken imagines.

Instead the soul screams and they scream and they scream, "It's not fair!" That some souls get light while others get suffocating black.

Dead white people wish they were buried against their own societal laws. They wish they were laid to rest in open spaces like in limbs of the great trees stretching up to stars in prayer. That they rested as the indigenous peoples once were before white displaced from the lands they conquered. At least then they'd get to see sunlight at least half the year. When their bones had decayed completely and were churned into dirt, they would mist away like a whiff of steam in the morning rising off a blade of grass.

After an eternity of screaming a soul starts to pray for a geological upheaval or an earth changing quake or a new building project or something to turn over the soil and release a symphony of prayers to the winds that sweep the earth clean. But no, that doesn't happen.

I lay. Trapped. Suffocating. In the dark. Waiting. Swimming in a river of tears that never rain up to the stars.

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

Write At The Park by Purple Mark: October Thoughts

 

October Thoughts

“Greetings from Nineveh!”
a distant voice rang out of the drizzle.
it was a gray morning, the first of october.
The indian summer had ended last week
and I was sorry to see its warmth leave.

The summer had been full of ups and downs
because good things happen. Sometimes
they happen for no particular reason,
the way the bad things so often seem
to happen & those things happened too.

I had gotten in some acting experiences
playing a madman & a ‘V for vendetta-ish jester
and I had secured my seasonal job,
but to balance out the good things
my kidney stones had returned as knifings
and the deep pool of depression was ever near.

It seemed that my life was constantly hanging
in the balance & it was hard to rustle up
any enthusiasm to get through this period
which was being termed the great recession
or maybe the death of the american empire.

October was always an introspective month
for me, as it’s completion was my year’s end
according to the calendar that I followed.
It was a time for the dying and the dead
because after this, there was Brian’s service:
it made my end seem that much nearer.

by Purple Mark 10/01/2011

 

Prompts Used                                                     

1. "Greetings from Nineveh" Collected Sonnets of Edna (St, vincent Millay), pg. 163
2. "Good things happen. Sometimes they happen for no particular reason, the way bad things so often seem to happen" The Steep Approach To Garbadale (Iain Banks), pg. 132.
3. "Rustle-up" from "The Thesaurus Of American Slang."
4. "The souls of the dead rise up to the lids of their coffins''" by William James, 10/1/2011.

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

Come & Play: A 2007 Disastersing Song

 
 
Come&play-9.22.2007 by penheadpress

Maximos of Tegucigalpa, here’s your Triolet!

 

I make the peanut butter sandwiches to the tune of time
Then steal moments to rub a tuna melt on the boss’s tool-kit lock
Ted, the chef raises a knife to salute a greasy dime
To make a million more sandwiches to the tune of time
Ted ground fresh tuna fish into Ponzi-burger, then commits a crime
I vomit out a brain as I work around the clock
Making peanut butter sandwiches to the melody of time
I rob the boss’s time to rub a tuna melt into the restroom lock

 

Maximos of Tegucigalpa (I think the name and the place is fake) requested a Triolet on 9/7/11 from these two lines:

“Making peanut butter/tuna sandwiches to the tune of time”

“Taking time to rub the tuna on the lock”

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. We've also recently published our first e-literary mag. It is available for $1.99 at amazon.com. It is called: Randomly Accessed Poetics, Issue 1: The Texture of Words.

We Wrote In A Room Next To The Park Beside Philip Bernier-Smith

 
Star Journey

In the amazing maze of wonder
admist piles of baggage on the starship
hold me closer as we look back
towards the globe that gave us birth.
Blue green dot hanging
in the velvet deep of bedazzling gems.
Left behind are all the old familar faces-Di Di Di Di Di
Left behind are the fleecy skies
and the bright blue days of childhood.
We have left without dinner
and we are bound jitterbugging towards
stars of amazing strangeness.
There natives on their quasi-polynasian planet
savor uncooked food that
appeas like grubs or worms.
Fear not but hum an Edith Pilaf tune and
think of Paul Gougan.
Do not cry like a cat
but take to the journeys sleep
like an abandoned child, dropped beyond nightmare
into a dream of cornmeal, flour and bacon sizzling.
I will be seeing you in the distant morning sun
when the cold crossing of night is through,
perhaps there we shall walk new blue highways
or yellow brick roads till
the time our flesh falters decomposing
and our skulls contemplate
orbs of multiple moons.

by Philip V Bernier-Smith, Saturday, September 24, 2011

 

Prompts were:

Earth-we pray for one lasting on the globe that gave us birth, let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies and the cool, green hills of earth..Robert A Heinlien

-The Green Hills of Earth Water Witch- by Cynthia Felice and Connie Willis- No Dinner and those natives who eat worms

John Crowley -Little Big - Auberon was awakened first by the crying of a cat "An Abandoned Child" he thought and went back to sleep

Blue Highway-"A Journey into America" by William Least Heat Moon- "The only baggage the boys carried in addition to the mail mochila-was a kit of flour, cornmeal, and bacon plus a medical kit of turpentine, borax, and cream of tartar."

To A Dear Fellow Traveler

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. We've also recently published our first e-literary mag. It is available for $1.99 at amazon.com. It is called: Randomly Accessed Poetics, Issue 1: The Texture of Words.