Heaven

Heaven

And our time just races on
dizzy like a drunken night
while the elegant seasons come and go
speaking softly of Michelangelo.
All the while, through it all like prose,
we'll maintain some sort of structure, composure,
we'll be weather'd but still a bit alive,
we'll try to dance away the days
that are dusty essays
'cause we're like that,
reckless dreamers in it together,
imagining a world that doesn't spin,
that doesn't sit angled on its axis,
of a world that just sort of hangs about
straight and quiet
like a silver ornament on a Christmas tree.

Then it would all make sense,
our numbered days timelessly decorative
like Tennyson or Poe.

Poem and Photo: James Gagnon

Piss

Emerging from a piss in the woods wearing a tuxedo? Your just asking to be caught by the lens.
Video: Joe Smith
Culprit: To tastefully remain anonymous.

slithering

slithering
so soon sunday slides
up so sweetly and
saying sophisticatedly
subtle nothings
dissuades you from
functionality
instead concentrated on
forms frothy and filling
fills not so fundamental
friends too, four and twenty
like the old rhyme goes
so will these times
and those we
held with even less effort

Poem: Robert Lescatre
Photo: JG, Airplane

The Great Mother

The Great Mother

Not all those who pass

In front of the Great Mother's chair

Get past with only a stare.

Some she looks at their hands

To see what sort of savages they were.

Gary Snyder, from the collection "Turtle Island" 1969Photo: JG, Pikes Peak.

the Pueblo

"The Pueblo sees no need for horizontal contact with the alien world without. The Anglo compulsion for lateral expansion- for more land, more wealth, influence, and power over his neighbors- is incomprehensible to him. He is rooted to a pin-prick of earth in immeasurable space. But that pin-prick is the whole universe in miniature. Nothing outside can add to what he has here; expansion can only detract from its meaning.

"Hence his contact with life is purely vertical. That is to say, his strength to live, his power to enjoy and understand life, derives from contact with its invisible forces. Only when this fails will the springs dry up, the air grow stale, and life in man wither at its root."

Frank Waters, "Masked Gods" 1950.
Photo: J.G.

lost meanings

lost meanings

talking like you sing
lost meanings on shirts
organs that you pump
milestones you jump
landings carpeted in brown
windowed but stained
for keeping families fine
still no decent kick
in Kalamazooooooooo
what do you use
situationally humorless
hugs two-tone tenacity teasers
echoed long and sorted in bins
yellowed like some paper
with purposes for permanence
fitted eagerly with flair
no lines left of lachrymals
mama's little baby loves shortening

By Robert Lescatre
Photo: J.G.