Final Poems

#finalpoems / [?]

In the Wasteland

The end.
Without you,
I will wander the wasteland
as a nobody
to get me behind me,
and I will fail.

I will ride faster and faster.
I will waste, raid the oceans
for more mermaid meat,
scour the towns for
someone who looks like you
to split in two
again and again.
I will leave a wake of loss,
slay the lady of the lake,
smother hearts with my boredom,
my acid god, my amphetamine jihad.
I will drown more youth in rivers of booze,
suck and fuck dynasties into oblivion.
I will poison the well,
serve shit at the table.
I will string the pearls of grief
I stole back from swooning others,
polished,
and they will shine bright enough
to blind Venus for good through midnight
into my mourning.

It’s all to say:
I don’t know myself without you.
And still, every morning,
every year,
5:01 am,
the gem you left in my chest
wakes me again
and again and again,
again and again,
with the feeling you are about
to call my name.

When he is not polluting fresh minds as a teacher-for-hire, Matt Carney writes prose, poetry and music, and trips graciously but liberally through San Francisco, never forgetting to wear his shit-together-glasses as he watches the sunset. His heroes are David Bowie, Ellen Ripley, and Chun Li.

#finalpoems / [?]

in my last moments i’ll be singing a Weezer song 

almost always there’s a song

morning       so  i was a teenager

again   listening to Weezer

a sanctuary   so

cozy   so  now i

go out (avoid roommates)

lost the garage

where i felt safe

to sing

melanie farley lives in Philadelphia, PA. Her chapbook things we have in writing POEMS (for Z) was published with dancing girl press in 2016, and you can find her work elsewhere, if you do some sleuthing. She almost always wakes up with a song in her head.

#finalpoems / [?]

Two Hearts

For so many years you were my oxygen
My breath
My conversational mate
You made me laugh

My heart inside your heart
My hand inside your hand

Before we knew each other we were lost
Two halves wandering
Steps searching
Traveling toward a place to call home

You found me
My arms were wreaths
My intentions were circles
Our laughter was a room filled with jewels

You spoiled me by listening to me
I spoiled you by laughing at your jokes

I hope I gave you enough
I did my best and that was all I had

You were/are/will be
My everything

Nothing will change
Nothing
When the world comes to an end

Eliza Mimski lives and writes in San Francisco, California. Her work has appeared in Sparkle and Blink, the Lascaux Review, Poets Responding to the News, Fiction365, amid other places.

#finalpoems / [?]

One Bird

There is no way out of the labyrinth, meandering trap.
Language is a circle that goes nowhere, though it entertains the mind;
Scripture calls it God.

The world is not the thing: Table, chair, word, person.
Time only happens in thought, what is seen is not seen,
Space and content.

All of history is a sham, this human construct of box:
Pull the zip tab, see it rip and go up in flame, a puff of smoke.
What’s left is nameless.

Coffee is perking, the furnace kicks on, sunlight creeps through the blinds
Daylight turns to night, breath rises, falls, a pulse beats in the heart,
One truth.

Cardinal red against a cursive scroll of tree branch,
A bird thinks it sees another, but there is only ever one bird,
Singing beneath

A blistered empty sky.

Kelly Thompson’s work has been published in The Rattling Wall, Entropy, Oh Comely, Dove Tales, The Rumpus, Proximity, The Writing Disorder, Witchcraft, Manifest Station, 49 Writers, and other literary journals. Her essay “Hand Me Down Stories” was recently nominated for a Pushcart by Proximity. She is also curator for “Voices of Addiction” at The Rumpus. She is a psychotherapist and has a small private practice. She also works on assignment with soldiers recently returned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado in the sunshine of the spirit. You can follow her on Twitter @stareenite

#finalpoems / [?]

Arcana 16

We were in a large cathedral
important to those such as us: lovers
of history, lovers of odd
structures of the mind, hippy-types,
wayward. Some took pictures,
others moved toward a green field,
their faces dark from much sunlight,
bodies tight with exercise.

I was watching in a hall. I heard
a shouting outside and when I looked again
the clouds had become aggressive,
moving toward us, a tornadic wind
circling meaningfully
as if to entrance us with its dance.
Some cried out, take cover.
Most could not. The sky darkened.

Lightning began dropping all around.
I was instantly aware I too was in trouble.
The cathedral was coming down, battered
by storm wind and lethal lightning,
flaming from its spires, it’ll
soon collapse. I left with my skin intact,
thinking every lightning bolt

that fell would certainly scour me.
That the picture was similar to the tarot
card was not wasted on me,
that the divination represents a collapse
of environment, a renegotiation
of possibilities, a surrender
of what at one time was all one knew.

I awoke then, feeling strange.
I pictured Rimbaud and a cow on a hill,
thinking of the cow the
separate wisdom of moving slow through
fields one creates with one’s step,
nearer the will, nearer the embrace, the
top of one’s head alit with Christmas tinsel,
and Rimbaud a voice drawn in chalk.

It was a dream, I thought, looking out my window.
The sun shook the trees of its silver dollars.
I wish you could have seen the disarmament
of the trees in noon time as Rimbaud
was drawn upon my voice with a light blue chalk.
It is recovered, I thought,
it is recovered.

Elias Siqueiros is a poet from El Paso TX.  He is the author of the poetry collection The Heart Of An Animal. Work has appeared in publications such as Word Riot, Stirring, Former People, Milk, and elsewhere.

#finalpoems / [?]

determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI), xxvi-xxvii, 117, 119, 124-25, 127, 195, 248n24

Jared Wells is a writer and sound artist based in Auckland, New Zealand.

#finalpoems / [?]

What entitles me to talk about the end of the world?

Humans have had gunpowder and steel for years. Rocks and clubs for longer. Teeth and fists for longer. We’ve been ending worlds for centuries.

I bet trench warfare happened on sunny days. Men pulled pins with their teeth while boys bit into birthday cakes.

Why is my end of the world significant? More than every car accident and earthquake combined? My death won’t be as bright as the fire by the bay in 1906.

We only have a few draws left before the filter. But what’s to say the ember is out? Maybe it’ll be hot enough to light a new one.

#finalpoems / [?]

I write to you in confidence
That you will understand
This poem acts as recompense
For that which I demand.

I beg you do not come to me,
Although it is the end.
I know you’ll ask how this could be,
To leave your sweetest friend.

For only it seems natural,
That we should face the close,
With fingers clasped, so near in all,
To whisper softest prose.

But should you try to comfort me,
My pain will only grow.
Your presence speeds up time, you see,
So sooner I would go.

I’d rather miss your last embrace,
And have more time to think
Of love for you which I did taste
From Heaven’s finest drink.

As now I sit in solitude,
My death it surely comes,
But since I am away from you,
Its march more slowly drums.

Our distance grants more hours, you see,
To cherish what we have,
So deeper in my soul you’ll be
When it decides to pass.

#finalpoems / [?]

It is the end

I want to believe
that I would expose it all
Tell the truth finally
Tell you everything I’ve ever kept hidden
The feelings that were too ugly to reveal

Because if it is the end
my reasons for hiding myself no longer matter

But it is the end
and it no longer matters

I will shield you from the dark truth
once more

Might as well

It is the end

*

it won’t end with fire. or ice. it will just end.
one day we’ll lie down together, and look at each other, and laugh. cry. talk about our day.
think about our eyes and the colors they change to. think about each other, and our past, and our future.
what has been and what will be.
who will be.
where we will be.
and one day, at the end of the day, we wont know it, but it will be the last time.

*

i don’t know if i want to know what awaits
is it gardens and oceans and flowers and sand and rivers of milk and honey
is it the arched gate i always pictured up in the clouds
or is it the alternative
beneath us
am i sinking into the quicksand more and more each day

who knows

its probably neither
there’s probably nothing in either direction
we’ll go
and then we’ll disappear
forever

the thought is hard to wrap my head around we are so caught up
in thinking we are so significant
we have to have souls
that will last forever
that will stay somewhere in this strange world
haunting our futures
and our pasts

*

The world ended over and over for you

When you didn’t get that toy you wanted from the store
When you had that nightmare
When you scraped your knee
When you fainted
When he didn’t like you back
When they moved far away
When it broke

And yet when you woke in the morning you felt better
The world restarted
Everything felt new
And everything was ok

What makes you think this time will be different?

#finalpoems / [?]

When I Say Yellow

It has been a fortnight
Since cold ran me down,
Mercury heightened up,
And jaundice.

I had so many plans
To study long nights,
Adorn my balcony with festive lights,
All of them…. Bedridden.

O Mirror, dear fellow,
Eyes are yellow,
My leather tanned yellow,
Is it a whim of Halloween
That removed all my mellow?

In me, all yellow.
Outside, all yellow.

What I eat, yellow.
My dreams, yellow.

That sweet-lime poured in a glass,
Ripe lemons cut my lips like knives,
Sugarcane: the sweetener in an injection
And grams.. The only solid intake.

Fantasies crave in me now;
Pizza smeared with Parmesan,
A crackling dish of fries,
No. O, no. They will rust my liver,
As if it hasn’t by now!

No more do I care of
This mettlesome heart,
Steadily I am falling apart.

A last wish before I sleep,
The next morning light,
Be white,
If not bright.

Edil Christian is a writer currently based in India.He is engrossed in literature and art craft forms. His work has appeared in the Yellow Chair Review. He enjoys the vivacity in smallest of things like a LED bulb or a doormat. You can find more of his poetry on twitter @edil_christian

#finalpoems / [?]

I have tried to live life sitting up
though it’s always tempting to lie down
resting on the part of my spine that juts out
I think about the possibility of someone holding onto my heart.

Life isn’t a game,
We try and explain.
But we are chasing the things we want.
We are making the moves
To differentiate ourselves
(or at least myself)
we look in the mirror for some reason to care
and to justify what we want
and why what we want is right.

Why exploding the soapy bubble was the right thing
Why stinging the girl in the headband set her free
Why holding onto the one person who was so consistently inconsistent to you
was so beautiful.
But so prolonged.
Was it worth holding on?

Allowing myself to become lesser in the eyes of the community.
Letting my chest soak in the thick spaghetti of the world outside my home.
The dusty screen and the toasty bed become antiquated
like an old familiar teacher.
I never got to prove them wrong.
But what would that do?
Prove them right about someone else?

Now I’m looking in the mirror
Did I want the right things?
Did I do those things right?
What have I done right?
It’s the recurring story of our lives.
There’s just no time.

#finalpoems / [?]

You are
Frayed gamma
Upon the precipice
Even now we
All is

John Trefry is the author of Plats (2014) and Thy Decay Thou Seest By Thy Desire (2016) from Inside the Castle, and the forthcoming Apparitions of the Living. He is an architect and cofounder of the design workshop, the work.group. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

#finalpoems / [?]

Before We Come to Blows

                   .              An Interrupted and Somewhat Imitative Reflection on Real Estate and Construction

Something there is that doesn’t love…
     .        that’s all.

####

Work by Bruce Robinson, almost always rigidly apolitical, has appeared in Poetry Australia, Fiction, Onthebus, Yo-NewYork!, and Pittsburgh Poetry Houses. He leaves behind his shirts, ties, and cars.

#finalpoems / [?]

Offering

secret
languages (love)

love
love

text
messages (friends)

moist
Zukofsky

amore
Michelle

sex
periphery
want

Quixote
palindrome
merrier

larder
desire
dreary
thunder
joyous
bone

alligator

gadzooks
bucolic
buns
fuck (& cluster)
apoplectic
circus
dumpster fire
turkish
loin
exbee
hat

retro
expression

melody
passion
succulent

immaculate
sincere
camellia

succotash
cellophane

mammoth
circle
curls

sound of adverbs
–quickly

Dale Enggass is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah where he studies poetry.

#finalpoems / [?]

NAUSICAA

I stand at the ocean

This tumultuous black mirror

Roaring like life

And reflect

Oh, chaos

I am everything

This blood unseen

Trickling out

Pulsing so naturally

But rank in the way

It calls him to me

Yes, the night swarms

In the body of predators

Circling around

This burning ship

Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist in Oakland, CA. Her book, As They Fall was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2013.  She is co-founder of The Third Thing, a feminist performance art duo.  They have a chapbook out with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.  She is currently working on a book of poetry about the ecstatic entitled Born Again.

#finalpoems / [?]

Sunset for the Mourning

Effervescent sky fading
blue to gold then rose into
starry night
stolen away by
grey cloud rolling in

Until we meet again, beautiful life

Spencer Folkins is an 18-year-old writer from New Brunswick. His poems and articles have been featured online, in several anthologies, one literary journal and one magazine for young writers. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick and is the recipient of the 2014 New Brunswick Day Merit Award for Arts and Culture. He currently attends St. Thomas University and hopes to one day teach English as a second language.

#finalpoems / [?]

The worlds omg the worlds

In the blueness of ice craft
a threshing mouth
opens to read our history
nightclub of night wheat
rustling
rally split to riot to brawl
Grain, kernel, chaff
When the mouth closes: a slipped
inversion
Now, I am babygirl
steering with my hand as a temporary fin
& these torso holes blare the morning broadcast
it doesn’t sound so good…
America’s Beach Dad is Upset…
Why Can’t Beaches Stay…
Clean? Fuck You, Stay Out. Go Back.

Wishing murder on the colonizers and the would-be managers and the border police
every kind of border police & all the oh my god these worlds the news the news

I just wanted to kiss you like normal but weirdly
but oh my god all the worlds came at me
I wanted to hold your hand for much longer instead of
holding the body still and autonomous, so mine and afraid
looking at how the time isn’t ours yet
reciting history like this
masked, crouched, & surrounded by fields

Oki Sogumi is a writer who lives in Philadelphia. She is interested in rebellion, speculation, waywardness, politics of care, and will talk for way too long about her favorite kdrama or weird new life habit.

#finalpoems / [?]

FIN

how was the beach?

Aaron Beasley studies at English at the University of Utah.

#finalpoems / [?]

Presidential Speech

You have reminded me I am not a robot. Thank you
For your zealotry, your metal-American luridness,
Without which this pulpit is as the ransacked sarcophagus
Rotting swiftly in the modern light. I am your architect
Tonight. The infrastructure of our humans wanes,
But not the pleasures you’ll find flasked
Beneath your seats—drink up. Dream up another coast
While my words usher in one bald hallucination
After another.
               .               Let us begin by actualizing fears:
Insistent are we the bogeyman is real. (The moneyman
Will take your gift afore the exit; lest you forget,
I remind). Tsunamis crest with every family,
Nuclear or god-despised, playing in the leaf-strewn yard,
Studies show. Efforts to improve have been, in a word,
Threnodic. Enough has not been to done to curb the appetites
Of pets—the markets shudder like the loins of Leda,
Loosening at this index. Gyres later, bails left out
To dry, this nation’s horticulture, prospect of thin
Domesticates may be preserved—but we need gyres.
I have gyres. I am one walking gyre. I bleed gyres
Like I bleed red, white, and blues jazz on iTunes.
I am one of you.
               .               I proceed to Caravaggio: more please.
I will bring back High Renaissance aesthetics in the form
Of free internet for all—to recover copacetic senses
In this economy so buried in the guideless Arizona desert
Only underground officials glimpse its gunmetal silo
Is my sole mission. I am not your uncle’s politician.
I am your uncle gifting shit Christmas presents
To his foes. What does this have to do with art, you ask?
I’m glad you did: keep asking. Keep telling me I can’t.
I will. I’ll hang this once-woven tapestry in the MET again,
Yet not before you crown me keeper of the codes.
Not one wink before. I’ll be your servant and your king,
Your state-appointed portrait drawer.
               .                              .               Hypocrisy
At tea-time I won’t tolerate. We must do better
When we speak of nothings, must be truer and less vile.
I will stipulate that lovers be accountable to words,
Mere words, and vie with time to stare with no intent.
Imagine Freedom as the medium through which
Spirit travels unbuffeted. Warren Buffett is in on this,
And I will press my lips against his lips, against the lips
Of each mouth in the private sector if a kiss
Will marry future, past, and present. This is my
Public works project. Objections? Your silence
Speaks of wonderment—but it is song I need,
Dear friends, your last delicious, whipped aria
Of approved molasses.
               .               I want to bring to light several
Major weaknesses. Sometimes I see my visage
In crystal-clear lakes and like Narcissus forget I am myself
Yet love myself like I love cold October rain.
For many hours in a day, my output is straight nonsense;
Even as I speak I speak of tilt-shift photography
Amongst other artifices, other bendings of light.
Every morning I wake up and know I have not breathed
Enough throughout the night, have not dreamed up enough
Legislation to veto to applause. My phantasmagoria decay
Apace with institutions—I am the world’s metronome,
I am ashamed to say, not too proud to believe.
This nation must be painted loud—but I have never
Dressed in color.
               .               Let the primaries and first caucuses
Be my easel and my palette. In Iowa I found myself,
In Texas: delirium tremendum et fascinans;
Mysterious and numinous, this night in Nevada violesces
Like the Aurora Borealis. Like the sun’s expectorations,
I will beat against the firmament with firm showers
Of my party’s fists. This is the me I make for you. This is
The Salt Lake City in my eyes, every city in my sinews
Sculpted with immaculate precision. Conceived, lend me
Your minds. We have an image to reconstitute,
And great restorers to re-find. Are you bored with
Warring angels? Join me. I have smitten saints and
Bowdlerized a wise man. We can have warriors
On every street, if you’ll have me.