fallen angel heads: the archive

SHARON AUBERLE

ABBEY'S SOUL

"Disappear, from everyone, myself included,
down in the grandest canyons of the soul."
- Edward Abbey, Earth Apples

Once I thought the soul was a small thing,
a namecard, maybe, pinned inside, saying if
I was hell or heaven bound, the tiny,
two ounce weight (I read) that leaves the body
at death and can be accounted for
no other way. But now, Abbey's poetry in hand,
words leap from his book--thundering words,
like tonight's storm, sweeping aspen leaves before it
as Abbey's words sweep away my old notions of soul.
Words that sing like that great bull elk
in lightning-lit trees behind my house,
the grandest canyons of the soul!

Now I feel this once-tiny soul, this wild
stormy soul growing immense, rising up,
singing like wapiti, the elk, making up for all those years
so tightly packed into two ounces. Hell? Or Heaven bound?
HELL, IT DOESN'T MATTER Abbey would probably roar.
Just live it all now--the thunder and lightning of your life,
the poetry, elk, aspen and rain. Then disappear one day,
become like him--a pulsing of air in sweet canyon light


GRACELAND

"I've a reason to believe we all will be
received in Graceland." - Paul Simon

Sara, have you forgiven yet
that lean-faced man of the fifties
with his short, harsh hair and those
nicotine-stained fingers?

Does he still come to you
on windless nights, in dreams
full of hanging smoke and ask you why
his Hail Marys full of grace brought him none?

Sometimes, you say, you hear his ghost
crunching through those shattered
bottles where he found his grace,
while all you could do was pray, Sara,
and listen to Elvis-songs
drowning out those whiskey words,

till you escaped one day to a soft-haired man
of the sixties whose grace would implode
in those same bottles and then you began
praying to Elvis and a hot summer moon
riding over the lake, glittering in the glass
you held, and I watched while you dreamed
and sang Love Me Tender and made excuses
for your life.

I never saw you cry, Sara, not once,
you laughed instead, saying you dreamed
of rivers--lazy, warm rivers carrying the debris
of your life away, bearing you to a new home
where grace lived and then you left us
on a night when that hot yellow moon crashed
in the lake, to rise again on the Mississippi,
that old, slow river flowing into Graceland...
Sara, does Elvis still sing you to sleep on nights
when you can't help remembering a lean-faced man
with nicotine-stained fingers and what he did to you?

fallen angel heads: the archive

NORBERT BLEI

Finders Keepers

Find me in the desk drawer near the loose paper clips, broken pencils, illegible notebooks, old knives, dead fountain pens, wooden matches, faded love letters, and holy cards of the Blessed Mother...In Loving Memory of (mother) Passed Away: Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; ...he said. Find me in the back pocket with the loose button of the gray woolen pants on the bent hanger in the closet. The glove compartment with the water-stained yellow receipt for new brakes, faded road maps of Wisconsin, and the photograph torn in half under the seat of the white van stripped of engine parts and licence plates near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. In the coal bin of my father's basement and the wooden hand-painted black and red tool chest belonging to a great uncle who tuned pianos in Chicago at the turn of the century and saw visions of saints on fire flying round the parlor ceiling at night. In the hole of the prairie earth dug with boyish hands, covered with weeds and sticks to trap WWII Germans and Japs in the heart of the old neighborhood; and the package of Lucky Strike cigarettes stashed near the roots of a catalpa tree, under the rock the size and shape of a man's head. In the black leather pocketbook hanging forever from the wrist of the grandmother-who-sewed...buttons,seeds, hair pins, string, folded dollar bills, pennies, peppermint candy, a lace white handkerchief with a fancy letter K embroidered in red. The cellar of the northern farmhouse with shelves of preserves and Babi's glass egg wrapped in a paisley babushka. The bucket in back of the garage holding a chisel, glass doorknobs, broken hacksaw blade, spool of wire, lock washers, a Wisconsin license plate 1939, the split handle of a screw driver. The scented pillowcase beneath the woman's sleeping head, her pills, a pearl-handled knife, a gold band, a rosary, a pair of black stockings, a torn photograph of an uncertain lover...the other half of him.

Todd Moore

laredo showed

me all the
bullet holes
in the side
of the
barn sd
this is
where i
tried to
write my
name in
gunfire
the little
holes were
the old 22
the big
ones came
from the
44-40
from the
looks of
it i didn't
spell so
good but
i liked the
way she
bucked

bruce

hands crossed on her lap
right scratching left
in slow circles, absently
her clean white lines: like
a lily in a long-necked vase

"The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle"

This album reminds me of the rootless days
when, young and uneasy, in shapeless cheap
jeans and ragged trainers, I shambled aimless
through all those warm or tepid summers,
dreaming of love and of writing glory
and not quite making either one.
I'm sentimental for them now, wish my mind
could be as free again, not encumbered
with all the useless luggage that I make
it carry. Then even old was new--my
weariness with everything a novel journey
and not one more outworn attitude, cold
as stale porridge in a bowl beside the couch.
I wore vests like the younger Springsteen
and tried to make Wellingborough
another Asbury Park, the romantically
unpromising old town that made me Me,
and all the girls in Wimpy uniforms
and all the dowdy shopfronts were pictures
of a Beat adventure straight out of Bruce,
albeit one that even then in bouts of
hopelessness I knew I'd never consummate.

Tim Sansom

WHEN I WAS


When I was a boy aged five with pensive scrutiny
I looked and reckoned at Horn lane’s unceasing flow of cars
Apocalyptic fancies though a thought mode new to me
Soon corrupted how I heard the birds and saw the stars.


Calculating patterned growths and broken oaths I felt
Doubtless that we faced a vast impending wave of change
I sensed the cards of disregard which we mankind have dealt
To soon be shuffled by the earth and dealt back in her rage


Then aged ten complexities placed next to me had grown
With accelerations of unprecedented pace
Ruining at leisure tools to measure man was thrown
Into what appeared to be to me an alien place


A place where inconsistency insists to be a pest
By smashing into smithereens our ethics goals and faiths
With morals made like lemonade we’re fed and without rest
Subliminally a clueless viewless few indoctrinate

Then aged sixteen I first sat a different school of lessons
Innocent of truth that well intended kin hid well
My eyes opened to the present’s calibre of weapons
I was weak with disbelief their ease to unleash hell


I loved life being thirty and if given Godly choice
This I would have crystallised to time forever long
Balanced between spring of limbs and having found one’s voice
I could watch earth’s rising seas and choking trees whilst strong


In a twirling giddy month or two I’ forty-two
Weather’s jarred behaviour has the seasons bumping heads
Arsenals aren’t permitted to be owned by those who do
Order, peace and kindliness hang on today’s frayed threads.


TIM SANSOM is a Northampton-based musician and poet.

Bruce

what I will remember

a taxi ride with you
through the roads around Wilby
two summers ago.
windows open a notch.
breeze flutters our hair
and on the car radio
'Summer Breeze' by the Isely Bros
coincidental, but perfect.
we are going to Northampton
catching a coach for Birmingham
our first big adventure.
you are animated
looking ahead at the road.
i keep touching your hand.
i'm amazed by the beauty
of the half-smile your face
wears in profile
puzzled like a curious child:
to be here with you
in the summer
in love--
such mysterious fortune.
i can't quite believe
i deserve it

Albert DeGenova

Enough Space

give me the Blues
give me
the Blues
all the space I need
is three chords
to tell a howling
'ya beautiful honey'
knuckles cracking at sun-up story
give me the
Blues
with deep pockets of bass rhythm that pumps
like the heart of black earth and
dreams deferred.
The Blues is
enough room to breathe is
three chords
and a bit of sunlight
through dirt- and smoke-fogged
windows, the Blues
is an attic garret in
Paris or Prague or New York
or Chicago or
a sharecropper's shack in
Bogaloosa Lousiana -
where art
without any name at all
first cries its be-wah-wah-be-wah-dah.

give me enough space
give me the Ba-looos

Albert DeGenova is the Editor/ Publisher of "After Hours", a journal of Chicago writing and art (http://www.afterhourspress.com ). He's also one half of the performance poetry duo AvantRetro, which appears throughout the greater Chicago area. Of his first book "Back Beat", poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "Back Beat beats everything for being beater than the Beats."
More of Albert's poetry will appear in forthcoming issues of ANGEL HEAD.

Bruce

Spring

the bare trees
have bird villages
on top

Bruce

controversy on the bus
the pensioners are treated
to a culture clash

my moustache versus yours
seeing each other off
through a perspex window

just give me my change,
driver, we'll act like
Woodstock never happened

fallen angel heads

from angel head #2

Ralph Murre

Flyin high this angel
wings still beating that
thrump thrump thing
we used to hear
Here, here!
Glasses of econobeer raised
bkerouac praised
May the beat go on
be it angelic at midnight
or wee hour demonic
thrump thrump thing
transatlantic
harmonic


(bkerouac was for a long time not only the editor's admonition to himself--ie, be like Kerouac--that is, write with surreal elastic eye and deep soul--but also his email address. It now serves as part of the URL for ANGEL HEAD)




Two Poems

us, then
young eyes smiled as stars
but words carried sad world's cloud
as we sipped coffee
music of strange lands
flavor of warm baklava
sweetness of struggle
we would eat, often at the same table
never shared, though, were our cold, narrow beds
honeyed afternoons
of vinegar morning'd days
dark weight of unrest
pickets of protest
united in common cause
desired each other
like magnetic poles, unable to touch
we were attracted to what would not be

My Room

Asian art.
A haiku, framed.
And there was dirt.
There was dirt and mess--lots of both--
in what I had hoped would be my wonderfully
neat somehow Japanese black-floored room.
I thought by creating the room I could
create a nice new self. A neat self.
White walls angled upward to apex of beauty
now spider webs but they have the right
I suppose to use what I can't reach.
High corners. Peaked ceiling.
I'm not tall after all.
Window to the east--morning light
now filtered through fly specks and blue streak.
Flies have to live too or spiders starve.
Sleeping mat, disheveled covered with books
my bad art--no girls.
Floor mat, beyond repair.
Some shoes, creepy.
Sandals, really creepy.
Clothes, never in style anywhere piled everywhere.
Never in style anywhere--no girls.
Really creepy--no girls.
Not in my room.
Not tonight.
Not soon.
Can't remember the haiku

fallen angel heads

from angel head # 2

ronald baatz

on the fourth day
i named the fly
howard

an icy evening
a bowl of noodles and thoughts
of a naked woman

in the driveway
shoveling snow that's the same
eerie white as the moon

lonely pussy willows~
the only place snow
seems to be sticking

we act like children
laughing when i fart in bed
between my bony legs

in the window
enough leafless branches
to weave me a coffin

the rake~
of no use against
the constant rain

a rare thunderstorm in march
knocks the bread machine
out of commission

screeching like baby birds
in a crowded nest~
dumplings frying

out in the field
waiting to piss
it starts raining first

after the game
the chess pieces stand around
shocked at what happened

old crow
so close to dying~
why walk across that frozen pond?

fallen angel heads

(title Ralph Murre)

The Angel Head Archive Space

from angel head # 2

t.kilgore splake

untitled

on the road darkness
lonesome hours passing
driven by mad desires
awash black guiness bitters
super high buzz
stiff foamy beard
holy outlaw poet
moving beyond
well-rounded schoolboy
dickhead first class
reenacting others lives
chasing after silence
listening for voices
seeking faces
emery margaret
paula barbara olga
dreamy nightmare

winter day into darkness

earlier CLIFFS ravens
raucous insouciant
cockandballs
pussyandtits
piercing arctic clarity
lone wolf
zig-zagging prints
light powdery dusting
driven by hunger
warm mate hot rut
cattails snowy cones
distant muted church chimes
shadowy dusk falling
shrouding fifth street "le metrops"
five o'clock home bound
headlights eerie glow
bardic graybeard
soft amazing grace
light blue-ribbon buzz
keen alky perspective
backwater poet
living on the cheap
karma properly aligned
free to sit
play buddha

SHARON AUBERLE

CHOICES

A man sits hunched on steps.
The light around him is fragile.

Rain begins, spotting his thin shirt.
He smokes, the smell mingles with wet.

Across the river, lightning sparks
over a silent carousel.

We are waiting for a bus
to take us in from the rain.

For a moment
I could love him.

The bus arrives, rain pours.
We board, he slips quietly to the back.

I hear two women reading from a book:
what if you could choose your own death?

One reads to the other. They giggle. I don't
think I could love them.

A man sits next to me.
He looks like the Dalai Lama.

Yes, I will love him,
spinning silently

on the carousel
in the rain.


SHARON AUBERLE will have more poems in a forthcoming edition of ANGEL HEAD.

captain america comes home from the road

i watched him die. i held him in my arms and saw the life drain out of his uncomprehending eyes. i watched him die.
they shot my bike out from under me. two yahoos with a big gun driving where no law could reach them. they left me bloody under the burning teardrop gas tank. fire consumed the stars and stripes that had been painted there.
and now i'm here again, in "the old hometown". only, it doesn't look the same. (i watched him die.)
how are you gonna go back when everything has changed?
pool games on a friday night. lonely girls, sad derelict beauties in search of a love connection they think they'll only get thru sex. old drunks who know too much to be mad at anyone. these are my companions in the neon-lit darkness of the bars.
i lie awake for days smoking, stare at the damp rot circle in the ceiling and wait for it to fall. old freaks come by with roaches gossip plans. i send them all away. i can't stand them anymore. i can't stand anyone.
i get a gun. (I WATCHED HIM DIE). my plan is to decorate my bathroom walls with blood, join Billy where it doesn't hurt. tomorrow. today there is no reason. today there's nothing but the memory of his face in death.
every time i shut my eyes i watch him die again

GARY BECK

DISPOSABLE YOUTH

The badly decomposed body
of a young boy was discovered
stuffed in a plastic garbage bag,
near a South Bronx housing project.
The police arrived at 9.00 A.M.
responding to a 911 emergency call
and found an 18 month old child,
who looked like he had been dead for days.
They hauled the lifeless child away
in a green plastic body bag,
and no one cared, or waved good-bye,
or even knows where the body lie



GARY BECK lives in New York. More of his poetry is scheduled to appear in ANGEL HEAD.

First Day of Summer

The sun today is brighter than it's been all year,
pouring from the left over my neighbour's roof.
The birds chatter like crowds at an opera intermission.
Men slam car boots. Wind flutters through their uncombed hair.
I won't do anything today except shop for wine,
then lay back and dream awake all afternoon
like the dust motes floating in these streams of light.


~Bruce

Nostalgia

How I miss
those old worlds
that exist now
only in my head,
like when Elvis
was alive and
everybody knew
he was the King,
before videos
were rotated
endlessly on
music stations
and new young
kids disrespected
any sound that
wasn't computerised.
How I wish
I could return
to legends of
the 1950s
re-enacted by us
two decades on
in clubs where there
were always fights,
walking home along
the back roads
trying to roll
like Danny Zuko,
our parents home
waiting who had
been there when,
and understood.
Elvis, rock and roll,
our parents, these
were constant
points of reference;
now the reference
can only be
our memory of
what has passed,
ghosts of universes
once everything
now absolutely gone,
and substituted
by scenes, people,
alien to me,
conventions I
don't wish to buy.
I feel homeless,
as if cut adrift
in unfamiliar waters
remembering
the life I had. If
only one could go
back! I'd do it now
and walk on
safer streets tomorrow,
heading down to
Dix's with the
boys for chips,
pissing contests out
the toilet windows
in the Arndale,
our silver streams
descending on
the people waiting
at the bus stop
on Commercial Way

Steve Urwin, County Durham

I always feel greasy when I wear this coat; I can smell the wax on my hands. And the onion-breath clouding my speech as I regret these hours; cobblestoned streets and freezing sleet as I stand huddled in some doorway gnawing at the thick wedge of stotty oozing bloody sauce and grease. Double steakburger and...grease? No, I don't think I asked for that. Regret; I always feel it when squandering is the order of the day and the weather is of little ease. And the cocksure little students--well-versed in Eliot and Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron--pretty little things, storing up data and spewing out fact--not an ounce of soul between them... Bitterness, bitterness, here it is; the bitterness born of insecurity. I always feel it. I always feel greasy when I wear this coat and it rains and Durham is my destination; scurrying like a demented rat, from bus station to burger stall; from wet street to Waterstones--and trips to the cash-point inevitable. Ah, the guilt. The smell, the wax. This rat; my greasiness.

This Morning

This morning
I am broken
by my need
for you.

Your absence
makes this
cold house
colder.

I made a
you to sit
and make
me ache
at dawn
for loneliness.

Which shows
I love you,
and tells
of our
approaching end.

~ Bruce.