Tim Sansom

THE WOODS


The gilded trim of the linnet’s wing
Splay tapered to her feathered form
Whose delicate maths sway and swing
Each blissful breeze, each trying storm


Dawn’s warbling sweet cacophonies
Calm gently amidst glistening dew
Earth’s rhythmic fulfilled prophecies
So regularly ensure they do


Those shrieks and tweets from dense wet woods
Play sweet and real trustworthy scales
A music not puffed up but good
Our spinning sphere recounts her tales

Capillaries of unmarred streams
Like slim deft digits reach and spread
Descending dales steps and steins
To quench life’s thirst and cleanse the dead



Our forbears knew the trees I’m told
No map nor compass was required
They read on bark the sap and mould
It told of rainfall routes and time


Moist worms recoil from two for joy
With six for gold scarce next to us
Above behold each girl and boy
Our swallow’s airborne exodus

Each morning cracks with leaps of light
Awaking mice, sedating owls
Then stirs of warmth replace the night
As black shapes change to grazing cows


And deep into the covert woods
Each fable dances with each myth
No soul can claim “They are no good!”
Nor that the Goblins do not live.

Maureen Doyle

Blowsy roses bloom
like women with unkept hair
trifling and raucous


Evening garden scents
can make one drunk and sappy
all from crumpled petals

t.kilgore splake

becoming

graybeard bardic soul
standing eight count
on road to oz
cold dark alone
musing
that was then this is now
WHAT TO DO
plastic insurance card binge
od 40’s b+w films
alky brain cell suicide
grand sexual orgy
ask nun’s blessing
jack armstrong’s "wheaties"
mad man giving away possessions
wooing woodland witch
liking idea
time doesn’t exist
denying nursing home confusion
diaper
wheelchair
toothless
blind
good day rallies
waiting on sign
telling inspiration
"it is now"
dancing naked
long loose hair flowing
beyond
metes and bounds
return to womb
end of the earth
coyote
catfish
raven
bluebottle fly
companions
knowing grinning smile
smooth pale bone
spring
road kill
skull

Norbert Blei: Spam Poems

Patch

Don't let the other guy get the girl
Arm yourself with Ultra Allure pheromones tonight!
Join thousands across the world.
Penis Growth Patches
Are the most potent patch.
Fuel up.

XUCarbonic

I haive the moust beautiful
wetches in the world.
scorecard ribosome cozen.
They're perfect, not overprized. restitution.
tahoe faithful.
See
and tell me
love to see you
But
if you dont,
here watc16h3znowbymail.com/rm
We'll be just fine.

Bruce says: these are part of a new work Norb is preparing in which some experiments with language and form are made for the modern age. Let the Press know what you think either in the Comments field or via email. As part of my new resolution I will not be answering comments unless requested to do so by their author, so you can have your say without being put down, at least by me. Fill your boots, dear reader.

JOE SPEER

Room to Let

smooth skin college sophomore
searching the campus purlieu
for lodging other than dorm
sign on cardboard in window
to let
reminds me of the gall
of Galsworthy’s Soames
selling the house he built for his wife
and she lives in it without him
a 1936 Plymouth in the driveway
ceramic chimes icicle porch
knock knock
shrill voice bids enter
Mrs Smith peers over steel rimed spectacles
surrounded by art books
she looks for pic of osprey
to embroider on doily
walls canvassed with her paintings
she tells me stories of her 89 years
the room is at the end of the hall
her crutch points
a van Gogh Thoreau simplicity
40 dollars a month and kitchen use
i move in the same day
two other roomers share house
Rudolph is into jurisprudence
phones his girlfriend twice a day
Jimbo consumed by sports
volunteers to referee girls volleyball
weekends spent busting kegs with paper cup
her daughter visits bimonthly
to clean and drink cup of instant coffee
before she skedaddles back
to vending real estate
once we solidify friendship
she becomes a target for puckish darts
i hide her crochet needles
tie her crutches together
change channels as she leaves the room
we watch the news
and shout bring our troops home
one night i gulp down her milk
unawares and retreat to my room
she calls out my name
and asks if i emptied her glass
i was reading Homer
the part where Polyphemus
hurls a stone at nobody
i might convince her
except for white arc on upper lip
then after every random breeze
she accuses me
of making calls to Singapore
of spending spring break in Thailand
to spend funds on skin trade
she forces me into peace pact
and our relationship levels off
one Saturday evening she
explained the death
of Pat Garret
”i heard he was blasted
with a shotgun
some goathearder
in revenge for Billy”
”not a bit of it”
Mrs Smith said
”he was shot in the back
of the skull
while urinating
about four miles east
off highway 70”
one rainy day influenza harbors
in my chest
i stop speaking and recoil to bed
she sets up a tray with
orange juice and hot soup
she sits in the chair
to describe how Michelangelo
saw david in the stone
when semester ends i
visit mountain meadows thawing
Canadian geese on wing over
glacier park
in fall i return to class schedule
after matriculation at NMSU
i call Mrs Smith
line disconnected
i visit the house
it has a for sale sign
i call her daughter
my mother went home she says
between the Rio Grande and the Gila
past the stone house
in the Black Range
where she and husband built
away from the well
where injury forced
move to city near daughter
sorry to hear that
things change so much
in three months
she was a labor of love
i walked until i saw a sign
room for let
Mrs Smith was standing
on her crutches in the corridor
sending a last message
from the
ethereal hallway


JOE SPEER is the editor of Beatlick News and runs the Beatlick website (http://www.beatlick.com )

bruce

kicking love

this is when
i would have
called her:
before lunch,
before the first
bottle.
i can't now
and i miss it
badly.
i'm kicking love,
and the
delirium's
tremendous.

Dave Church

FOREVER USEFUL

I couldn't find my scissors
And my ruler broke in two.
A postcard picture
Of Bukowski
Leaning against a fridge
Holding a bottle of beer
Was strung out on the wall
Near my desk.
His poet eyes seemed to blink
And say--
Go ahead,
Use me
While I'm still sharp
Around the edges.

I cut that piece of paper in half
Just like the man himself
Penned a poem--

Straight like nothing at all.



~Dave Church, from Providence RI, USA, will have more poems in forthcoming issues of ANGEL HEAD.

Bruce

love


love
vanishes
like a dream
in the morning
fallen
waking
to a
body
with knees
and arms
dangling
going
to the loo

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?