ISSN 1529-0832  Vol 1 No 6 – February 2000
All Works are Copyright © their Authors 2000
All Rights Reserved Worldwide

No portion of this electronic magazine may be reproduced in any other form or by any means, except for the purposes of review, without the prior consent of the appropriate copyright owner.

 

 

FOREWORD


Though scheduled for January 1st, 2000, Locust #6 has come out one month later. Oh dear! We missed out on that flood of A Happy New Millennium stuff, the mere thought of which makes us gallantly burp! We’ll never know, however, if there is a sulkier man than the editor, who most probably postponed the publication of issue 6 on purpose. Fortunately, everybody kept on reminding us that something was definitely going to change in our lives on January 1st, 2000. Unfortunately, in spite of all the millennium domes and the gargantuan funfair wheels mushroomed far and wide, not even the editor’s old PC noticed the change. That’s life!…In this issue you’ll find poetry and prose, as usual. You will also find that Locust has started accepting art reviews.

February 2000

 

From
LUNCHEON DUETS OR SOLIPSISTIC SOLILOQUIES
A Poem Sequence by George Samson

 

(ONE LEGGED LOVER)


I heard by e-mail before I arrived at this imitation Italian ristorante
That in the U. S. arts, there is a proliferation of experimentation without precedent.
It was said by a Mexican, but no, it was a Frenchman.
As I sit with her with the auburn glow in her dark hair,
I think about “Battersea Bridge.” I need darkness, darkness with a few lights.
By thinking about Whistler, I have darkness with a few lights.
Coleridge said, “The clear place given to us is when we’re alone.”
Although she is here with me, I am alone; thus I have a clear place,
A clear place with darkness and a few lights. Now, I’m beginning to wonder
If I’m suicidal. I feel so lonely. I did not feel this lonely
Until I had lunch with her. I look again at her gorgeous breasts.
I’m so lonely. Now, I’m caressing the leg of the only lover I have.
I’m caressing the one leg of this wine glass.

 

(WISE POET)


I don’t know what to say, I never watch television. I don’t even read newspapers.
What can I talk about to a beautiful woman. I look at her and say, “As Blake,
The only wise poet said: “Greece and Rome destroyed art; Christianity destroyed love.” She started crying, “I do not know about art, but I know about love. My father
Was a preacher, a Christian. Christianity destroyed my capacity to love. We supposed to love God whom we cannot touch. I loved God, now I’m incapable of loving a human being. I can only love the Supreme Being. I can’t love you.”
I listened and I started crying.
Everyone in the ristorante pretended they did not see us.

 

(CALAMITY)


Calamity came in this imitation Italian ristorante when she told me she wanted
To get married. I said, but you said, “You can’t love me.” She replied, “Marriage has nothing to do with love, marriage is for having children and bringing them up to have traditional values. We’re not supposed to be erotically happy, but do our duty. I’ll give you sex anytime you want it. It’s all part of the contract.”
I was in a panic, then she said, “You know, I’m a virgin.”
My panic grew more severe.
I told her, “I married one virgin, and I’m too intelligent ever
To do that two times.”

 

(WATTEAU)


I sit here with her, and think of tumultuous seas, raging tides, sharks, sting-rays;
I think of rococo gardens with a bunch of fancy dressed fools
Prancing in accord with an illusion in Watteau paintings,
I even think of anchorites and their arrogance.
I think of many things in this imitation Italian ristorante,
So I will not think about my loneliness
When I am with someone as cold as her.

[George Samson’s Luncheon Duets or Solipsistic Soliloquies also appears in Locust #5.]

 

DARKNESS OF FLOWERS
A Poem by Kenneth Pobo


Hold it right there! Are you
one of those bizzaros who see
flowers as sun-loving gods

and goddesses in a back yard’s
tanning salon? Those
who sentimentalize bloomers,

ugh! Flowers are dark.
Not like night–much darker
than night. Roots crawl

toward the open eye
ball in the Earth’s center. Bees
hunt the real nectar,

darkness. Flowers would
make great morticians
if they had insincere voices

and charged grieving people
too much. Death walks
with flowers who give big

sloppy French kisses
to whatever withers
as they do. That we put

flowers around our dead,
that’s weird. Or is it?
Blossoms, gatekeepers

to the ground
someone gets dropped into.
Darkness takes everything over,

wipes out anything in
its way. Then comes this
odd shine,

the moon
looking to pick the flower
it can turn tides with.

 

An Extract from
HOBERON
A Poem by Patrick Gasperini


Wonderful night!
Time to put on a coat of viscosity and tobacco,
Is there any difference between the rain and the electric chair?
Why is after-supper-at-a-chinese-bistro always yellow and drilling?

O! O! O!
The wind is still blowing bubbles of chemical beauties into

Impervious
Holes of
Rag-Dolls
but…

…are they nymphs or flesh-eating vestals?
Repercussion of creeping animal-thunder,
Harps, banjoes, spinets, saxophones,
Here someone sells old musical rubbish, probably pinched from a monastery in Nepal,
Old Redstowitch with his four-figure grin!

Quid! Quid! Quid!
£ 1,000,000!
Oceans!
Vortices!
Galaxies!
£!

Gold in a milk-jug implores us for veneration:
If my finger-nails smelt of cosmic dust,
My intestines, doctors say, would jingle with gold.

If my bladder were a spring cloud,
I’d water the gardens of heaven;
The Bishop would be grateful to me for ever,
And would even reserve a front-row seat for me at the celestial matinée.

Aristotle was right!
A bowl of inspired crotchets contains both heaven and hell,
Undoubtedly God can be boiled down to a spoonful of musical broth,
Infusion of religious vibrations.

Here I am! One, two, three…
Sophisticated slaves, my sisters!
Rainwater perversion and gutter incantation,
Tonight I want to drink kerosene and admire an Egyptian miracle,
There’s still a sun, a pinch of treasure in my pocket,
                                                           Twinkle, twinkle lousy scar
                                                                                                              etc etc

(Bizarre words I’ve never managed to learn by heart)
Will you wait for me,
My Queen?

[Hoberon first appeared in Angel Exhaust #15, Cambridge, UK.]

 

TULIPS MUST BE HINDUS
A Poem by J. Kevin Wolfe


tulips must be hindus
(sprout blossom drop-petals die)
they reincarnate in spring
(sp  out  b  os  om.  d o –     a s  die)
they are clumsy with their petals
(  p out   b  oss        ro  pet        ie)
so careless with precious colors
(       s             lo               p   pe as    I    )

[tulips must be hindus first appeared in Bardo Burner, UK.]

 

CLOCK
A Poem by Townee


sun, keeper of inconstant time;
the bell-ringer, and an angry foreman at work.

 

TO VALERIE (PARTICULARLY)
~ A Poem by Alex Stolis ~


The house where you used to live
had too many windows. It wasn’t
the windows that bothered me but

The way you would give a name
to each of them. Call them
your children.
I didn’t understand

counting them every day until
they all broke. That doesn’t mean I lied
we were just there all the time,

listening to what we thought were
orchestras. It was only the addicts
downtown, extending their arms to Sunday;

every overdose mean another card in the

deck.

She knows it drives me insane to think on
empty rooms, except for the times when

(honest)

her fingers stab the light.

 

DRUNKEN SANTA
(Oil Painting by Paul Jaisini)
A Review by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb


Drunken Santa is a work that creates a miracle of equilibrium. What seemed like a clash of an opposite spectrum’s colors became the unlikely harmony in this painting. Jaisini’s artistic vision here is formed from two components of physical and emotional states of being. Freezing and heating serve as a symbol to a human need for warming up from the chill of solitude by means known to people at all times. The artist pursues his art philosophical quest for worldly knowledge that had left its traces in many of his works. A line of composition literally ignites the painting’s surface with the movement. The color of this work is phosphorescent, and it creates the different planes if the subtle color nature. The warm color of purple supports the hot color of Santa’s figure and an exotic fish above Santa. This hot color may represent the so-called material universe, the world of the gross senses that can be observed in a sober state. The cold, arctic blue color represents the unknown, the world of a deep state of drunkenness where real is unreal and otherwise. The only hard reality is the self, which never changes in any state. And maybe that is why Jaisini favors the painting’s main hero, Santa, to possess the vivacious color of fire. Jaisini chooses this color of fire to manifest the self and the cold cerulean, cobalt and ultramarine to renounce self as a mortal entity surrounded by the eternal unknown.

While Santa drinks his feelings of frigid loneliness vanish. And so, he gets a company of some almost hallucinatory nature. A shark, a ghostly image, a profile of another prototypical drunk who is not accidentally situated in a horizontal position. An amalgam of the several female figures that consists of a woman in stockings, a nun, a big-breasted silhouette that create a shadow between.

A heat can be sensed around the hot colored Santa who has lost his beard and is holding a glass of red wine. He shows his thumb that may be just a polite substitution for the middle finger sign.

The colors of the work are balanced by a virtuoso composition of a cubist character. The picture’s space is divided endlessly. More images start to appear. The world of Drunken Santa vitalizes to almost chaotic state. The work is a treasure. It depicts and witnesses the intangible mechanism of reality transformation. In the state of intoxication, what happens to the solid world of sober state? Everything disappears. It is just like the dream-world, that we call unreal, because when we are awaken it is not there. Just so the solid world must be unreal because it also vanishes in the drunk or deep-sleep states. Then what is reality? In Drunken Santa, this problem is elaborated to the triumphant conclusion. The simplicity of symbolism of the warm and cold colors. The dazzling composition of figuration superimposed to abstraction. And besides the beauty of artistic logic, Jaisini’s works are marked with the rich, magnetic colors, as in Drunken Santa and others, strikingly attractive pictures in their intricate game of light and shadow, in their absolute congruence of visual and conceptual.

 

A Review of Harry Munns’s Novel
SOMEDAY COMES


Harry Munns’s novel Someday Comes can be bought and downloaded at www.somedaycomes.com. As far as I know, it should also be published in print soon. Publishing a novel on the W.W.W. is a great idea, though reading it is somewhat tiresome, and trying to print it certainly a stoical enterprise. No! I am neither sceptical nor biased, because, as everybody can clearly see, I can only be a staunch supporter of Internet publishing. However, that was only a minor digression, which has nothing to do with the quality of Munns’s novel. Someday Comes is a self-confident, quick-moving work. Its plot can easily take the readers, especially if they like action, intrigue and mystery. Personally I preferred Mick’s sudden flashbacks, some of which were really effective, even poetical at times. Although I am indecently biased against modern novels–I can’t really imagine any modern work ever equalling Moby-Dick or Nostromo –I honestly think that Harry Munns should be encouraged. I can see vigorous potentialities in spite of a pressing Hollywood impulse, which I think should be curbed. That sort of irrepressible search for violently emotional effects by means of artificial sex or over-realistic nosebleed, that’s Hollywood! Well…not all perhaps, but most of it! I am still an uncontaminated idealist, and I don’t think writers and poets should ever wish to have a posh Beverley Hills mansion…should they?

P.G.

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Locust Seven - March 2000▶