Poetry By Misti Rainwater-Lites

lonely down saturday's highway

blistered by your sun
which is your ego fried hard
and I'm allergic

too soon the moon goes
like my mom, a Gemini
I have no covers

blast me like you will
scorch me like you do, laughing
watch the layers peel...

Pep Talk From A Security Supervisor

they are wondering if maybe
you could get to work
five minutes earlier
grave shift guards love to bitch

they are wondering if maybe
you could smile and speak to them
when you scowl in silence
it makes them nervous
call center employees
are all about the mindless smiles
and matching courtesies

maybe you could iron
your uniform
shine your shoesput your hair in a ponytail
look awake
put away the poetry
and lipstick
sit up straightmake eye contact

a monkey could do your job
but good monkeys
are hard
to find

another American man stickin’ to his guns

the bubble head bitch is interviewing
the marine asshole on some mindless
morning show
they are surrounded by people
with balloons and posterboards
who wave at the camera
hopped up on starbucks coffee
and their pathetic fifteen minutes
bubble head bitch tells marine asshole
there are people who disagree
with his actions
which were emptying two magazines
into two iraqi insurgents
then writing No Better Friend No Worse Enemy
on the hood of their car
marine asshole says that’s fine
he fought in a war
to defend those people’s right
to disagree
just what the world needs
another american man
stickin’
to
his
guns

I Could've Been a Flower

I was on the ground
mute and delicate
on my back
I could've been
a flower
or a weedbut I was a six year old girl
and he was the preacher's boy from across the street
an average sized teenage boy
but to me he was a giant
and I couldn't fight him off
he pinned me down
and I saw that the clouds were in the sky
and I could hear the birds in the trees and on the telephone wires and
the cars
driving down the street
and he gave me a Little Golden book
filled with songs
and told me to read to himand if I could read
he would let me go
I was so scared and illiterate
I was such a slow learner
late bloomer
I was a dumb kid
not the kind of kid parents brag about at cocktail parties
and I was weak
and meek
not a fighter
and I don't know where my parents were
I don't know where anyone was
I was there
and he
was above me
and that was first in a series
of episodes that made my inner voice dialogue
work overtime and off the clock
I am small
I am a girl
I am weak
I cannot speak
I have no voice
I have no choice
They can push me down
and step on me
I'm going to have to learn how to read
I'm going to have to learn how to scream
This isn't a dream
This is life happening whether the angels in heaven like it or not
They must be having an off day
They must be having choir practice

I could've been a flower
but I
was
a girl

Misti Rainwater-Lites is the editor and publisher of Instant Pussy, a monthly print zine that features poetry that does not suck, collages, weird craig's list personals, tits & ass & pussy & the occasional cock. http://instantpussy.tripod.com

Poetry By A.D. Winans

FOR KELL

Old guitar slung over his back
Pure country singing the blues
in all of us
with eyes that cry out to be heard
Leaving a message on
Annie’s answering machine
Reading a poem about a bird
that died in his hands
Remembering the scattering
of his daughter’s ashes
Caught in the pit of sorrow
This man of music
This one time old friend
who works the nerve ends
like a skilled surgeon
Still fighting
like the rest of us
for whatever time
is left

CITY HAPPENINGS

there having a rumble
at Ellis and Eddy streets
and the police are slow
to respond
you can see the rage in the
Chicano’s eyes smell the
fear in Whitey the
Blacks are shucking
and jiving and rolling dice
while placing bets on winner
and losers alike
the street whores move down
a block or two
to ply their trade
one white, one Asian
one spade

the black and white arrives
at last dispensing the players
like bit actors auditioning
for a role in the big show

small town punks gather themselves
run for cover
don’t stop to look back
head for crack-house
biding their time
like a stoned Jesus
hung out to dry
on your mother’s clothesline

BILL

He keeps a photograph tucked away
Inside his meager belongings
Three soldiers smiling smoking cigarettes
A Viet Cong in black pajamas
Hanging upside down from a pole
Gutted like a fish
Flesh nailed to wood Jesus fashion
Needs no caption
Guilt shadows him in doorways
And under freeways where
He now makes his home
Incoming artillery tears at his nerves
Pieces of flesh stuck to bamboo
Like a piece of meat thrust into
A tiger’s cage
Vietnamese peasants
Suspected Cong haunt his dreams
Like a faceless Santa Clause leaving
Behind a bag of body parts

GOING TO MAKE POETRY
AN INSTITUTION

The preacher man
don’t believe in evolution
The con-man
don’t believe in revolution
The priest has run out
of absolution
No more autographs
No more forced laughs
No more hanging around the zoo
swapping stories with gurus
Going to smoke some dope
with my good friend the Pope
Going to make love nice and slow
Read me some Edgar Allen Poe
Lose myself in the late night show
Going to make a cameo appearance
on the 10 p.m. news
Play me some John Lee Hooker blues
Going to penetrate a prerogative
Bugger the cosmos
Evolve evolution into a revolution
Put anarchy on the stockmarket
Nuke technology outlaw e-mail
Declare Da Da the official
English language
Going to hang religion from a tree
Make John Brown the new
National Anthem
Turn outlaws into in-laws
Land owners into donors
Put Bukowski’s face
on Mount Rushmore
Pay homage to a whore
Going to name a bus after
Rosa Park
Put a little nookie
in every fortune cookie
Expose Saint Nick as a chick
with a dick
Going to invite the First Lady
to ride through the streets of Chinatown
dressed in a see-through nightgown
Going to talk to the fly in the soup
alone or in a group
Going to sing a ballad with
Lorca and a band of gypsies
stop off at the manager
and have a talk with the Lone Ranger
Going to put an end to hemorrhoids
Outlaw humanoids
Going to offer a truce
Bring back Lenny Bruce
Make politicians ride the caboose
Going to go back to school
Erase the golden rule
Going to feed a vulture
Starve off mass culture
Going to turn evolution into
A revolution
Make poetry an institution

A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet, writer and photographer. His work has been published internationally. Recent books include This Land Is Not My Land (Presa Press) and The Last Rodeo (Bottle of Smoke Press). Presa Press will be publishing a book of his Selected Poems in January 2007. He can be contacted at ad1936@juno.com

I really like Christopher Robin's stuff. Funny, elegant, sad poems. Good poems. Christopher is from Santa Cruz, California and he publishes one of the two or three best poetry magazines in the country. Aptly titled Zen Baby, you can get a copy by sending a couple bucks to PO Box 1611, Santa Cruz CA 95061.








Poetry By Christopher Robin

Xerox Sprint

How will we interpret
This reluctant American incarnation?
This wasteland of cells and shortcomings…
Low budget/unfinished holograms
Shoot across scarred bellies/
Unholy canvases/
Bodies we can’t translate-
In here
That check will never be cashed
In here
Punk rock beats gurgle up through the toilet
And mix with surrealism
At the cracklin’ Mic
This is a carnival of bullshit
The cops are right outside
Trying to make the distinction between
Those with a poem
And those without
But how can they tell?
We get:
Walt Whitman tattoos
And Emily Dickinson enemas
Buy old cars
Collect typewriters
Join MySpace/
Cell-phoned
Or chopping-wood
Celibate
Or sexually-panicked
Unmade beds smelling of schemes…
Some of us fast/
And some just sit still
to wait for the wine
To bring a supernatural dawn/
picked last for the team
or not picked at all
Some of us will break out
Off the beer/off the dole
Most of us won’t
My ink is an eternal sprint
Across these Xeroxed outsider pages
My friends and I are headlines
In the papers no one reads-
Moving so fast through the living
I fear boredom more than death
And I refuse to sleep-
The lumbering old trains pass us by
Singing their graffitied-death-rattle
while we sling emails
with lightning irrelevance-
in the city/honor what kills you
or say uncle


GIVE US A LAP DANCE-THE END IS NEAR!

The future’s givin’ a lap dance but luckily it’s too dark to see the wrinkles

so stand at attention feel that red, white and blue pride swell

She’s got two bad eyes a sore on her lip Destiny is browbeaten hunkered down ready to one up herself

She ain’t got nothin’ on Hitler, Mussolini, Cheney, DOES she?

Please board now the ship they told us would never sink

is sinking AGAIN but the sunset is amazing the record is skipping

the champagne has been pissed in so many times the universal joke IS embalmed

Worm eaten PASSE

Nobody’s laughin’ the parties been over since the first stone was ever hurled

We are limping towards our own execution the corners of our mouths clipped in irony

practiced in black-lit mirrors reading Spin Magazine

and what a story this will make!

Where we can link our ‘elevated yellow” PANIC? and government sanctioned

Obliteration?

Is there a chat-room appropriate to make THE BIGGEST SPLASH?

Big Brother’s flipping our switches our DNA

The CIA swims in our blood

but popularity doesn’t matter anymore (until there’s a uniformed pounding at the door) right?

any more than GIANT TSUNAMI’S AND HURRICANES AND RUNNING OUT OF gasoline matter-right?

Adam and Eve don’t look beyond my fig leaf!

Whenever I FUCK Barbie and Ken have lived in vain!

But I’ll never have a car with a sun-roof anyway

as long as the Black Power movement is still treading water

MTV: what does the taste of bile reveal about 90 pound ‘girls going wild’? I’ve never seen it on the newsreel….

Retching sounds in the Women’s Studies class retching sounds on Spring Break…..

But don’t blame this generation

illiterate but downloading-all-the-deeper-meanings–plastic-band-of-cyber-monkeys….


with my phone unplugged
I get the news in my sleep via karmic reruns of a century imploding on itself

All those hometown leg-less boys could be sitting on barstools right now watching

football games holding the women’s movement back fifty years

Or shooting deer instead of Iraqi’s

my heroes will go AWOL or bomb Wall Street

But what do I know about bringing down empires? I have barely the fortitude
To tie my own shoes!

I HAVE BEEN DECLARED INCOMPETENT! ‘Born to Lose’? my planned

obsolescence was planned by me

it’s all quicksand

this American dream

and we are all at this very moment NOWHERE TO BE FOUND

praise be to Allah for that


Clown Fish

I can’t work
I’ve dedicated this day
to snapping my fingers
and singing a chorus
with the last
heartbeat of the world
I’m a carnie animal
ugly jack
skipping over minefields
of loose synapses
a broken headed
professional bumbler
by trade
gender mutant
of the sensual circus
lilting ghost radio
in my nerves
of a zig zagging
carefree
pony-tailed girl
who I loved with
such impossible belief
I asked her to please grow up
and leave me
in the loop
of the eternal summer 8-Track
with an endless boyhood sky
and no mothers calling me home
the dummy of the furious walk
searching for an ill defined mysticism
promised to me
when the world
fell out of my skull
I dream the numbers
I own the make believe
but I can’t find a nickel
to scratch the sunshine
out of this winning day