Jitterbug to the beat of amnesia
A blood-red head
Dreams of Rita Hayworth, blood-money and blue keys
Landing the lead role, your face in magazines
Diamonds and pearls painted neon pink
A diner with a monster behind the kitchen sink
Look into the mirror and you see that it’s you
Walk into the bright lights of an angel city
Find a room, relax, and look pretty
The dream is broken by a phone call
Snap back to reality and begin to fall
But before you pull the trigger
Watch the box open
And let it remind you of your ***** motives

In this moment before birth,
I am turning,
a tiny mass of flesh/bones
struggling toward the light,
my slippery cord
    unra  v   e    l     i      n       g   ,
my head a mess of milk white fuzz
that pushes down and through,
my wrinkled eyes sealed,
arms  fingers  legs
rubbery  red  wet.

My mother's family waits outside,
a Greek chorus drinking black coffee,
relieved that the labor is over.

Someone marks the time:
one-twenty-three-a-m,
and my father, half-drunk,
plays the guitar in a nightclub
somewhere in South Philly.
He does not even know,
as his callous young fingers
interpret "Stardust,"
that his first son
has been born.

Someone gives him the news,
buys him a drink,
while my mother,
beautiful  serene  sedated,
smiling like Rita Hayworth
in a pinup picture,
cradles me with  nervous sighs.

She is tended now
by hospital people
who daydream about loved ones,
fearful and faraway,
points on a fiery map.

But I am just another baby
in an era when babies
are mass produced
like munitions.

I was conceived sometime
in the dawn of a new year,
the result of two militant lovers
    making up
while the rest of the world
lusted for the blood of boys
born twenty years before...
a war baby
who brings no peace.

Things are starting to look up a bit.
Or rather,
I'm,
starting to look up a bit.

Things are still bad,
there's no changing that.

But I'm beginning to realize that not all the world is filled with such chaos.

I mean,
I suppose I've always believed that there was good out there.
But I've never truly believed that there was good here.
In this town,
in these walls,
in me.

However,
now I see that I've got potential.

But that's it.
For now.
Potential.

I just,
I want,
so badly,
to paint like Millais.

I want,
so badly,
to write like Sylvia Plath.

I want,
so badly,
to be ever so determined and inspired as Darwin.

I want,
so badly,
to sing and dance across the stage like Hayworth and Astaire.

But alas,
I can do none of those things.

I am just a girl.
Nothing special.
Least not to anyone else.

I cannot paint,
or dance,
or sing.

But I can live,
and breathe,
and write!

Though maybe no good at all,
by God,
I will write.

For nothing stirs my soul like the dragging of my pen across the page.
And by God nothing stirs my soul like the heat of those stage lights,
and 50 eyes upon me.

I may not be who I dream to be,
but ******,
I will continue to be,
until the stars pluck me from this Earth and dance with me.

Until my feet are lifted off the ground,
and I'm carried on clouds to Jupiter,
or Venus,
or Saturn.

And there,
there,
I shall sing with Cobain and Strummer.

And I shall laugh with Monroe and Hepburn.

And I shall write with Bukowski and Thompson.

And I shall dance with Charisse and Gene Kelly.

And I shall dine with a thousand queens,
and lay in the silkiest of sheets!

But until then,
I shall simply live.

I shall live a life devoted to words,
and I promise to write whenever inspired,
and dance whenever music plays,
and sing as loudly as I please,
simply because I can.

And I promise to be kind to the universe,
and I promise to never promptly believe unknown truths.

And above all,
I promise to live.
And breathe.
And be.

Because,
well.
The universe does indeed have plans for me.

© 2014 Rembrin Hawke

I gave her thornless roses,
thinking there is space still for something
between those ageless hands.

Very nice, sir.
Never dear, never darling, never precious—
Such old words, she says.
She means: like lungs and gasoline,
we just don’t need them anymore.

But I get my smile.
Always do.
Measured, weighed, tested, and yet:
Brief eclipse, splash of night.

The model was a fresh Rita Hayworth, 1939.

Yes, very nice. Only, tell me, sir…
Do you remember?
When the world was cruel?

Later, when there is time,
I swear to start again.
I have had dreams of honeyed girls
and an end to fearing silence.

What is it
that you want from me?

Oh,
wild things.

Oh..boy, O'Malley hit that ball right outta the park
the crowd hollered and wooped, my bet has made good
I've got lolly in my pocket and jolly on my mind, I scrammed
moseyed down to Fat Albert, had a whiskey and sour, things dandy
so as the sun set I walked down the block and hit Green-a-gogo
the jazz notes were jumping, those cats sure know howta swing
at the bar I called in a tall dry Martini on the rocks, lit a cheroot

Ah, this is a breeze, ain't I just got the freeze with them lollies cooling
She came out of nowhere, looks like Rita Hayworth, sashayed like her
red lips pouting, hips rolling and legs she borrowed from Marilyn
that's Monroe, if you needa ask, she smelt like heaven in springtime
Howdy handsome, she purred, have you been waiting for me
Nope I said,  just landed five minutes ago, what's your poison, honey
make it a highball, easy on the rye, ain't got my guard with me now

this babe was a looker, she's already got me in a choker, my oh my
what brings you down this way, she purred as she took a slug
to find you, I said, cool as a cucumber from Lebowitz Deli downtown
well you're in luck, she said, I am found, she said again
I inhaled slowly and blew cheroot smog away from ole brown eyes
I have two thousand bucks burning a hole in my pocket
I still had my senses too

Hey babe, I said smiling, this ain't no shakedown is it, honey
she smiled and shook those dark tresses, do I look like a moll, she ask
I tell you this honey,.............I’m a dark chocolate lover,
Never had the buzz with the white stuff
so don’t be offended or think me mean, when I say,
I have no interest in the white chocolate,
I prefer them to have no jacket on too
if don’t have a jacket you will know exactly what i’m referring to  

I smiled and winked at her, lets put it this way, I said
I am black as you can see, but a Rabbi visited when I was born
so the Rabbi took your jacket away, she offered, did you a favor
we both laughed, danced, chatted and as we left. I asked
Do you just waltz into bars and pick up men, just like this
She stopped, looked me in the eyes  and said
You're from Royal Spokane Avenue in Philly, aren't you
I nodded, surprised
You're a lawyer, you're divorced and you're a **** gentle man
my friend told me all about you, now lets go swimming with dolphins..............

If I had been around in '41
I feel I would have mattered more
Made a handful less mistakes
And fought for lives on foreign shores

I would have championed for freedoms
For colors beyond my own skin
To speak and worship freely
To be free from the fears within

I would watch my innocence crumble
At Bette Davis and those starlit eyes
How Rita Hayworth would corrupt me
With legs made to victimize

The day I'd enlist to serve my country
How scared my mother would be
Sitting in her morning chair all evening
Pretending there were no tears to see

Maybe my father would actually notice
A young man that needed his time
A boy that needed a little shove
To dream bigger than the painted lines

I would have worked til' my fingers bled
To see Joltin' Joe hit safe in 56
To witness the magic of Beantown
And Teddy Ballgame getting in his licks

I can only imagine my heartbeat
Holding her hand in the freezing rain
Knowing tomorrow, I'd be off to Hell
Knowing I may never see her face again

I would've taken the A train with her
Just because Ella and Duke told us to
Danced her up and down Sugar Hill
Til' there was only one thing left to do

We would've driven a coupe by starlight
Til' we were running only on dreams
Break into a farm at the edge of town
And lay silent til' roosters screamed

I would have left my fedora in the backseat
Kissed her lips and swallowed my doubt
Waved from a train headed for Carolina
Feeling knots I'd only read about

We once danced like the glowing Lampyridae

Bathing in the molten heat of a new fire

While walking hand in hand
Down loves panoramic highways

Flames of belonging and such sensuous fire

Lit and consumed our aura's

But when the winter of our love season arrived

With the familiar sound of jingle bells

Announcing our Oak wedding anniversary

On that particular sunrise
On December the fifth

That mesmerising spell broke like the mythical Sword of Elendil

And my world
Shattered

So blue is my new season watching the midnight Lampyridae dance

Alone
In the silvery moonlight

Like a young Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth
As we once did

While my life slowly drifts
South

After I lost you
My world and the only thing that once mattered

Wandering lost in my mind's so many labyrinths filled with our hieroglyphs

As I stand alone on
Death's high cliff

When I remember that first time we met

On that beautiful night  
When our souls were ordained by God's light

(C)
Copyright John Duffy


(Lampyridae: Firefly)

Rudolph died at 31
A silent wonder
Shouting :
"There are a million ways to die !"
But he only needed one

He's a dealer of illusion
He buttonholes your collar
He comes down *******
allusion

Singing about Rita Hayworth
While holding hard a
Betty Davis in disguise

Swimming on the tarmac
of frozen dreams
Dreaming of crashing the party in silent screens

Have you heard the news ?
Valentino's dead !

the eggs fall from the sky;
laugh don't lie when the
sun goes down in circles;
my memory of u is
something like a holocaust

time is easy compared to this;
come up to the moon's rooftop
footstep by step; ur
candlestick's wick flickering
in your lime green eyes
candlelight brings out ur hair;

the streetlamps were gas lit;
her bustle was metallic
the cold drift of space;
the wind's level apace;
the city froze its top off &

don't leave ur basket of Rita
Hayworth dolls in the hall;
they might catch fire just like
she did in real life; deep space
is just the beginning of our
countless decades together; ur
timelessness turned to hours

Marie, Marie, I love my phillumeny,
I want to burn my ******* house down,
I want to burn my white picket fence,
I want to burn all the stupid people in this town,
I want to fight like Joan,
And know like Curie,
I want to love like Aphrodite.
Now, with my two-year husband,
I’ve been ****** hard like some heavenly ****.
How I relish his **** inside me,
How I love thinking his seed’s spreading in me,
How I despise him googly-eyeing Hayworth,
How I hate him ******* to Lake,
Don’t talk back, don’t, don’t,
He’ll hitya, ya know,
I know, I know,
Don’t cheat when he’s cheating,
Really? But I love a good rendez-vous,
With a crush-boy from my kindergarten days.
I love him taking me rough to anomia.
Oh, I’m so afraid.
I’m afraid,
I hate every made-up person around me,
I’m afraid,
Those sniggering socialites’ll figure me out,
I’m afraid,
There are those who want my daughter,
For the future,
There are those who want my daughter,
Right now,
Now without the hairs of the elderly,
Now with all her pretty white-blond hair,
On her pretty white head,
Just like all the pretty white heads,
Of the dukes and barons and lords,
Of my family,
Who go to marvellous get-togethers,
With exquisite wine,
Who bootleg their lipsticked smiles,
With social emotion,
Who eat the flesh of their younglings,
With plastic sauce,
So they will continue themselves,
So they can be accepted,
As all must be,
Giggling softly at no joke.
I’m afraid,
I’m a little bit crazy,
But I think everyone’s crazy,
But they just don’t show it.
Marie, Marie, how do I die?
How do I make myself,
Immolate myself?
How do I illuminate my entourage?
Face it,
Your primal soul cannot be overridden,
And perhaps that’s what is most terrifying.

FOR THE RIGHT MOMENT

time, standing still; stealth laid bare, ours only to pacify
out of a split second we, kept in a trance, we
watch her pose, turn, stare back into the camera's eye

offered up she, with a look, her face  iridescence reflected
she, one eyed; Rita Hayworth, hair lost in skew
similar unfamilar, red-dressed silhouette, mirage detected

within a non shadow, filtering exposed, camera's focus explained
by the trick of light, she stays unfazed, to our dilema
she is poised; in a pantomime-as the mystery of; remains

displayed in negative rolls of film; to mock more the light
we are held in captivity, where she holds her court
into; out of body, precise is she, left anon in black on white

her face like an angel, or a devil in disguise
coyed in voyueristic servitude, our hands are tied
if we believe in truth,  willing to succumb to the lie

as we continue to watch; caught up in the freeze frame
with no where left to hide, she like a whisp, ghost like using
no words, not a sound, just sans a smile, in which to blame

waiting for the right moment, unattainable, in voices un-evolved
she stays defiant, steeley eyed in temptation, diligent, her essence
not revealed; she remains, whole- hearted to break our resolve  


By Michael Perry

The word came and went just like Modern art, a Jew invented it we all know—
Dylan continued it, picking up like Christ in the street, drunk again as usual stumbling along performing miracles—
We all love Nijinsky, we all love ******, the fat rich ones who pay well for *******—
No good ***** takes it in the *** anymore—
Except on the Bowery for medical reasons—
It’s energy came out of Russian ballet—
Russia turned on Bob Fosse, Balanchine, Musorgsky, Naguchi, Graham, Duncan & Robeson—
These were the people that invented Modern art, the little ****** are multimillionaires, without an inheritance, raised on rat poison—
The lovely little clown dancing around in the street—
Half animal, half-nature, a stone age primitive, admit it—
They still do that kind of stuff in the mountains of Afghanistan—
We want to do it too, at the Limelight, at Studio 54, at Stonewall in the streets,
Dancing with the cops while English ****** look on—
We know what we are doing, have studied it for years on the Lower East Side and Broadway in fluent Yiddish—

Emily Dickinson sitting in a box beside Abraham Lincoln, a black girl with a mouthful of ***, a mother standing on the stairs ushering the high-school footballer upstairs—
All these things can happen in America—
Have happened, a girl goes home with her schoolteacher, life goes on and they are married—
Name the year, the century—
This is America where the corn gets laid—
This is the Jubilee year of the Jews—
They have owned the place for centuries, Chinese Jews from underground have built castles filled with cats in places we have never been, Chinese to the core, like Walt Whitman and Walt Disney and Kerouac—
The children of a lesser god, beautiful in their Adamic innocence—

We thrive because they live, the rotten white maggots seething underground at the subway to the path out of town—
The rabbits of Caligula’s oceanic army against Atlantis, falling in the toilet, dry as rotten wood, in Afghanistan a princess lay dead ****** in the desert—
I once had Technicolor dreams, but now they just repeat—
I live in the hollow of my fantasies; the girl named Shirley that lives next door to the railway station comes to see me at night—
The moon sharp as a knife, pointed as a needle—
She spit in her palm and gave me a *******—
She spit on the floor and I said it was lovely—
She spit at the moon and it came back in her eye—
She saw Infinity in that moment, a thousand times, as she’s done a thousand times before—
The world came and went, just like Modern Art—
Picasso and Einstein taking up where twisted Freud and crazy Nietzsche left off—
Where ****** went back to and where Sarah Palin wants to go—
Barefoot on her knees with mouth open,
Tongue out waiting to be filled with the Holy Spirit—
I find it easy to imagine what the first moderns must have felt like watching the Belle Epoch drown itself in blood on the battlefields of the First World war—
Pound and Eliot went mad and got lost—

Picasso got lost in his cubicle, Einstein in his equations—
Hemingway got lost and found himself when Fitzgerald bought drinks for everyone—
Eliot taking Holy Communion, Pound preaching fascism, Hemingway living and dying From a shotgun blast to the head years later—
Lorca taking it in the *** in the sultry Spanish afternoon,
Gunshots ringing out all around him—
Did Hart Crane write difficult poetry because he was a ****—?
Pound and Eliot wrote difficult poetry too,
John Cage writing difficult music that Merce Cunningham could dance too—
Victoria’s Secret supermodels replacing Gibson Girls
In the imaginations of dead soldiers—
Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth surviving in the memories of whoever cares to recall their black and white beauty—
I prefer Bettie Page to any Russian spy you can name—
There are thousands to choose from on the streets of Moscow
But Sarah Plain knows the ones that are good to go—
She can see them from her bedroom window
Turning tricks on the freezing corners—
But what I want to know is which ones are into *******
And which only want to watch old American musicals
Because I know that Russian girls don’t understand Japanese Manga
The way Korean girls do—
Tattoos covering their albino bodies—
Performing in staged gang bangs with the sons of Oligarchs
And switchblade carrying gang members for worthless rubles—
I think I know how the Modernists felt when they saw the decrepit Victorian society go down under machine gun fire and mustard gas—
****** emerged from the ashes and Stalin rose from the streets
Of Georgia to make a name for himself in Lenin’s pocket
And Trotsky died of a headache between *******
Between Freda Kahlo’s surreal broken legs the way all Communists and Jews do—
Yes, I said that all Jews die between Freda Kahlo’s thighs,
The red **** splattering their inert faces with her purple ******—
And from this reflection in the broken mirror of America
Jackson Pollack learned to paint in Benton’s shadow and Diego Rivera ****** Rockefeller’s **** in the high-rise elevator as it went down at rocket speed—
Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe on the moon
As the Soviets flew by with robot precision
But it was too late for Bettie Page to open her legs
For the hustler to step inside and find Jesus—

Barefoot on her knees,
She opened her mouth to receive the communion wafer from the black priest—
The Soviets didn’t believe in Jesus,
But then who can deny that the man walked the earth barefoot and celibate—
Did Jesus Christ ******* on the hills overlooking *****
With the disciples looking on as if he were showing them how—
Did Mary Magdalene offer to do them all up on that hill as Satan looked on with envy—?

like the infinite vista
upon the midwestern plain
farther than the eyes of mine
(an ascetic and copacetic
shortsighted father of two grown
twenty something daughters)
can no longer see,
since sockets severely seared
staring at the hypnotic screen
blindsided courtesy the magnificent 7
(a group of seven
major technology companies
that consistently outperformed
the overall stock market,
particularly in recent years)
severed mine "ocular orbs,"
leaving a comfortably numbskull
bonafide USDA approved
nondescript puny skeleton
once sported a sexagenarian
sliding seventy inches
down into the behavioral sink
dwarfed by teeming masses
of dead people,
(who once possessed a sixth sense)
sporting telltale signs of misery
somnambulance courtesy prolonged insomnia
a sorry escape for a Dreamcatcher
standing under the dome (more so
wobbling on spindle shanks
awaiting Rita Hayworth
and Shawshank redemption),
though I never flinch
head and shoulders above me,
where their vestigial swallowed tail
(shriveled and atrophied coccyx
resembling dessicated wild asparagus),
the bony husk, the body, the firestarter
illustrating emotionally tattooed
generic common John Doe
among skeletal husks
of emaciated humans
wolfishly fighting over scraps
confusing yours truly (me)
as some tasty morsel
with weathered gristle
remains of the day
from a freshly fielded ****
concentration camp victim
mostly bleached lovely bones
charred courtesy bonfire of the vanities
the aftermath of cannibals
partying after experiencing ****** madness
strongly resembling animated
****** temple pilots
base sic lee emulating 10,000 maniacs
frolicking with more'n one
barenaked lady supertramp wannabe
turning her cheap trick
ohm my dog after getting a charge
quaffing electric kool aid acid test
gifted me with aforementioned hallucinations
to escape the cares and concerns
of an uncertain future,
hence I never wanna venture out
nor can yours truly (me)
break free and clear of this cell
tethered with omnipotent cables
of human *******
approximating as a quasi umbilical cord
housed in Apartment b44
analogous to be encapsulated
and livingsocial as if born again
within pseudo makeshift ******
no longer experiencing desperation
to venture outside
into the webbed wide world
because I feel safe and sound
ensconced under the covers
away from the coming fury
where opposing armies never call reatreat
meanwhile the cursor blinks
as the writer of these words sits stupefied
yawning chasms that could swallow a Mack truck
despite just arising
from a siesta moments ago
dead set to let thought unspool
analogous to a meandering river
baffling the casual observer
why a more direct route
from mountaintop to base
did not manifest destiny
"a riddle wrapped in a mystery
inside an enigma"
which origins of the phrase
can be traced back to a statement
made by Winston Churchill
in 1939 regarding the Soviet Union.