Author: poetryfest

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

“I’m so fucking broke it’s absurd,” Floyd noticed the tear inside his jacket pocket. There are miserable times and there are the best of miserable times. Weeks had gone by and his dog Sue had been eating from the hand that fed him, trolling along on a loose rope. And then gone. Floyd remembered having found Sue running outside the Hermann Park late one night in February. He was sniffing at something lying next to the kiddie railroad tracks, an old muffin or something. He’d lost his tag and was without remorse. “Hey there buddy. Didja find something good?” It wasn’t snowing; it hardly ever did in Houston. But it was cold enough. He looked like a dog named Sue, like the old Johnny Cash song, and it seemed like Sue took pity looking at who Floyd was, or at least the way Floyd wanted to believe he was, backwater and fatherless.

Floyd got up off the curb and kicked the gravel underneath his weathered, old Doc Martin boot. Or was it crushed glass? He walked down the Bowery and lit a borrowed, given Marlboro. “God those taste like Shit!” Floyd thought about the conversation with the bartender at 2A, the musician who had some demos produced by the guitarist from Patti Smith’s band. The guy who knew his amigo from the art camp for disaffected city kids up in the Catskills. He was from Illinois, and was a decent musician, kinda Marshall Crenshaw. And he was friends with Handsome Dick of the Dictators who always had a Super Bowl party at his joint in Brooklyn.

There wasn’t much to the scene these days, Floyd thought. God, I wish I’d been here back in the day when CB’s was the place. You could crash anywhere downtown easy. Now it’s all stock-market exploding inevitable cock-suckers, he thought. Floyd had been staying for a while at the commercial space on 44th Avenue in Long Island City, but that wasn’t going to last forever. There wasn’t any plumbing except for a shower on the floor below, and you had to bring water up the four floors of back-and-forth stairs that make it seem twice as long since the elevator was usually broken. And it didn’t make it any easier that he was supposed to pay the dude who lived there, and had been making excuses the past few months.

There was a nasty smell coming up from the subway grate, the bizarre mix of urine, fish, sweat and milk that is brewed by an invisible witch on and under the New York summer streets. “Man, Sue would not dig it here,” Floyd muttered to himself. It’s a dog eat dog world. Or, a dog eat cat world… or something. Man, I should go back home.

Floyd wandered into a liquor store on Delancey and checked the prices of bourbon. He walked past some bridge-and- tunnel girls buying cigarettes, who’d probably lost their way from the PATH train. There’s a Korean place over by the beginning of the Williamsburg Bridge near Essex that’s cheaper, he thought. But what’s the point. I’d have to lift it anyway. Floyd wandered down past the barrage of international sweat- shop clothing stores and wondered how all this got here. The Ritmo Latino record store with the Tower-like Celia Cruz and Tito Puente airbrushes, and of course hell-hath-no-fury in a fluorescent dungeon McDonald’s. He turned up Essex, since Jenny his favorite bartender at the Johnson’s bar on Rivington would give him a few drinks on the house. He showed her some guitar licks and changed her strings sometimes.

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

The horses of Gaza—the stallions, colts, mares
the donkeys too—and mules, and jennies
who once tugged the people
on their carts, across the streets and intersections
for twenty centuries and maybe thirty,
now they scramble, the neighs, the braying,
the gallop in drummed dune-sand,
where hooves print crescent moons
with horseshoes that endure the bombings
Scrap horseshoes that were not twisted into guns
have the shapes of human jawbones, unbroken
the horses rush together, they are racing no longer
against each other, outpacing shadows
of the sun and of the warplanes,
which cost billions and still resemble
nothing more than dead birds
that fly dead-alive, with wings hardened
by death and jet-fuel
dead birds haunt the sky
because they had no cloud-deep burial,
just as the second world war
had no proper burial and was exported
to loom over the heads these Arabs
and their puny teenagers.
And the horses whose ribs protruded,
whose ribcages were played like xylophones
by Gaza’s screaming children who played
pranks and hopscotch all over the shadow of death,
the equine gallop on the beach,
mighty hooves thud out the sound of mechanical invasion
their hooves match the soughing plumage of the birds of prey
when they shake out their wings after bathing in the water.
The horses are now saddled only by flames,
with only Saracens of flame,
djinn of smoke as their riders
after rolling in the sand,
they douse their hides and manes in seawater,
leap into the coolness of death,
they breed the sea with the sky
to create a new and stolid race
The mares conceive the children of the blaze
2
and of the stallion in their fallopian tubes,
lo their children, soon as they’re born,
will be ready to ride winged foals
a harras of winged stud ponies
conceived in the burn
the only stampede worthy
of bearing the name Pegasus
trample the shadow of death in a quest
for secret lilies
until the shadow-fibers break against the quartz shards
in beach sand, hop over the dome
of the rock (gold-plated kippa
by azure waves of marble worn)
up to the seventh heaven,
drag Moses down for him to see this and to say
“I condemn all of this sordid mess, what sort
of children are they who made this rubble,
I want nothing, nada to do with it at all!”

And the hideous head of the Goliath Netanyahu
will roll
unworthy of a circumcision

Yet even if the reptilian tanks attempt to mate like lurching crocodiles,
even if the helicopters should mate like the dragonflies
whose anatomic design their engineers plagiarized
from the god of the mangrove to forge helicopters,
they will fail,
I know who will inherit these prized coasts
not for a biblical stable
not for a parking lot,
only for the field of plumed
airborne ponies.

This was foreknowledge foreseen
from the moment of their conception,
when the steeds who transported the two-leggeds
of Gaza ran,
manes afire, into that cool wave,
the chain of crests blueblack and bluewhite, the final wall,
always the last fort wall to remain standing
even as it comes ever crashing down
without prediction,
without cement of prayer.

POEM:

The Maga will deliver what is owed
from a great hardware store
a department, the section
necessary fixtures and adhesives
for the job, guaranteed to cement
what’s so rickety, piles as they shift
rise majestic, up to high heaven
where Maga sits with open hands
open arms, flowing gown, granting.

POEM:

Summer arrives
in a dazzle
of pink blooms.

The gardener admires
my petals with his fingers.
Reach for the sky!

Seasons pass. Rivers slow. The gardener comes in shadow — a small flask
of rain.

A brutal cutting!
Tendrils reach out for him, asking
“Why?” as they fall.

His tapping boots fade.
I curl in grief, hidden
under earth’s dark starve.

Endless night, silence.
Who am I without my bloom,
my admirer?

From the stillness, Spring
enters in a rush to wake
‘n shake me up.

Why didn’t I know? Pruning
brings new lustrous blooms.

It was only winter.

ani martin 2024

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

In the fading light of a weary day,
A man stands firm, through shadows play,
His heart a drum, steady and loud,
Facing the storms, beneath the shroud.

Each breath a battle, each step a test,
He feels the weight of the world on his chest,
Memories flash like sparks in the night,
Fueling the fire for his final fight.

With scars like stories etched on his skin,
He fights not for glory, but the strength within,
For love ones lost, for dreams not yet dreamed,
In the depths of struggle, hope still gleamed.

The echoes of doubt swirl thick in the air,
Yet he draws from the courage that’s always been there,
As shadows converge, he raises his hand,
Determined to stand, to make his last stand.

With one final roar, he charges the night,
A blaze in his heart, a warrior’s light,
For in this last moment, he knows he’s alive,
And through the darkness, his spirit will thrive.

When the dust settles and silence reigns,
He’ll leave behind echoes of laughter and pain,
For though the fight ends, the spirit ignites,
In the heart of a man who embraced his last fight.

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

The sky opens,
raindrops fall,
and sunlight breaks the clouds,
casting its glow
throughout my backyard.

An event, as if tailored for me—
a dance of water and light.
The universe is communicating
through the space between.

I am in tune with the
presence of something greater,
an ephemeral moment,
a timeless memory.

The spectacle is brief,
but its message stays:
there is no separation,
no boundary between struggle and peace,
rain and sun—
only moments of balance
where everything converges.

In this stillness,
I feel the connection—
the universe whispering softly,
and I am here,
grateful for this moment.

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

She climbed to the top of the mountain
In her ascent
She failed to see
Red roses blooming, so fair, so sweet
Grass green growing there
Purple lilacs, stalks so bright
Pink glowing sky
Turning white clouds red by and by
Blue fading into black
Her steps show her track
Higher and higher
No turning back
On and on, no pause or rest
Ever approaching the summit, the peak
Where at last she placed her feet
Looking down
All around
Brings a tear to her eye
So on the way down
She doesn’t even try
She stops at every flower
Inhaling their scents
Touches the petals
Feels them on her skin
Throws them into the wind
To see the colors fly

She climbed, continued

She twirls, dances
Like nothing else matters
No one is watching
Just her and the sky
Realizes here on the ground
She could have found
What she was climbing for …