Enter Home Planet News Poetry of Issue #3                        Page 18
                                   
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The Blog Bog

The Mag Rack


Near 5 AM Watching Death and Waiting


After time behind the bar
in Summer, waiting for Hour
of the Wolf, waiting as Stout
slow pours: essence of black
with a cap of white. Sipping
double Jameson's, the sting
and burn of it in half-light.
All the rheostats down,
the only source of illumination
what the Death Channel provides:
endless wars, WWII news reels,
Pacific theater footage, kamikaze
on the quarter deck......
...."we who are about to die salute you"
sayonara songs then, a new Irish toast
in an Irish bar now. A hint of dawn
beyond the brownstones, History
Channel recording all those senseless
deaths, sending camera crews where
it is hot, collecting evidence, images,
from today's war, the tomorrow war,
all the wars to come.

                            Alan Catlin___

The Future

"So our hope lies in a world without hope,
governed by Satan."
        Ake Edwardson, Sun and Shadow

"Neighborhood girl, 8, killed
by stray bullet while riding
her new bicycle."
The news article said.

Police canvassed neighborhood
looking for leads but no one saw
anything, though everyone seemed
to have heard the shots. Were on
the street seconds later, and were glad
to appear on local TV offering
opinions about all the things they
didn't see.

Weeks later a thirteen year old
boy was arrested for the crime.
Said he felt bad about the little
girl. " I wasn't trying to shoot
no little girl. I was trying to off
someone else. She just be in the way."

Asked where he got the gun,
he confessed it wasn't his, was,
in fact, a community gun that anyone
could use, if they had to, as long as
they put it back where it was to be
hid when they were done.

Said, he had to wait until he was 16
to get his gun but guessed, now,
he'd never get his own.

                           Alan Catlin___


Fly Me to the Moon

"...he started drinking a lot, and taking a lot
of Ambien.  But it didn't put him to sleep,
it would, just, like, out him on Mars."
               Arielle Holmes

He wasn't much to look at after
the suicide attempt, the fire that singed
his hair down to the scalp plus the third
degree burns on his body and all those
rusty razor blade cuts that really make a mess
out of a man. Spanging now for him was
like a California Gold Rush for street
beggars with all those obvious brutal
wounds: he not only looked the part of
hapless and homeless, but is suggested
whatever part, in whatever action movie
he was the star of, he was pure Method
and it doesn't get any more real than that.
Some of the regular panhandlers dubbed
him the Marlon Brando of Skidrow,
the highest sort of praise known to man.
The money was so good , he could
afford top shelf: Cognac and sleeping pills,
Fly Me to the Moon cocktails that spawned
fevered dramatic monologues on street corners
and in movie theaters, leading some to believe
he had discovered the secret of animating
stationery objects for audience appreciation
and participation. Still, even as the good
times rolled, it became obvious that even as the
hallucinations danced for him, as the silver
screens turned to gold, he was headed
for the White Room of No Return, the one
where the spikes were loaded with enough
juice to kill all those mythical beasts
epic poems were made of.

                           Alan Catlin___


Blue Velvet


".....I used to have to read
by the glow of my surge protector."
J. Allyn Rosser

"I can't decide if you are a detective
or a pervert." She said, as if we were
characters in some demented David Lynch
movie and maybe we were.
Maybe we were responsible for the severed
ear in the grass of a suburban nightmare.
Or just investigating the removed body part
where insects had begun families in,
watching all the stages of life from maggots
to super flies. That ear, a possible homage
to the lost spirit of Van Gogh, where all the bad 
dreams he projected onto canvas were formed. 
Or, maybe, we'd descended tunnels of love that  
disappeared  inside brain cavities, resounding  
with echoes  of reverberating weapons of  mass 
percussion, cars,  on freshly repaved Maple Avenue 
streets.  Where we sat, parked, she in the passenger seat, 
innocence personified, and me behind the wheel, 
sensing her need to become more experienced, 
more like the shacked up whore I had spied through
closet door slats, and, she, my nascent love, 
not yet aware of her need to be debased and I said,
"What's the difference?" turning on the car
radio to maximum volume and the four wall to
wall speakers respond with a full  frontal sonic 
assault of the senses, Dead Wilbury's singing
Roy Orbison songs in a wide variety
of foreign languages, while, outside the vehicle,
a man named Frank and his gang of thieves, are
smearing the windows with spray paints and
the last thing we see is the man in black gesturing
with his ax for us to follow him to where
the blue bayou meets the inland empire,
that place where all the whores and pimps meet
after death, to warm their cold hands by gasoline
fed fires, in oil drums and ash cans, and we know
we can, as well, now that we have seen the light.

                           Alan Catlin___