p o e t r y




Poems meant to be performed
by Randall W. Collier


1. Spastic Grace

Malignant misconceptions
of a twisted and blistered hate.
Insane ideologies
of strange twists of fate.
Corrupt incorruptibility,
can anyone relate?
Paraplegic imperfection
is such a sad mental state.


2. The Grand Stage

So, here I sit, alone again, incarcerated by my own fear of intimacy. Encapsulated in solitude of my own creation. All my life I've kept everybody at arms length, and I have finally come to the place where everybody has decided to move even further away. Where I now sit, wallowing in my own lonely world, motivated by fear, is where I've always told people that I wanted to be and even more where I liked to be. I am now truly feeling the backlash of my own words. The verbalized and vocalized, vengeful vendetta of my very own creation. I am suffering in this, my own vignette of sorrow, forged through self-slander. The lone soloist weeping on the grand stage of life.


3. Weeds

Here I go again, bouncing off the wall
Acting as if, acting as is, feeling, flailing
Falling through these feelings and feeling alone
Silently screaming the scream of despair

Uttering urgency through lips of remorse
Hanging in solitude, blowing off course
Lurking in loneliness, yes, dancing alone
Losing myself in these weeds I have grown
(Losing myself in these weeds I have grown)


4. Theater of Pain

Insatiable aggression keeps me
In this rusted cage
This spectral apparition holds me
In this state of rage
Left alone in this
Hatred
Violence in my eyes
I cannot see the end in this
Seething pit of lies
This mindless destination has me
In its bloody teeth
Its course for ruination keeps me
Sickened, full of grief
Left alone in this
Hatred
Violence in my eyes
I cannot see the end in this
Seething pit of lies
Is there no escape for me?
Is this all I am?
Is this cage my destiny?
Or my battering ram?
This mental institution throws me
To the rocks below
I'm paying restitution for these
Things Ill never know
Left alone in this
Hatred
Violence in my eyes
I cannot see the end in this
Seething pit of lies
Welcome to the theater
My theater of pain
I cannot see the end in this
Seething pit of lies
I cannot see the end in this
With violence in my eyes
Left alone in this
Hatred
Violence in my eyes
I cannot see the end in this
Seething pit of lies


5. Invisible Boy

Sweet nothings
Subtleties
Don't speak
Don't feel
Don't go outside
Outside of the mind
Invisible boy
Lost on the couch
Lonely jitters
Frustrating smile
Invisible boy
Silently screams
Alive in his mind
Dead to his world
Fantasy his reality
Reality his enemy
Invisible boy
Beside the T.V.
Eyes wide open
Technicolor confusion


6. Half Empty

While conducting this monotone symphony
I'm injecting this acetone empathy and
Portraying this blasphemous sympathy
I digress, filling me, half empty

Retarding my projection of serenity
Rejecting simplicity and diverting divinity
Bathing in this tainted purity
I digress, feeling me, half empty


7. Nausea Delirium Daze

Redundant replay of mass confusion
Furtive movements of thought
Sideways strains and twisted connections
It's another sad day in the rain

Madness overwhelms the senses
Muscles contract and expand
The details blur around the edges
Nausea, delirium, daze


8. Apathy, uncertainly, doubt, and my old friend melancholy together we bleed
Here I am again, alone, without, and helplessly lost on an apathetic sea of unchanging doubt. Tossed on waves of uncertainty, beneath melancholy skies bleeding tears of pain. This doubt, this uncertainty, and this salty sweet apathy are steadfast and strong like bedrock in my life. They are without fail, a constant in my tortured and dreary existence. I have mingled with melancholy, beneath her bloody crying skies, all my life. They have all become welcome guests in my life as I trudge along this boring and useless path of life. They bring excitement to my bland and tasteless life and they bring the sour tears that cleanse my tarnished soul. The most important function or influence they have in my bitter existence, or should I call it my endurance, is that they bring the gift of inspiration. With inspiration comes creativity and with creativity comes growth, and there is always room to grow. I know I am in safe waters here with the henchmen of depression and together we shall facilitate another change. Then I will bid them farewell until I conjure them up again. I guess I am just at my best when I am at my worst. So I move forward.


9. The Pain

Torrential troglodyte rain
Shadows come blue and black
Frenetic electric flames
Dreams alight gone insane

Help Me
Assistance in existence

Hide me
Persistence my resistance

Hold me
Aberration or destination

Heal me
Deviation to destination

Dementia, denial, and disdain
Progressive backwards truth
Deceitful dogmatic refrain
Chronic undeniable proof

Guide me
Divide Me
Help me feel the pain


10. Short Scrib

Black tar nightmare in concrete and stone
Reverse flashbacks and deja vu
Hardened face of frustration cracks a lonely smile.
Too mnay memories in the fire.


11. Subterfuge

Cynical deception reverberates
freely through the cracks
Dripping into pools
of loosely tangled lies

Spinning the web of protection
Slicing the vein of truth

Broken words and promises
spoken with two-faced glee
Undermining strained relations
with sweet gentle subterfuge


12. My Abyss

Hanging over the edge of reconciliation
Fingers gripping the ledge
Of this rude separation
Clinging to the hope
Of each blessed tomorrow
Slowly wading through
These different shades of grey
Slipping
Falling
Dripping
Down deep
Into this
My abyss


13. Like Jimmy Hoffa

Mangled mass
of malicious confusion
Clouding
the skies of my mind
Mumbling
Malingering
On the doorsteps
of my soul
Twisting me
Tearing me
Blistering my view
Shooting holes in this
graveyard backdrop
Burning me
Churning me
And leaving me
Strung out
Strangled
Dead
and lost like Jimmy Hoffa


14. Mid Life Crisis

I hate this nonsense
I hate the way I feel
The way I look
The way I smell
I hate myself
And that's the worst
See, you don't' have to live with me
I'm a whiner
I'm selfish and insecure
I'm going bald
Approaching forty
Is this the way life's supposed to be
I'm psychotic
I'm neurotic, and to boot
I'm as ugly as a horse
I'm irresponsible
I'm immature
Self obsessed and mundane
Yet this is my cup of pain
And that's got to be the worst
You see, you don't have to live with me
I do


15. Motionless

He stood poised, motionless
Two steps from mysteries edge
Blindly staring, emotionless
Over dizzy continents of time
Of space, of grace, beyond eternity
Tears of disbelief, subsiding
Moving slowly over life's edge
Undiscovered fires igniting
Surreal emotional flames of joy
Of sorrow, of tomorrow, beyond state of mind
Existing in mind without form, shapeless
Above the storms of broken lives
Moving in infinite glory, now fateless
His exodus begins, moving up through endless skies
In absolution and without retribution
The aura of soul is now forever freed
Eternal existence on plains of spirituality
Up, above, over it all, in spirit, without duality
Individuality ceased, body discarded and left crumpled
And without, with all, within
As he dances this dance alone forever

—Randall W. Collier, 39, is a full-time student at a local university in Bakersfield California. He has been writing since he was seven: "Each piece I write is written to be a performance piece. To truly enjoy it one must hear it performed!"



















p r o s e




[essay]
After the War— War
by Drazan Gunjaca


It's summer, awfully sultry, and the sea is so near - the solution is obvious, isn't it? It would take only a few steps to let the tired spirit in an exhausted body, find comfort in the cold waves; something the most of the civilized world calls vacation. It's not so simple, though. You need to know how to rest.

I vaguely remember what it looked like before the last, five-year-long war that devastated this land I was condemned to by God and my incomprehensible love for it. I remember the times when man walked here, too. And then the war came. Out of the blue, intollerably arrogant like any unwanted guest who cannot accept to be rejected. On the contrary. Some people I used to have fun with disappeared over night, some other came whose idea of fun I couldn't understand, no matter how hard I tried. To avoid feeling excluded I asked the newcomers to explain the reasons of their joy, which to my dismay, surprised them very much. Shouldn't one know why he is merry? Anyway, after a time, some of them became my other self while the other started avoiding me.

Have you ever seen how the warriors rest? In no way. When they don't shoot, they drink to forget why and who they were shooting at. It seemed the best solution to me too, during the first year of the war - but my war didn't end on time. As any war never ends on time, no matter how long it lasted. After some dreadful hangovers I realized that it had nothing to do with resting.

They say all wars have to end sooner or later. Are you sure? If so, why do the warriors "rest" in the same way after the war, too?

Let us leave the warriors in their world they themselves do not understand, let alone the others. The warriors will never understand why, out of heroes, in time they became modern lepers widely avoided by everyone, and those people avoiding them will never understand why, only a short while ago, they thought those lepers were heroes.

It's so hard to be a simple man in war, wherever it catches you. History is only interested in people of its stature. Not in simple men.

Perhaps everything would somehow come to balance at a bearable level of existence of the ones and the others, if it wasn't for the third ones; those who needed the war while it lasted, but who need it even more now that it's "over". The hyenas of war. They do not understand the warriors or the sufferers, nor do they try to. They need the war just like an auto mechanic needs a broken car - to make a living. And if there are no broken cars, all the worse for them. You do have to make a living, don't you? That is why they are the most successful in their "missions". In any way. And that is why the war doesn't end until they are on the scene. They feel perfect on that scene where it's unbearably easy for them to transform a lost poor wretch into a warrior again, and the scared sufferers into ostriches who are so terrified that they do not just put their head in the sand, they all go underground. Unless some of the other ones should stumble over them.

What will happen if you raise your head anyway? And they notice. Perhaps they won't shoot because the war is formally over, after all. But they will do everything to push you back in, make you bury yourself once again in the hot sand, drenched with blood and tears. With your eyes open, so you don't forget the lesson. If you somehow manage to stay on the surface, then the others won't see you. They won't let them. And if some of the other sufferers notice you after all, then it's high time you left or started quickly to revise your religious education.

You don't believe it? Don't. It's your right. But then, just in case, revise all the prayers you know; you might need it. Do you think your hyenas are more civilized? Maybe more refined? Or maybe you do not rhetorically recognize them? But this does not change the essence.

Oh yes, you can try something more simple. For example, try playing a tourist in the just "liberated" Iraq. Spend your vacation there. Why not? Wasn't it liberated? Spend some time with the liberated people. Share the joy of liberation. It's a unique feeling, trust me on that.

But when you return from Iraq, don't ever ask yourselves: what is freedom? This question can only take you in one direction - to a mental institution. I know many people who have gone crazy because of "freedom".

On second thought, maybe it's best if you forget what I just wrote and enjoy it while you can. You can't change anything anyway, except...

—Drazan Gunjaca (1958, Sinj, Croatia) is the author of a number of awarded anti-war books, like the novel Balkan Farewells (international award Premio Satyagraha 2002, Italy) and the drama Balkan Roulette (medal of the European Parliament at the international literary contest Anguillara Sabazia Citta D'Arte 2003 (Italy), the theatre award at the contest Il Viaggio Infinito 2003 (Italy), and other awards at the contests Cesare Pavese-Mario Gori 2003 (Italy), Premio Carver 2003 (Italy) and Il Convivio 2003 (Italy)).Go check out his site: www.drazangunjaca.net








[story]
A Quick Existence
by Luke Buckham


I was sitting behind a pine tree in the low shade, long grasses turning to straw in the heat around me, bent and trampled, reading a book, and the tree blew in the wind, throwing the shadows back and forth across the words on the slightly yellowed pages, making them more intoxicating. The whole landscape was ethereal every time I lifted my head, the goldenrod in the distance, where the mowed lawn stopped and a small swamp, that smelled stagnant, led into a forest. Behind me, music throbbed out over the surface of a parking lot, and several people roamed around on the tar, smoking. I had been reading too much--the words were so sensual that they were as real as the existence around me, and I would become absorbed, wanting to talk in long streams of overwhelmed language every time I raised my head. In the brick building, punk band after punk band was playing. Occasionally I'd have the urge to get up and join the music inside the building, but a quiet kind of melancholy, that I liked, kept me from it. Cymbals crashed and the trees lashed back and forth in the wind, softly, the breeze cutting between the branches and rustling the leaves. I peeked around the tree and a friend, standing on the tar, waved to me, flicking a cigarette into the air, that bounced on the tar with a shower of sparks. I felt like I had been asleep for a long time, at least since I had woken up on someone's floor that morning, with sunlight streaming across a short, bedraggled rug, ashes and beer bottles, none of which were my own, scattered around me and birds squawking outside the window, their cries invitations to the world. I had grown quiet, lately, and found it hard to speak to people with any emphasis, after moving several times in the past year and finding myself now several hundred miles from my girlfriend, without a job and without a consistent place to stay.

When I looked back at the book it was a dead thing, no longer a transportation to another world, but flat, unremarkable, like a plain sidewalk that didn't lead anywhwere. So I got up, joined the friend who had just waved at me, and entered the building, the music swelling around me as I went in. The band members were jumping around with real energy, slamming into each other and whipping at the cords of their instruments with frantic hands, and I got the chills, as I always did when hearing any kind of passionate music. But at some point I had started to overthink everything, absolutely everything. Rather than just enjoying the music, I had to wonder what it meant, what it would mean in one hundred years--or maybe that thought was really supposed to mean, "what will I mean in one hnudred years?". My writing had become increasingly tormented, to the point of near-psychosis, the characters in my stories overturning coffee tables and throwing things through windows at the slightest provocation, and acting generally like sociopaths, which was likely how I would be acting if I didn't write the stories. Something was creeping up on me, I felt, a realization of some kind, a revelation that would make this fall into place, the doubt, or the lack of direction, behind the music, and behind my own life and art, more coherent--or destroy it completely. The music paused and then went into another song, banging away, beautifully, the lead guitarist reaching a kind of violent triumph, his spiked of blue hair trembling as he screamed into the mike. I loved everyone who made good music--music was the force behind life, I felt, something imperfect but holy nonetheless. I grabbed at it for more and more meaning all the time, and was starting to grab at nature in the same way--snatching at it for some sign of transcendence. There was a force in me that needed a clear target, that was like an airplane that kept taxing down the runway and never quite taking off. I would stand on the fire escape during the sunset over the half-wrecked industrial town I lived in, listening to headphones and staring at the sunset, which was usaully a violent red, every night, and grab at the whispering behind it the same way I did when I listened to music.

The drummer hit the cymbals in a crescendo, and the guitarists shrugged the straps off their shoulders, grinning at each other, sweat dripping from their faces. The lead singer had screamed himself horse, but his expression was calm, Buddha-like and soft, as if he had spent all his life's venom in this room, venting it through the speakers. I looked closely at his face, studying him carefully, which was another thing I had been doing lately, looking at people so closely that they seemed to pale under my glance. I had the unfortunate habit of wanting to understand everything, or at least experience it more deeply thatn most people did. I had grown up in a religious home, where I felt paralyzed, so in the outside world I had always been astonished by the amount of freedom that people had, and wondered why they, and I, didn't do more with it. These thoughts were beginning to make my life intolerable. The singer with the blue hair, who was a friend of mine, held up a pair of scissors and smiled at me as he went past. Earlier he had planned to cut off the spikes, in order to strip himself of his assembled punk identity and get closer to himself, and to see how his changed appearance would alter others' reactions to him. I followed him outside and offered to help him cut off the spikes---I was happy to perform something like this, since I always felt a need of greater intimacy with people and any way of stripping down their exterior was something I was in favor of. He stood on the lawn as I stepped outside, with a few people gathering around him, and the scissors were too dull, they kept getting caught in his hair when he tried to close the blades. Someone took out a long, sharp, glistending knife and offered it to him. He grinned and took it, then handed it to me. Fading sunlight danced off the end of the knife and I starting sawing through the hairspray-clotted spikes, one by one. They fell on the grass, blue neon on the freshly cut green, somewhat jarring. As we sliced them off another friend of mine spoke into a dictaphone, recording his thoughts, which were getting increasingly chaotic. He played his voice back, the tones crackling in the air through the tinny speaker, and I looked over my friend's half-shorn head into the sunset, which was red again, like something cut open. Another spike dropped to the ground as the dictaphone played back an earlier entry, from when my friend had been living in the woods, and a comment about considering suicide dragged over us in the air. It seemed to become part of the red in the sunset as he played it, the gasping, grasping desperate voice, alone late at night, drunk and stumbling in the woods. I had been to the place that he had documented, and as I heard his voice come from the small speaker, I could feel as if my own soul had been inside his body, as he walked through the forest, my own nerves replacing his as his hands lingered on treetrunks for support as he walked, tripping over roots and speaking into the tiny machine. I cut the last spike off the guitarist's head, and looked up at the one playing the dictaphone, seeing that he had a sheepish, embarrassed look on his face, his mouth crumpling in a grimace that was half a rueful smile. I smiled back at him with sympathy.

We all had separate urges to find something lasting, something sure, concrete, in ourselves, but the urge didn't seem to be bring us any closer to ourselves, or to anything solid. I walked back to my spot in shadow behind the pine tree and started reading the book again, across the parking lot, taking one lock of my friend's shorn blue hair with me, a jagged spike, looking like an alien object. I used it as a bookmarker, still unable to focus on reading, and looked back to the scene I had left, where several girls were running their small white hands over my friend's freshly-cut head, smiling. The one with the dictaphone was speaking into it again, documenting every minute, as his disgusted girlfriend looked on. She had a small chin that receded slightly from her mouth and gave her a very dark shadowed frown when she was angry, and she had that grimace on now, her mouth puckered in distaste, irritated with him for recording himself and his thoughts, detaching himself from reality by documenting it so obsessively. She walked off across the yard and sat in a crab-apple tree, balancing in the fork, as he continued to rant, and the other bands, carrying their equipment, gathered on the lawn, most of them looking happy. Those of us who were questioning, tormented by something nameless, were separated from them by a kind of shroud, a fog that lingered around us. Tension grew in my belly as I looked at the glowering girl in the fork of the apple tree, her thin arms crossed and her hair blowing almost imperceptibly in the distance. Her separation resembled mine, but was different in that I wasn't distressed by anyone in the group, only estranged from them---or maybe my alienation was an illusion. My friend with the tape recorder walked over the the tree and rejoined his girlfriend, and tried to placate her, their shadows in the fork of the tree holding hands, trying to make peace, as the sun got lower. It brought a tear to my eye. I felt an intense sympathy with people, especially when I saw them in desolate scenes, but wasn't sure how to touch them with the feeling that I got. So I often remained in the distance like this, watching their dramas play out like they were on a stage. I got up and walked toward the woods.

The last band was playing, to a diminishing crowd, most of which had filtered out onto the lawn in front of the building, and the music served as a soundtrack to my journey, wherever it was taking me. I looked through the forest and saw that it was only a small section of trees, just before a hill, that dropped after them. I looked through the sparse branches, the illusion of a deep forest disintegrating, and down below saw building after building, many of them hotels, red lights shining on the tops of thirty or forty stories of porches and white plastic chairs replicating themselves. Alone, detached from the movement of the city below, it looked like a slightly dingy heaven, like something distant and unreachable. Cymbals smashed, and leaves waved in the wind. I clenched my fists and felt unutterably alone in the world. These desolate scenes had taken over my mind---if I was distracted from my life for a moment, they would flash past--hotel windows looking over an expanse of snow, long streets passing under blinking traffic lights with no traffic, train tracks with no trains, rust, concrete, an occasional bum passing through the whole empty scene, but mostly just the expanse, the expanse of so much loneliness, so many cracked sidewalks, so many rough-barked trees and silent cats, and alleyways, all yawning like mouths. Scenery of any kind had a powerful hold on me--the urge to turn every room, every face, into a poem, to frame it in a space that I could understand, was overpowering, and when I got a job the room would whirl around me as I tried to capture it all. I would stand at a dish sink, for instance, and it would be raining outside on the tar, blackening it, and the road would call to me, each drop landing making a commanding signal, an urgency to explore, to find other human beings with this trapped desire. The problem was that if not many other people showed the same frenzied urge, that you would begin to naturally stifle it, thinking it insane. It was unhealthy because it built up an interior frenzy that made your features freeze and your mind seem to clog up with thoughts, with endless questioning.

I could smell the swamp behind me, like a whisper to my senses. It called me back to physical reality, which was something I was always in danger of leaving. I walked back past the pine tree and into the clearing of the parking lot, and watched people getting into their cars, detached from the process. It was strange---ever since I could remember I had always been vaguely on the outskirts of any group that I was associated with, some uncommon element keeping me always on the outside, feeling somewhat stranded but curious as to why. The boy and girl in the distance detached themselves, shadows lengthening, from the apple tree, and, holding hands, came back to the ground, faces pale and drawn but relieved, as if from crying. I loved them, and pitied their emotional fragility. Maybe the whole world needed more emotional fragility. People, in general, were a wonder to me--they lived in an unspeakably incredible environment, yet seemed barely to notice. The huge clouds rolling overhead, the raging music bursting from a small room in the middle of nowhere, they had gotten used to these things, and most didn't treat them as miracles anymore. I wanted to know why, but also recognized that I myself didn't always move through life with enough obvious passion--maybe because I hadn't yet found a way to communicate it to people, maybe because writing was a solitary medium. Several car horns honked and amps were loaded into trunks, the instruments that had been plugged into them before now detached, soundless, and the landscape of the city beyond now the loudest noise, but only a hum. There was something illusory about it, even in its immensity, and it glowed like a dream in the distance as conversations and cigarette-smoke drifted past on the quiet, warm tar. A churchbell rang in the distance, a dulled metallic bong. Church. A distant universe to most of us. I placed my faith only in the solitary voices, in the strange and tormented individualists who made art out of the near-nothingness of their lives, who made the world sing and dance even against its will. There were many others who had felt what I felt, who had felt alienated, strange, passionate but trapped, but many of them were dead and I was starting to question where their theories had lead them, and where my thoughts would lead me. Before I had left the town I had been staying in, my relationship with my girlfriend had been troubled, by this distance created by too much desperate thought, too much dissatisfaction. I could feel her bright red hair, as shocking in its appearance as sudden blood from a wound, brushing against me every time I closed my eyes between the conversations, and feel her body beneath me on a distant bed, but I was disconnected and I had the nagging feeling that I would never see her again. The same feeling had always come to me in airports, at bus stations, in doctor's offices, in restaurants---Something is going to happen. Somebody is not going to arrive. The person you're waiting to meet isn't ever going to get here. It was a persistent, nagging paranoia, that I always tried to brush aside. But it stayed, a thought that clung like an odor, a vacancy, a missed connection. Someone tapped my shoulder. I felt like an ice sculpture. I got into a car and we streamed off through the glowing city as night fell, memories tumulting through me like a terrible waterfall, flickering as if lit up by passing flashbulbs or headlights. I felt sterile, not in a clean comfortable way, but in a scoured metallic way, untouched by my surroundings. My eyes grabbed at things so hard that my body was beginning to feel like a viewscreen, and a feeling of forboding lingered behind everything. It was going to be a long, long summer, I thought. Was there a certain point of alienation from which a human being could not return? Had I been hammered past the point of normal human communication? A friend tapped me on the knee. I looked to my side and his teeth were like a small sun, his smile carefree, for the moment, and wide, small shards of remaining hairsprayed blue hair glittering on his head in the passing streetlights. It was temporary. We were temporary. The people passing on the sidewalk would be mostly forgotten in a hundred years, as would most of the music coursing through my head. The sky was an immense dome, and above the hotels that stood high on either side of the car, some of which I had stayed in, watching the evening newscasters with icy faces in white, quite rooms, it stretched past into a lower hemisphere, it kept reaching past the horizon, into other time-zones where the sun was shining on other landscapes. It almost hurt to look at it for the wonder that it was. Maybe that was why we had roofs--not just to keep out the weather, but to keep out the awe. But I had lived in the woods before, and so had my friend with the dictaphone, and he was no longer entirely immune to it, and I was nearly paralyzed by it. His recording played back in the car's small claustrophobic interior--

"Lately it seems like people are...distant...I can't get a handle on what it is, I just feel like people aren't real, or don't want to be...it freaks me out..." the tape cackled, and he pressed a button to turn it off, the hiss of the speaker seeming to reflect the machine world around us, the hiss of technology behind his speech, invading, molded together with it. I pictured the tape unwinding, unrolling, unravelling, its information unreachable. Temporary. We're temporary. Then why do I feel, while watching all these bus stops and shop fronts go by, that none of us will ever cease to exist. Why do I feel the nagging of...eternity? My poems were cluttered with streetlamps and parking lots, eye-make-up, shopping carts and headlights--anything but the real world of flesh and blood, except for a few scatological details. I was running from something in reality, but certainly not its harshness, not its power--I had thoroughly acknowledged that, I thought. My girlfriend's eyes in my memory joined the silvery street landscape, her huge eyes, prematurely tired in her very young face, crying. Grabbing at me for something. Something I didn't have, some permanent knowledge I didn't have.

—Luke Buckham is a spreadhead poetry regular. A Quick Existence is his first prose contribution on spread.