BLAIR'S CHILDREN
By Bruce Hodder

We've got cigarettes and lager

and a lousy education.

We watch the telly every night

and practice masturbation.

We lost the only jobs we had

cos we were never punctual.

We laughed when we were disciplined

The boss called us presumptual.

And girls? The only girls we have

are spotty, with big arses.

They're thick as us, and laugh at kids

with asthma, blokes with glasses.

We dream of fancy cars and guns

and riding round the streets

like Snoop or Fifty Cent, the speakers

pounding out some beats.

But since we can't afford a car

we have to do with buses.

We slouch in seats to show we're tough

and perv on all the lasses.

We're children of the age of Blair.

It's all we'll ever be.

When he has gone, our empty lives'll

be his legacy.

We're small but hard, and when we come

into a pub, you fuckers,

you better let us have your seats

or we will cause a ruckus.

Bruce Hodder's Myspace Page

Poetry by Lyndsie Stremlow


Your Words Fall Gently All Around You

I do not want to hear
"You have skin of milk
and hair of honey..."
But I do want to hear it.

How much dead sky
is there between desire
and the soul,
how many corpses of rats
and pigeons?

I have not seen the sea,
but your eyes
drown me in my own reflection.
Your words fall gently
all around you,
but land as dead
bird wings in my lap.

I have seen your hands
across the table,
fingers folding
as they did on my face.
Your lovely angular hands
smelling of smoke
and mingling with the taste
of night air.

I do not want to tell you,
"You are made of vast eyes, and light..."
But I do want to tell you.

Skating

What we are really
doing is perpetually
skating around one another
out of fear of closeness
and of loss.
We are forever spending
our energy
seeking refuge
from all the possible
seasons of love,
wanting only the most vibrant,
and fruitful, but shunning
the quiet, the cold, the skeletal,
the gray seasons.

The first time I loved,
I loved steadfastly,
without cowering
from the many sorrows,
nor the overwhelming
happiness.

I stood bare of body
on a jagged cliff,
staring out over the whole
of man, flashing my naked badge
at every cavern,
at every abyss...

Flowers

After he always
wanted to hold me
because he knew
how to love and desire
simultaneously where I did not.
I would lie as still
as possible, his legs and arms
lined up perfectly with mine,
and sometimes we would talk
or listen to trains
from the window.
I always knew it would end,
that I never knew
how to care for an orchid.

He brought me a bouquet
of big white flowers
when I left him.
The note inside said
he understood mistaking
the complexity of love for confusion.

For weeks I forgot to water
the flowers
They died on our kitchen
table, later to be easily
tossed out with boxes
and empty bottles.

He Sleeps Silently As I Write

This is a house and a tomb
of pictures and poems hanging the room.
The boy sleeping warmly in his skin
was gone, but I thought of him
every day, at least once.
Now he sleeps silently as I write.
The day turns this tomb to night.
I've learned not to fight the shadows.

I've worked, made love, walked aimlessly
through the shit-stinking streets
and stone forests flowering
under concrete skies.
Like a bird building its ornate nest,
I've come to this room to await death
and lovers, and friends...
More than once I've taken men
I barely know into my bed
and tangled myself in their limbs.
In the morning it's always the walls
I wake to first, if not the child
wailing on the stairwell.
Waking to the world is hell-
it is a hell made of vacuous schedules,
paper money, and a stinking sense of obligation.
Waking at all is masturbation.

My mother insists that I quit smoking.
She says I'll never get a husband
if I ruin my teeth.
But, I tell her, I have a husband
I haven't spoken to in months,
and every day, at least once,
I've thought of this boy asleep in my bed.
I've watched the pulse breathing in his neck
for at least an hour now.

My mother insists that I quit smoking,
And it haunts me so that I can't forget
her scornful face as I finish another cigarette.

extract from Spartan

by Corpse Meditation

i.

He naked heap wobbled before the stretched canvas. Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" piccolo-ed from a decrepit phonograph sitting on a dead child's fireside chair. Her womb stank the mottled brew of stale oil paints and turpentine. A child crawled from that offal synagogue, welcome life slithering through viscera & trimmings of a butchered bitch. What nay-ing that child must have sounded before first breath; like a steer, bulging roars marking it's lament of infertility And when the nurse-maid carried the child's body to the furnace – what silent butchery open eyes of the dead do reap.

Audriana was painting a cathedral before the needle spun into the vinyl's fleshy disc, skipping and tearing across the paper label, bouncing off metal spike which fitted the album to spin and the needle to bore out Mozart's guffawing harmonics. Such simple mechanics – and the dead are born:

"The commoners will see that I have given defined form to the steeple where everything must be fluid. Fluid!" her mutterings amused herself.

Audriana bit into her bottom lip with such elegant ferocity the blood mixed with saliva puddle between jaw and lip seeping between pale teeth into a sort of afterbirth. She growled and reared her head back – the image of a steer; Figaro still skipping on her dead child's fire-side chair.

A halo of sunlight shone 'round her nays; back fat lurched and swung hula-hoop as if she were a teenage girl and her neck was supple and milky. A newest admirer stood watching her from the doorway; sensing his peers, Audriana lingered about drowning the flapping slabs of flesh smacking against each other by her macabre churlish guffawing - needing for him to admire her. A fawning. She spoke with her head thrust back as it had been, dripping paint brush dangling from her left hand. The boy mistook her for the Virgin de Guadalupe and hung his head.

" Please dear, fetch yourself there and cease that incessant ricochet – such unclaimed actions as yours for to gaze upon a mature heroine's supine form is dangerous; the abandoning of your want and desire, not your gazing my love."

Her fingers fluttering, like scissors cutting a dead man out of bloodied suit and underwear, delicately at the end of her arm called for him to approach. The boy did as he was told.

"Before I commence your tutoring, I always ask

my…..participants…..succumb to a provision of mine."

Lilting, like a choirboy, her voice - yet grizzled and ammonia-washed; some muscle-car brawn engine boiling from silence into drilling, eruptive, epiphany-charging gallop and roar! The boy nodded.

"Read this my lovely. If you comply, we shall begin. Otherwise, retrace the steps that brought you here and distill all memory of me into passing dust."

The boy held here with unsteady grip an index card holding a Bible verse – Matthew 8:1-4. His gaze, ever more frenetic and shifting from dead words to Audriana's face ,carved the curve of letter and sentiment of word from card to mind, drowning :

"When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said 'Lord if you are willing, you can make me clean.' Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing.' he said 'Be clean!'

Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him 'See that you don't tell anyone. But go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.'"

Audriana's hand slid over his, clenching, stroking his soft fist. He wide-eyed, startled at touching, at the foreign drawing-forth from some removed place of contemplation, a vihara or torture chamber, he couldn't say only he was horrified the power touch possessed at this moment. She drew her long bony index finger up laterally to her pursed lips. The boy focused on the crucifix of lips and crooked finger – her lips moist and plump, the only record of her ardent youth.

He nodded in agreement.

She drew him into her with a wave of wrinkled hand.

"Have you thought of killing long?"

The boy weeping, shivering in white tight underwear strangling bulges of fat 'round thigh – he slumped / sweating / holding himself up by the elbows on her recaimer; she stroking his matted wheat-hued locks laying alongside him through the open back , naked / seeming a lioness drenched with moonlight / tickling his thigh with canine finger nails / the boy evaporated in the immensity of her girth .- a scene Modigliani was gladly sketching in Heaven sucking down tea and barbiturates, twisting Aphrodite's nipple with wrenching passion so she drooled on his fingers where he cleaned the paintbrush and he continued the contortion of woman into lion:

"I, I, I, I, I never knew I wanted to to to to to kill anyone. OH MY GOD! WHAT THE FUCK AM I?! I JUST WANT THINGS TO BE RIGHT !"

Slobbering, snot heaving flood from reddened nose. The boy choked mucus, gagging – coughed up revelation and bits of corn and bell-pepper.

Up from the floor came his collared, long-sleeve shirt; first in a crumpled centerpiece, than Audriana handing it to the boy – disemboweled from huddled whimpers. The boy wiped his face, blew the nose & wiped again.

"It is natural my love for a young man such as yourself to be recalcitrant. You want manifestation of the voices trapped inside the proper gentleman that your elder council demands; your parents, grandparents – they've experienced the same thing as you are undergoing. Simply put, they did not have an ally, a friend as you have in me to show you the voices must be released – they must be birthed if you are to assume masterhold over yourself. It's imperative to release the whispers my love. Ultimately, YOU are the voices."

Audriana slipped away from her softness, going to a wardrobe. The door she opened blocked her from the boy's view but his llantomuni continued its heaping in his wet shirt – smothering. She returned the door to it's latch and reproached her way to the boy carrying with her a long slender object clunking across her oak floor.

"Take this my love."

She drew him into her with a wave of wrinkled hand.

ii.

She flung her bush whispers away from his mouth; standing there, dangling this dark object from her inverted finger. The boy smelled rotten eggs & grew silent, his cries.

"Stand with me. Release the voices."

Their bodies brushing; stomach against stomach, waxing – like two smokestacks stretched against a pitch-grey-black sky of their own filth, she breathed her words, circling his lips with hers:

"This will free you. Your anger will guide – what you hold, what you attack is up to you. Use this against the ones, or, the one my love who has tried to destroy you. Lash against your enemy. Choose your recompense cautiously."

Wrapping around the boy, Audriana slithered out on her recamier again – he took his place before her, holding the dark object she passed to him in their embrace. His finger rubbed something smooth & jagged beneath cold iron.

"Who has imprisoned you my love? Your captors – assail your captors."

He snapped the belt over his shoulder; whipping, glass gouging skin, tearing a strip of flesh clean. Blood. The cold dripping. Blood poured down his humped back. He crumpled on the floor, lashing still his own body in free-fall. Skin hung off the broken glass – holes in his body opening:

"FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!"

Each blaspheme, each lashing an antistrophe for each captor; some chorused Black Mass where hooded figures sang castrato for Lucifer & the echo of their plea returned a bellow, shaping itself before them.

Audriana toyed her clit – pinching between thumb & pinkie. Her head reared, belching in delight.

"Ah darling – you are Christ my love. Mmmmmmmmm – you become Christ this night."

Corpse Meditation's myspace

Poetry by Leopold McGinnis

Modern Art Gone are the days Of artists and easel Amongst treetops and seagulls These artists hide in caves Spilling abstractions From paint cans Using photographs For models Of a world they’ll Never see. Revenge of the Mouse He watched a mouse die on the busy sidewalk corner of a skyscraper downtown Heaving, staring up at him with eyes as black as space breathing slower and slower - some sort of respiratory problem - easing into the pavement until… the spark was gone And he thought he’d kill himself if death wasn’t even more pathetic and insignificant than life - he thought, if he could grow to a thousand feet tall he’d trample this city and all its ugly people underfoot Take a dump on its national monuments Piss in the water and crush the earth between his fingers like clay, Laugh! Laugh! Then he’d blast off into the furthest reaches of space Finding brave new civilizations and extinguishing them one by one, The greens ones, the red ones, the purple ones before gathering up the debris to make a gun the weight of fifty black holes dense enough, powerful enough big enough to wipe out the universe in one single shot And then he’d bite down on the metal muzzle pull back the trigger and spray his grey-matter across the dark-matter leave a universe of colored memories rotting in the vacuum of nothingness the red ones, the green ones the monuments and the mouse.

ULA Director’s Manifesto #1 We come hungry, sharp teeth bared for literary feast. The wine and the new literature (ours). Academic jargoneers grow dusty on our plates. Where is the sweet universe in all her wretched beauty? We want deliverance from her. We want to become her. Fancy this, my friends, Modernism isn’t dead, it lives in the belly of Bill Blackolive. A handlebar mustache greased with language, sweet syllables. They drip, simmering holy words, into the Texas sand and wash away into the ocean. Breton: “That madness or the other.” We are the mad and we are in love but pick no madness in particular (the dagger comes too close to the scalp). Instead, we have eaten of Beats Punk (Zines) 60’s Surrealism Situationism Modern/Postmodernism Etc. They dissolve in the stomach and become a new energy. The energy: Zeen. KILL DEAD LITERARY FORMS. We ignite with typing, ask questions later. We have become the carnival and the carnival plays our songs We’re a psychic café. We’ve come to play and play the word.