Cassandra Voices

Category: Poetry

  • Demon Cum

    DEMON CUM

    I

    He’s the latest spawn of Hell
    with a lanyard and a notch lapel
    and “there is no alternative,”
    as if nothing has to give,
    a stench of sulfur to intrigue
    some think-tank from the Ivy League.
    Gray-flecked beard and close-cropped hair,
    a ruin that’s beyond repair
    but crying out for management,
    refurbishing, and rising rent,
    but atop primordial slimes,
    an op-ed in The New York Times,
    a view where people look like ants,
    paid by fellowships and grants,
    a Predator drone with mark on lock,
    an unpaid intern on his cock,
    a data-driven genocide,
    a seminar taught on the side,
    a speech into a thousand mics,
    a million viral Facebook likes,
    a sociopath with lots of friends,
    a handshake that never fucking ends,
    a five-star meal, a rail of blow,
    the so-called former status quo.

    II

    The poem is reduced to a statistic
    of lines and syllables, attempted tropes,
    and stresses. Still, you should be realistic—
    you’ll hold off the degenerates with rhyme,
    with Ivy League credentials, and you’ll cope
    in little magazines, marking time
    with versifications of the status quo—
    a plea for dialogue, an early snow
    beatified, a metaphor that’s felt
    in the flipping of a calendar,
    one more year before the ice caps melt.
    It’s either not our fault—or all our fault.
    Shake your head and grip the bannister.
    Head to bed or dress up like John Gault,
    content there’s really nothing you can do.
    content that all real change must start with you.

    III

    Resistance wears a muu-muu now.
    “Yes we can” and “we know how”
    becomes your mother on the line.
    You tell her everything is fine,
    but she knows better. All the fuss
    takes on shades of Oedipus—
    a tired old lady on a stage,
    the slapstick ending of an age.
    Daddy Warbucks, Howard Roark.
    A NASDAQ surge. A high-tech dork.
    A mother-god is on the phone,
    scolding you in monotone.
    A shattered statue, endless sands—
    a poem no one understands
    despite iambic clarity.
    Inside a tent marked “VIP”
    our goddess goes back to her crypt.
    The tripwire, yet again, is tripped.

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  • Double Take

    In 1973, my first time here,
    I’d stood in wonder with my head strained back
    As dizzily I’d tried to see how high
    The buildings had to reach to scrape the sky,
    Then lowered my gaze just like a steeplejack,
    Who staring straight ahead finds nothing sheer.

    Instead now I’m a resident who knows
    To cross Manhattan’s gridded streets it’s best
    When lights are red to zig and when they’re white
    To zag – a kind of crow’s rectangle flight,
    Combining north or south with east or west,
    Allowing chance to lead me by the nose.

    And yet my sights too low do I neglect
    The joys I’m underlooking as I pass?
    Careering too determined and hard-nosed,
    I miss those older buildings juxtaposed,
    With superstructures shaped in steel and glass,
    Where classical and modern intersect;

    Or how the scrapers taper, tilt or lean,
    To strike us with new beautiful contours;
    How topmost floors designed to counteract
    Excessive symmetry are stacked,
    And houses show surprise entablatures –
    So much unless we look remains unseen.

    On top of one apartment block my eye
    Picks out what seems at first some weeds grown wild,
    But they’re well-watered leaves of terrace trees
    Seen peeping over penthouse balconies –
    The rooftop plants you’d tended as a child,
    Still waste their green on earthbound passers-by.

    I can’t be too unworldly or withdraw –
    I live my lower days here down-to earth,
    Look horizontally for safety’s sake –
    But suddenly a higher double take
    Delights still in my love’s New York rebirth.
    I’m staring heavenward again in awe.

    Micheal O’Siadhail is the author of sixteen volumes of poetry. His latest book-length poem The Five Quintets was previously reviewed by Frank Armstrong for Cassandra Voices.

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  • Two Poems

    All the while the windows wait for no one

     

    While there were those who climbed,

    It was only you who knew the spaces through the ladders.

    The dent of shadows

    Upon the tumbling walls.

     

    When the door is too small to walk through

    And the gate shifts at your hip.

    All the while the windows wait for no one.

    Like miniature hats.

     

    Where idle hope feasts on the cavities of the rooms

    As soaring beginnings roar.

    Where the seamless thread that shapes your brow

    Falls hollow into your skin.

    As the walls of the dolls’ house

    Can no longer keep you in.

     

    *******

    I am not…

     

    I am not just around the corner,

    Or held in the palm of your hand,

    like a scent escaping the rose.

     

    I am not fully heard in the howl of the gulls,

    Or in a scattering of dandelions raw through the air,

    like condensed smoke.

     

    I am not in the taste of the salt of seawater,

    Whose splash is seeped into your skin.

     

    I am not to be touched through your feet on the grass,

    Or in the chill of the heat of your summer’s loss.

     

    I do not scream through the silence of the stars,

    I am not hounded by your tears

    Or held in the rubble of your fingertips.

     

    I am not in the sworn word that returns to your mind,

    As sword or scythe through the kind air.

    If you see me in the shadows I am not there.

     

    I am far closer than all of this.

     

    Paul Downes’ poetry has been published in the Wallace Stevens Journal and EUR/OPEN. He has also published books and journal articles in areas of philosophy, psychology, education, law, anthropology and social policy and has given keynote lectures and invited presentations in 29 countries. His books include, The Primordial Dance: Concentric and Diametric Spaces in the Unconscious World (2012), Inclusion of the Other: Concentric Space as a Life Principle Beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur (Routledge, forthcoming 2019). He is Associate Professor of Psychology, School of Human Development, Dublin City University, Ireland.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • RAT RUN

    They turned up at the door dressed all in black,
    from their baseball caps and bomber jackets down
    to their DM boots, and they hustled in like hitmen
    or bouncers, or bailiffs, or the Old Bill
    or some kind of security syndicate,
    shifting on their feet, in uniform,
    black-gloved hands bearing black briefcases.
    One of them did the talking, one was silent.

    I told them of the massacred bananas,
    savaged in their skins on the kitchen table,
    and how I’d thought it was the live-in landlord
    tripping home from a spree whose bitter end
    involved the bananas taking an awful beating.
    But seeing the state the place was in next day,
    he’d thought the same of me. That’s when we knew
    there were some hungry monsters in the kitchen.

    So, casing the joint, the men inhabit the kitchen
    and fall to all fours, closing on the kill.
    The dishwasher gets dragged out, and it’s like
    lifting the stone on a woodlouse colony.
    The wall had been unfolded from the floor
    like a turned page; and the cave’s mouth revealed
    the shredded remains of the wall, the copper pipes
    and a burial mound of apple cores and nutshells.

    So then I told them of the landlord’s apples
    taken from the bowl and, one by one,
    carted up the corridor and left
    like the scene of a lynching or line-up execution
    after the firing squad had done its work:
    the butchered fruit, at two-foot intervals,
    arranged like a sacrificial offering
    in a ghoulish symmetry of rotting heads.

    And I told them of the unfathomable noise,
    that thumping from behind the walls at night
    like a house party got out of control
    somewhere down the road, or maybe next door,
    or in the next room. When you went to look
    no one was there. All you found were the scraps
    churned up from the dustbin and flung to the floor
    as the scratch of claws retreated across the roof.

    Back in Calcutta, Ajit would impale them
    on a spear, standing over the manhole
    killing rats like shooting fish in a barrel.
    One time, from behind my bedroom door,
    a writhing hairy thing the size of a hen
    appeared on the end of a prong, under my nose,
    as I drank my rum; and I jumped out of my skin
    as Ajit took off laughing down the hall.

    Here in the kitchen, the men recall the foxes
    they’d stalked this morning halfway to the heavens
    in the open air at the pinnacle
    of the latest mile-high plate-glass monolith
    rising out of the rubble at London Bridge,
    reaching an impossible perspective
    seventy storeys upwards, in the grey
    and swirling skies directly under the flightpath.

    They’d been living on the sixty-seventh floor
    of Europe’s tallest tower as it went up,
    surviving on the builders’ scraps, said the quiet one.
    It’s dark when we clock on. If you miss your step
    no one would catch you; no one would know you’d gone.
    The city was a circuit board, its grid
    lit up with diodes in the night, then dawn
    was spread like a map in pink and grey beneath you.

    And to hear him tell it, me and the landlord
    hang off a cliff, transplanted by vertigo
    down to the streets below, looking out through the eyes
    of animals on the sprawl that, at first light,
    the foxes contemplated from the sky:
    rabbit warren, anthill, molehill, rat run…
    You could step out into the atmosphere, he said
    with a faraway look, go strolling down the river.


    Timur Moon works as a psychotherapist at hospitals and clinics in London. Formerly a journalist, he worked as a reporter and correspondent based in the UK, South Asia and the Persian Gulf. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and continues to write poems. 

  • Twinned

    Storrington

    Place of storks and green-
    clad chalk. Are the Gypsies still
    perched on ‘The Warren’?
     

    Camargue

    Flamingo heaven,
    white horses, black madonna.
    Heart’s grey forgiven.

    Camargue

    Red dust on the shoes
    of Gaditans carrying
    Sara-la-Kali.

    Storrington

    At the age of eight:
    the camp fire by their wagon
    shed heavenly light.

    Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of six collections of poetry. Faber and Faber published his Selected Poems in 2016 and he is editor of their 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).

  • Nonetheless

    A cormorant dives to feed,
    then perches, its wings
    spread to dry.
    There are fish, there is
    a break in the clouds.

    A freighter embarks, laden
    with necessary goods,
    including toys, 

    much as a researcher
    presents his findings.

    This world is henceforth one in which
    these things have taken place,

    and the gates that would prevail against them
    have so far failed.

     

    J.D. Smith’s fourth collection, The Killing Tree, was published in 2016, and his individual poems have appeared in publications including Dark Mountain, New Verse News and Terrain. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science and the children’s picture book The Best Mariachi in the World. He works as an editor in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare, their rescue animals and no small amount of trepidation. More information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.

  • Two Poems

    Anthony Caleshu’s forthcoming book, from which this pair of poems is taken, is titled, A Dynamic Exchange between Us (Shearsman, 2019). He is the author of three previous books of poems, including The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and Of Whales: in Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins (Salt, 2010; named a ‘book of the year’ in The Daily Telegraph). He is also the author of three books of criticism on contemporary poetry, most recently as editor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2018)). He is Professor of Poetry and Programme Manager for the MA Creative Writing at University of Plymouth.

  • Psalm 95

    95

                   While someone exhorts us
               In song to sing to God,
	I've looked askance and asked, is he
               Among us here or not?
And found that question, off its no-man's land
               Uptaken then in hand,

               Lies with sheep in shade,
               And takes its rest in space,
           Beneath a large-leafed chestnut, bright
               With burning candles, placed
At intervals upon it, by that same hand,
               Which forms from sea dry land.

               Can it be we have
               A second chance of rest?
        I labour to hear a voice whose sworn
               Obscurity you blessed,
Like a bright cloud above unharvested grain,
               A clear heat after rain.

    Edward Clarke’s latest book is called The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini.

  • Gitanjali – after Rabindranath Tagore

    I am made endless for your pleasure

    Again and again emptied and filled

    A frail vessel ever with fresh life

    And melodies eternally new

    Breathed through me

    As though a little reed flute

    Cast over the earth

    And at your hand’s immortal touch

    My small heart loses all limits of joy

    To create ineffable utterances

    And on these small hands of mine

    Your infinite gifts are received

    Ages pass and still they pour

    And still there is room for more

     

    Navika Ramjee was born in South Africa in 1950 into an Indian family. Her family history is marked by that of the British Raj. She now lives in Oxford. Her work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal and Aerodrome, a South African literary journal.

  • LA RÉSISTANCE

    Missiles flashed, and it was beautiful—
    flares in the darkness of a fallen world
    where Satan plays the good guy in a wig.
    I’m in my safe space, a battered easy chair,
    swearing at the laptop, at the stream
    of video and voices, overlaid
    on top of breakfast. Coffee’s gone lukewarm,
    the trail’s gone cold. The woman on TV
    hasn’t realized it yet. Her show
    is sub-LeCarré trash, the waking dream
    of self-styled cells in Williamsburg, Crown Heights,
    Bushwick, even Windsor Terrace now.
    They’ll surely man the barricades some time
    after the co-op shift, when work slows down
    and the app is live and making NASDAQ bank.
    The cast of Hamilton will sing a song—
    a poem by Ocean Vuong now set to music
    by some ex-junkie from the punkoisie
    while bombs explode, bigger than before,
    to make a new crater in Afghanistan.

     

    Quincy R. Lehr’s most recent poetry collections are The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar and Heimat. He teaches history in Los Angeles.