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Headache Headlines
by Dd. Spungin
Thermometer takes its temperature
Calls the emergency room doc
Iceberg breaks up with his family
Scientists search for Crazy Sno-Glue
World considers ending
Too many have not finished their lines
Write letters to invisible powers
Pray to invisible deities
Or just pour yourself a very large glass
And wait…
And still now every morning,
each momentary wish for healing
is a risk, a wakening call
to change, to choose,
to leave so much behind,
and be again made new.
– Steve Garnaas Holmes
💌
Hey, Babe, can you write me a letter?
Every holy diadem of a single
solitary breathing
moment in this shelf of living
a single
solitary life
subsumed into
the pain of others
the holy grail of connection
filling this cup within my heart
this role play with each character
each story a classic
an epic tale of woe…
there is always room for more
than tables and candlesticks
turning a carpetbag into a steamer trunk
poppins would be proud to carry
under a particular umbrella
why do we so easily forget ourselves?
abundance is our birthright
gluttony a human pursuit
shared by many of our contemporaries
marking time by comparisons
making life a heaviness to be borne
where music falls as dirges
and the cracks we free-fall into
drop 45 minutes straight to the center of the circle
the letters we learn to write
always seem to start the same way
what would happen if I was not fine?
Cuz Im not so sure
I am…
feeling suspended
If you didn’t tell me how you are in such a smug word
but drizzle it sweetly, slowly, a bit at a time
throughout the scribed penmanship
a new thought might be magical
a new life might be born into being
Tito might get a new nickname, as a matter of fact
💌
Amy Lloyd (AL)
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
🏜
Aristotle BY BILLY COLLINS
life: acoustic & amplified 