#finalpoems / [?]

if it all ends—

i will say: you could have spent entire days
trying to figure out if
the world used to be
big or small.

it will, so i say: do it anyways and
when those holy invisibles turn out
to be _____ after all,
come and see me.

these days
i just seem to drink and kvetch and drink and kvetch
and drink and kvetch in
some vague
profundity. i know i have always been right               (about you,
                                     .                                                            .          about things, about past lives)

but the problem is invariably a

lack of
conviction. i seem to perch

on either
                             .                        . side of
witnessing
and
living

around a truth-string
that may or may not
cinch behind our around-eyes.

well fuck it, i say! wishing for overlap is
so important–
        .          .you might think i am                   tethered
to all of the other invisibles
    .  running

      .                        . towards            the

                 .                                                                        .       edges,
but even belief
  .       . can’t catch platonic
run
off like that,
and reeling in
         .               only darkens their veil. how foolish to think

you could just crawl in
and expand it all

from the inside.

i say, as i have always said,
come into us.

i have always already
i have always already
i have always already
made some sense of this.

the only thing is, if You are all you find                 (again)

   .           .    thanks, but No Thanks

I won’t/won’t/don’t believe it.

Sophia Reuss is a writer based in Toronto. Reuss’s poetry has previously appeared on Metatron’s ÖMËGÄ blog, and writing has appeared on rabble.ca and Ricochet.

#finalpoems / [?]

APOTHEOSIS

When I was a boy,
god was a bearded old man–
an unapproachable Father
who came down from the mountain
with a long, long list of naughty and nice.

In my prodigal youth,
god was a lawless young man–
a coming-of-age Adventurer
who chose self over service,
growing up over buckling down.

When I grew up,
god became a long-legged Goddess,
breathlessly beautiful and mellifluously mine
on moon-lit nights.

After the war,
god was a grim Reaper
bleeding my world of art, leaves and common sense.

Now,
with the years piled up like pages in a book,
one on top of the other,
god is a Mother
birthing and nursing our times together
and apart…

only She knows,
when it’s time to say goodbye,
what severance we will suffer,
the separation we must endure.

Billy Dean is a retired technical writer with a bachelors degree in English Composition. He has written articles for trade journals, been a newspaper columnist, performed poetry at open mic events, and had poems, stories, essays and how-to guides published in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet. His most recent craft essays have been published in Page & Spine.

#finalpoems / [?]

OBLIVION

(A Poem about the True History of Earth)

From the shores of the Dragons you came
Brandishing blue beams and sweet tongues
Into this Orb of Peace you came
Smelling of the bitter scent of predatory might.
Arriving unto uncharted waters you came
Fantasizing upon the innocent souls of this land
And yet,
This was done before, yes, done before.
For countless planets have tasted
From your gauntlet of invasion
The stench and savagery of slavery.
You exult
Receiving neither punishment nor reprimand
From peaceful Strangers of Other Lands.
Who dared not intervene
Within the dark coils of the Prime Directive.
Erring Time began
And Hyperborea bore your thrust
Because its innocence rendered it easy
To trust
A predator, hooded within
A malevolence such as yourself
Which was, after all, masked in the throes
Of mesmerizing twilight.
Separating the Two from the One you did
The Unthinkable
Separating the Two from the One you did
A great act of evil
Separating the Two from the One you did
Banish us into countless wars
Through time, of mind and psyche.
Original Sin, this was, a handiwork
Of your clever vanity, alien mind.
And unknown to sages pouring over scrolls
And books in perpetuity, who fail
To comprehend the true measure
Of your profound arrogance!
Not content with this, you assume the mantle
Of gods, further deceiving the poor masses
Of this planet of felicity; and to strike the final nail
On the coffin, you destroyed our guiding beacons
Emasculating our collective mind.
How then, shall we restore the Truth from the
Fragments of Reality you left behind?
How can we ever restore paradise?
When paradise did not exist
In the first place?
How can we piece the puzzle together,
When our prophets and scholars are
Stymied by red herrings in the roads
Of truth? Human Intelligence is no match
For your alien perversity!
Time passes
And then, you came back
Searching for gold in the mountains of earth
Searching for salvation in the sweet places
Where the bounties of our world
Are stored in vast amounts;
Ripe for the picking.
Shall we tell of your desperation?
Shall we tell of your predation?
Shall we tell of your rapacity?
That has endured for thousands upon thousands
Of years, subjugating the fabled lands of Lemuria
And Atlantis, which you seduced into the dark.
And now, you have destroyed Sumeria
For the nth time, what sins
Did they commit there, that invite your dark malevolence?
Upon a land torn by trial and suffering
You pour your heresies and call them
Our iniquities, what audacity
Do you possess to render such logic impeccable?
You cause the creation of thought systems and books
Which you call sacred, when all they do
Is speak of the chronology of sins you
Have committed on hapless humanity.
Does this satisfy your alien subconscious?
With the passing of millennia, repose denied
For the grieving souls of humanity.
From the shores of the Dragons you came
Born upon the winds of starry night and
Spectral nebulae
For you are strangers even
To this beautiful galaxy.
And yet, you insist, that this plane of thought
Is your home!
How savage are your mental processes
To contemplate such an absurdity!
Today, upon this world, shall you visit
The throes of Extinction.
Upon this time shall you render
Luzviminda into a residue of history.
Just to satisfy your avarice.
Your ego spiraling to realms beyond your ken
Whereupon you shall dance with joy
When the remains of the Sophia Collective are scattered
Upon the four winds.
Sweet tongued foreigner, when shall you desist
From your crimes to humanity?
Malevolent stranger, who shall give answer
To your apparitions of evil?
Insidious invader, master of the shadows,
Who shall stand up to you?
When Night blankets the souls of humanity
In the deepest net of forgetting
In the deepest conundrum of sleep
In the deepest veil of ignorance
A pilgrim band away from celestial home
Whose deep slumber is masked
By the fires of mystery, born of dark deception
And unknown enchantment
That your tentacles have profusely amassed
And cunningly wove
Into the Paths of Erring Time.
Crystal tears breaking in the shards of
Thought within thought within thought.
Immeasurable sadness has been
Your gift to us, we who suffer
In assumed solemnity.
From the shores of the Dragons you came
Slaves of the pureblood of your kind;
Inheritors of their dark legacy:
Slaves of the self
The slave mirroring the slave
And seeking to enslave others.
Such irony!
Spreading a spasm of corruption
Into this sector of the universe.
But now,
Did you know, dark foreigner
That your rapacity,
Separated an avatar from his twin?
Since the sundials of ancient time
Did their bidding, a long time ago
By your orchestra of shadows, unseen.
Behold, a warning:
Shall you consider the possibility
That this avatar has suffered enough
And now seeks Vengeance to be reaped upon
The glories of Slow Epistemology?
Have you considered
That retribution at last, may be,
Visited upon you
As an act
Of final terrible justice?
Despite the hesitation
Of the Seven Sisters, and
Despite the objection of Other Shores.
O Muse of History, tell me then
Tell me of the hour
When the sweet chalice of vengeance shall
Be served.
For now is the time to visit upon them,
By the matchless skill of Wisdom,
To pour into their scaly homeworld
The strange, potent brew
Of Oblivion.

Sensei Erwin Rimban was born in the Philippine Islands. Since a young age he has been fascinated by the esoteric realm and avidly read books on world history, philosophy, astrology, mythology, the social sciences and similar fields. Educated at the University of the Philippines, where he graduated Cum Laude, he added Evolutionary Biology to his plethora of interests. After graduating from college, he spent many years in the tourist destination of Baguio City where he pursued a career in writing and teaching, while at the same time finding time to be a meditation teacher. His hobbies include chess, poetry and Tarot counseling. Currently, he is active in organizational work, where he is promoting advocacies in educational philosophy, spiritual counseling, and environmental issues. He is also the founder and mentor of a learning organization and Wisdom Community, the ANAM CARA Philippines Learning Organization. He has written numerous essays on wisdom, metaphysics, mysticism, psychology, history, educational philosophy and psychotherapy.

#finalpoems / [?]

Final Wishes

If it all ended, I would finally
Pluck the courage to borrow
Your heart, and place it beside mine
On a silver soap saucer, like
Bergamot and Lavender,
Intertwined

If it all ended, I would forgive
Myself, for being a sloppy poet,
And not a bestselling preacher
Bereft of admiring hoards,
Self exiled most of the times

If it all ended, without sighs
I would consider this life wasted,
& futile highs, at the
Expense of cheap rom-coms,
& Take-out buys—
that I frequented daily, to have been
all for nothing really

If it all ended, without a purpose
I would comfort someone,
In need of soft caresses,
And take some warmth like
The selfish lout that I am,
Blindly grouping,
Between limbs in disarray,
Pungent and sticky
& Dismally bare

If it all ended, with no goodbyes
I would cry till my eyes dried,
Or died first, with chaos in the cornea
Brewing like greyishly purple clouds

If it all ended, I would wander
Over to the beach, surf the wave
One last time, swimming in the
Soft breast of sea salt & seaweed
Unafraid of the punishing tidal waves,
Lapping against my supple body,
Ready to be swept away

Sumaya Zainab Makhdoom is a Pakistani poet, currently pursuing an MPhil in English. She dreams of literary freedom and well-made cups of tea.

#finalpoems / [?]

Friday

When in 2011 I walked into my gym and saw the meltdown at Fukushima on a television angled above the treadmills, I had not seen earlier news coverage of the preceding earthquake and tsunami.
I was ill-equipped, accelerating the unmoving track, to understand the national task of reconciling the immediate ruin of environmental disaster and the social conditions it—I would have been unable to decide—either exposed or reproduced, and the slow violence of nuclear fallout, in which few lives are immediately lost or endangered but, over time, Japan’s water and food supplies faced contamination.

*

I read online that a billion seconds ago it was 1982, and the Challenger disaster was four years away. I cannot find the source that estimates the April 2011 tornado which ran from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham exacted $2.4 billion in damage, but I think about my high school friend, who two days later would text me hunkered in a bathtub under a mattress, and wonder if his great-grandparents, 2.4 billion seconds ago, intuited the ruins of the future are part of our present structures.
My mother told me our neighborhood regained power at the end of the week, but in the case of the bathtub, can an understanding of space as a relationship, and one of space as an occasion, be reconciled?

*

When my friend’s mother drove across town to take me to the hospital, she surely passed a now abandoned subdivision. The heavy cream pastes electrodes over my forehead and scalp which will determine how much of this was built into a past, nanoseconds away, and if, by the final day, deep waves from the temporal lobe rise and crawl across the forebrain.
Liberate the trauma from the past and recognize it as coming from the future as well. In the uncited measurement of damage—and given the current American life expectancy—in the future from my sweaty warm-up under footage of an evacuated Ōkuma I will be dead 24 years, inconsolable by any insight this will produce.

Born and raised in central Alabama, Engram Wilkinson now lives in California where he studies law. His work has most recently appeared in The Offing, LIT, and Lunch Ticket.

#finalpoems / [?]

Bad dreams

Whose life has not been
A bad dream? Sentences meandering
Poems uncoupled, bodies cold
Under their blanket
Unwhetteted matchstick
Soft, unphosphorusing
Life, how can it be?
Life without meaning

Gymnast never landing
From their balanced beaming
All thoughts thrown up
Not returning
Star light retracting
Tires screeching
Round corners upon corners
Of wild ride

Rivers, untamed
Have another story
Sitting above them
The salmon jeering
Some of them do not survive
This river of wild dream
Water rising in strips of blood
Fate takes away so much
Allows something to survive

Steven Hartung received a creative writing degree from Michigan State University. He lives outside Richmond, Virginia.

#finalpoems / [?]

Being in a 51 Chevy

The dream started simple enough
I was a kid back in the old neighborhood
but I wasn’t a kid
I was an old man like I am now
but I felt like a kid
and everybody who saw me
saw me as kid
and I felt great
I felt like running
and I ran fast without even
having to breathe
and I ran from the park to the avenue
and there were great big planes flying overhead
and low flying jets
and the avenue was packed
but I ran not even touching the ground
and the people let me through without moving
and there were kids
kids I didn’t know
but they let me play with them anyway
and we played rough
but it was ok
cause there were big kids around
watching out for us
tough guys and pretty girls
and they were there for us
and their moms were looking out the windows
watching out for them
and we were playing rough
and it was ok
and no one could tell I was an old man
not even me
and the big kids came over
and jostled us a little
and the girls were smiling
and I said hi I’m joey
and they knew me right away
and we started talking about everybody we knew
and all the stuff we did together
all of us
and I started crying
cause we were all the same
we were all the same
and it has been so long
since we were all the same
and a big kid said don’t cry it’s ok
we are all the same
and somebody’s father came along
and we were going for a ride in a 51 Chevy
and us little kids packed into the back seat
which was big, big enough to fit us all
and we felt even smaller in there
but we could see out the windows
it was night and the city was streaming by
filled with noise and music and the smell of food
and the grownups were shooting guns
but we were ok cause they were grownups
so we were safe
and a kid took out a bottle
of some crazy soap bubble mix
that had sparkly stuff
and all the colors in the world in it
and we were gonna drink it
and it was gonna be great
even though it was soap bubble stuff
and we did drink it
and wow
I just wooshed right out of that Chevy
like a the low flying jet
and I was above the city
and the city was everywhere
and it was Egyptian and Chinese
Roman and Gothic
inscribed, etched ,carved, and sculptured
and there were bridges
that spanned other bridges
and there were buildings
inside of other buildings
and people everywhere
and I knew them
millions of people and I knew them all
and I knew their ancestors
and where they were buried
and I knew their children
and where they went to school
and I knew who their teachers were
and I was them and they were me
and we were all the same
and I woke up crying
because we were all the same
and it’s been so long
since we were all the same.

Joe Bocchicchio currently lives and writes in Kent, Ohio, although he was born in Brooklyn, NY, and his work has been published in Upstreet, Jawbone, and Cutthroat. Certified in Public Health, he works in community mental health and much of his writing is driven by the tragedies and triumphs of those who are afflicted with mental illness and by those who labor on their behalf.

#finalpoems / [?]

It Could Be

The only things that matter
are the things that didn’t at the time.
Fingers sticky from dripping
ice cream,
talking through movies we’ve never seen,
bike rides to nowhere like children skipping school,
sleepy Sundays that felt wasted
filled with nothing
surrounded by everything:
books with worn spines,
cats kneading the blanket you knit when you cared,
cheap chocolate and cheese
Laughing till I’m wobbly
with the man I love
as we try to save the ladybugs
infesting, like the kindest, most proper intruders.
Tiny polka dots on the walls of our home.
To worry
about more than what good you can do,
about problems around which you cannot wrap your soul,
about everything that      .        with time       .        grows milky,
leaves a body
Empty.

Michaela Papa is a native Nutmegger who recently moved from Boston to North Carolina.  She spends her days reading, writing, and searching for acceptable bagels. Her work tends to revolve around characters slightly left of center. She has been published previously in Coup d’Etat, East Coast Ink, Discovery Girls Magazine, and others.

#finalpoems / [?]

Farmer’s Prayer

Seasons – passing Phantoms
before my eyes,
mixed up – overlapping enough
to confuse my budding crops.
Like my forefathers
I tried to follow the
pattern, hoped just to
keep their sense and
change the air, water, dry soil,
but, it happened otherway.

Five years have
struggled by without rain,
dried field, dried up wells
my oxen, cows showing
their ribcage,
All hopes for good days
vanished from my mind.
Days seem long when spent
in idleness or grief.
my heart aches at every dry day-break.

When I walk miles to gather a pitcher of water, I Pray,
sensibly for some rain, but unheard goes the prayer, for
He speaks in different language.

Thriveni C Mysore is science teacher from Karnataka, India. She loves Nature poetry, Philosophy before all other things.

#finalpoems / [?]

Beyond Our Reach

When the end of the world
failed to arrived on May 21, 2011,
as Harold Camping has predicted,
some people felt betrayed..

The next day I saw him on TV, not in heaven,
eighty nine years old broadcaster,
no trace of embarrassment, still eager
to see it happening, to see it through.

What makes us believe in stories
that cannot be verified, in miracles
that never took place, in prophecies
that will not come true?

Scores of gods have sunk into oblivion –
sacrifices ignored, prayers not answered.
It looks like the end of the world
lurks beyond our reach as well.

Boris Kokotov was born in Moscow, Russia. Currently he lives in Baltimore. He writes poems and short stories. He also translated selected poems of German Romantics and contemporary American poets to Russian language. His work appeared in periodicals, most recently in Allegro, The Bewildering Stories, Boston Poetry Magazine, Constellations, Chiron Review, and The Lake.