Friday, July 1, 2011

Finishing Hammers: OSFR #1 IS NOW LIVE!

Dear,

O Sweet Flowery Roses presents its first ever dossier: Mixed Martial Arts poetry. It's for reals now at osweetfloweryroses.com!
-Russell

Monday, December 13, 2010

Andrew Lundwall



Andrew Lundwall lives in NYC. Recent poems have appeared in La Petite Zine, RealPoetik, Action, Yes, Robot Melon, & Tight. He has released three chapbooks, klang, honorable mention, and funtime, a collaboration with Adam Fieled.


From A Saving Place



centipede signal at the skin bursts. the growth white with easter plunged in. a despairing sword in a crocodile. such haunts slant hard bounced checks of confusion. sympathy kneels near childhood piles like these. lightning misconceptions that time whips on.




































there is useless fat connecting on. returning in garden beauty. its autopsy smile. a cloudlike spoil of tumultuous buds. imagine this feeling. come blues thrice. glans knot whirlwinds cruelly. elaborate. sanity frowns try to translate. impossible as if any self-despising specimen. lidless nights. the pieces. can only signal. the species. throbbing accumulations. death yellow swings the vomiting corridors of answer. painer brows have stained some watching awful. burden & heat. realize nearer about poses violent. smoking details tread tremulous.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Brian Mornar

Brian Mornar is the author of Repatterning (Punch Press) and Three American Letters (LRL). He teaches at Columbia College.


AUTOPSY
                                    (for Andrew Lundwall’s A Saving Place)





















































Your Autopsy


*


is mine.  The voice a many thing.


I’ve a round-about in the old ways of speaking.  Acreage & appendage.  Sweet, and in the soft vein, but the shores and the body so narrow that what laps in there, your neighbor’s engine.

Sanity has a sound here, a coda your fingers.  The air is air.  We can say from here.  The ‘unreal’ cities older than we think, before founding.  In the poem, there must be an ‘external referent,’ as to any crime.  What we held onto to so.  The fact of we possible, not the possible, but only a thee that make bodies in overhead lights.

































At once mourning and joy.  But here the pores that are opened after the end rebuilds the stage.  Defamiliarization and familiarization simultaneous in the autoptic text-body


*


The body as it was, as were remembered it, before the loss:  in Beloit, Wisconsin, men and women manned the lathe.  The loss of our hands and still the scapel.  Bestill the chapel and then fled.  There are factories by the river.  Men and women sit at tables and in aprons assemble plastics.  We still play cards and night and think we can steer our lives as if driving, or piloting a lost seat boat.  The old hands lore read through acres of sentences.  Acreage left ashore.  Did we ever flee?  Is what we wondered in Wisconsin, though surely we did once. 




































The autopsy opens.  Released into the world.  We assumed it would be terrible.  And, as a surface, it is.  But don’t lament the desertion.  Freedom is to be leaned away from.


“Fugitive amusements”


Learn to: Yield the loss to the real.  Our bodies eked.  If only we could remember how they were growing, and doing so is dead.  Unfettered for something else.  Gesture does.







































That “sympathy kneels near childhood piles like these.  Lighting misconceptions that time whips on.”  Debasing the gravity of the body.  He takes as the object of his work.  In childhood, we push past the boundaries in perpetual flight.  We know our corpus as that which will be.  (When ‘be’ meant ‘air’).  And so this is a terrible, the body defined.  And the poet, his freedom to perform an autopsy, a window between one body and another:


“…autopsy smile…”


These autoptic bodies of text—these prose poems—do not reach for knowledge as power, knowledge as the naming of the unknown (the body, the first colonial object).  They are a venting in the old sense of the word: not reducing, but transferring population from one body of text to another.  One’s a lea and one’s a prison.  But without flags or names, just plots.  Bloodletting.  The body of one’s life, how to measure a thing.  Such as.






























Composition as skin.  Composition on skin.  Writing unsheathes the body of the text, the first glimmer at the base of the spine.  Why constellations.


*


Surrealism as having-become-mere-habit.  We still want to make new, but for the sake of the body, as the poet has here refined it—remembering the word, page, screen, other’s body as we last saw it.  That moment ago.  Torn from.  What warm mass is left human here.  Spicer’s dictation but his alcohol the warmth.



































As we having done this.  As our tenses remain, does static the body.  The voice escaped out and took with it the book.  Splayed as a preposition, before the(e).  Thee to me, you were, before this visible act.  Once lost the farm resprings true.  But it is real.   We know this, having been there our eyes.  Labor is a tense.  We’ve been between the word here, to labor a sentence, how a row.  ‘Tis more more than language.


*


Labor and summer indolence, a tense, or chore waiting.  The agrarians in other shapes persist, this loss yearly.  But the poet’s is a world in recovery.  To thee.  Act is amending.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Louisiana Lightsey

Louisiana Lightsey is a young poet and translator living in Barcelona,
Spain. Her work has appeared in Capgun, Word For/Word, Muthafucka, and
other places. She doesn't have an MFA. She has a website.
www.louisianalightsey.com




Placenta

/////

Of heaven, rather than field.

I don't know what that means exactly but

it IS what I mean.

After the poetry reading sucked

we went to a bar, THE bar, everyone was there.

I'm pretty sure we spent all his money.

All I remember is the leather nest in front of us,

I rested my heels on the bar bar-stool bar.

The leather nest was full of peanuts.

I said the word penis, over and over again.

Exactly, heaven, rather than pub,

when I met him I had said "wow you look cool!"

Later on, we found the floor and made out,

made up the violent names of our children.

We liked Viola, Sid and Cid.

It was crazy; how I love squid

and you held one

so high above your head.




Heliotropism

/////

Both master and concubine unpetaled the heliotrope.

It was like a long time ago in Asia or wherever they have concubines

so it was ok.

They wanted to ascertain the difference in the hair.

They felt like it was really important.

Do you ever feel that way?

The pollen was virgin and suddenly dyed by the light.

It’s probably by that light that many Nobel Prize Winners

have discovered without hair and with a bald mind

what will be taught to sallow children as cardinal.

Seriously,

if one elder pulls aside the ferns to show and tell the heliotrope

it’s only because long ago he was broken by the light.

Can you even blame him?

When younger, the master had dissected the cardinal,

the concubine bending over and blocking the light,

he was like:

“GET OUT of my light.”

But she wouldn’t move, she wanted to be an alpha female

AND also to see the veins untangling in his scalpel like heliotropes.

She bent so low, to sniff, to touch, to meet the open body with her hair.

Later they came together and opened through their legs fiery cardinals.

I mean THEY FUCKED.

They also shared glances of icy blue,

heated and re-heated the shocks of barreling light

as their minds grew apart and re-netted

like a bird finding at last its final nest

in the hate of the heliotrope. 




It Has To Make Something Doesn't It?

/////

Even if it’s gross it passes in the movies.
The super Loenstein.
Even the shift key will accept Judaism eventually.

Even eggplant parmesan has special effects.
Biangular, sensate, super-soft fry particle,
let me love you.

Under the hand you show up soft and saying,
don’t worry, frying is normal,
this will somehow make a super-cute person appear.

Recipeing together makes America happy.
Ingredients support the environment.
Love makes oil, I don't think it gives a fuck. 

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Tyson Bley

Tyson Bley was born in 1978 in South Africa and at the age of 30 moved to Germany, where he continues to live semi-reclusively with a malignant Internet addiction. His work has appeared in MyFavoriteBullet, Blazevox, Poets Of The East Village, Clutching At Straws, Disenthralled, and print journals like Smash Cake and Kerouac's Dog. His personal blog is located at
http://soapstain.blogspot.com/





GENE DEFECT ON A TINY PIECE OF FOIL

I moved my new car, angrily, after the 3D printer vomited it out. I didn’t want to be parked next to one of the printer’s other aberrant creations: a selfish pig in an igloo. ‘The way to hell is canned – is a pizza chain oriented along the vector of the glittering dolphin’s thigh,’ the pig told me as I peered in and wondered if it thought either of us was parked in the wrong place. ‘The one who melts first under the skull street lamps is parked in the wrong place.’ I kept the following rude assumption to myself: that it, not I, was parked in the wrong place.

Fragments of Ben Nye rape makeup hit the fan and was karateed by the blades into the form of yet another new breed of worthless sentience: a switchboard operator sunbathing in a straightjacket. Lights blip crazily around him – a dragonfly lightsaber fight jumping on the bed to a banned dancefloor anthem. The weather update deliberately intimidates us with promises of an utopia made of crude materials gorging on fractals. I like the switchboard operator’s worthless handling of the console. To wit: an atom-based stunt based on the ancient technique of the ‘squirm.’

One of the partners in couples therapy was a mechanical fish. The therapist, clad in micro-mesh, assessed the situation from a bunker underneath the maximum security prison where his patients were housed with a periscope jammed nonlethally through the McRib in the hands of the non-mechanical fish partner. The distraught relationship he was trying to remedy was cargo lined in fish oil due to be sent to a Mexican border town the next day, where it would be detonated in a display of highly eclectic, hugely disorientating fireworks to celebrate the opening of a new bridge and the erection of a Morgan Freeman statue, his surgical mask bulging on the hour as the iconic actor burps grenades, to mark the passage of time.




THOUGHT LINKS EYEBROWS

On the top landing, observing the dirty rocket trying to climb the spiral staircase. The cat’s claw’s tristesse, from being away from the balloon milk. Frida Kahlo’s hysteria over the hairy blood vessel on her brow, sweat like leaves covered in urine. Cabbage Patch kids constipate the Menorah. The more of a grotesque consumer the Pope becomes, the more his wing catches fire. None of us are what we really want to be, except the condom. Which isn’t either what it wants to be but thinks it is. Namely bald. To precipitate the mermaid’s flight. A seagull wears its heart on its sleeve, then when not drinking from it puts it down on a sugar coaster. This way Bambi’s earplugs melt, just as condensation gives a loud report. The deafening music my guardian angel listens to while cleaning out my car. A slow-dance with lithium, also found in 7-Up and also quite a sexy mechanical model. So where has my sweater been hiding? Stolen from the school mascot in a Santa Clause pat-down. My Nissan’s shame. Flying when not playing with traffic.




NOW THAT THE AC'S DOWN

The apartment’s AC has to be trained to do the ‘obnoxious sniff,’ to make it a better environment for giant insects. I want to be taught the empty gesture’s sideways movement, to perform it without hesitation. With amped kneecap in robotic hoodie, it used to be such a great co-pilot, but we parted ways. I want to blend reality with elephant lips; through its grill my AC said that’s more harmful than crashing truffles. With acoustic guitar and rose in teeth, it decided to direct the fitness montage of Doctor Octopus in ski boots. I’m lonely now, of course. But today in the personals I saw that the human liver is learning from the whitewash, and needs help taking smarter, more economic cues from jingles stuck in its head. Fright bleaches – that’s what I learned. And that the rescue will pass you by if you’re stuck in airplane porn. And Mars will become one of the caterpillar’s eggs. And sanity’s landing strip will slather fake balm over her wheels – the instant she grows into a piñata whose gramophone heart will be a byproduct of shattered absence. A raider of fake tunes’ heart. My favorite faker.



Sunday, November 28, 2010

Sean Burnham

Sean Burnham is currently a student at the University of Iowa. He enjoys making music, listening to music, reading, and being weird. Writing poetry is new to him, but he's confident he'll figure it out someday. If you happen to see a saxophonist on a street corner whilst meandering through Iowa, it might be him. Or so he hopes.

Crackle and Wail

1.
Solemn
and narrowed
eyes, how could I

be so blind?

There’s a tourniquet
around the day.

2.
He dragged his feet up
those stairs, shuffling
like a bull in a radio.

3.
When he got to
the top, he looked
at me and all
I saw was an IOU before
he threw himself
against the wall again
and again and once
more for good measure.


Bleacht

Rolling the sun back
the yart behint, I leap
t atop
the house to look

(my bett)
She was

gone. I screamt
and rollt out
the sun, thinking
to surprise her. She was

n’t surprised. Always
trying, I surp
rise with her
what she knows.





Flying Fox

1.
Aspen air-
freshener, pine trees cut down
for the sake of smell and why
don’t you plant a forest in your car?

2.
And in fifty years,
maybe someone will
drive your tree
over a bridge and into the bay,
crying and laughing to live
in a tree, to die
in a tree, to fall
and to fly, and why
don’t you plant a forest in the sea?

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Patricia Spears Jones

Born and raised in Arkansas, PATRICIA SPEARS JONES aka Patricia Jones has lived in New York City since the mid-1970s where she has been involved in the city's poetry and theater scenes as poet, editor, anthologist, teacher and former Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and working with Mabou Mines, the internationally acclaimed theater collective which is celebrating its 40th year.  Her accolades are almost too numerous to list and range from editing anthologies to playwriting and creating collaborative arts. She is the author of the books Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2006),  The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995)  and Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006) and the chapbooks repuestas! (Belladonna, 2007) and Mythologizing Always (Telephone Books, 1981).  You can find out more about her on her website http://www.psjones.com/, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Spears_Jones and www.aalbc.com.



k.d. laing sings ‘Hallalujah’ by Leonard Cohen


Sun shimmers, cold   Canada is cold.
Leaves are heart shocked
Colors bleeding streets, streams, rivers, valleys, mountains.

Below the 49th parallel, de spirit is almost broken.

Mendacity.  Mendacity.  Mendacity.

Corrode ear drums.  War corrupts our hearts’ thrum.

Oh and listen to the steadfast hymn singing. 
Hear daily declarations of faith. 
See sparkly flags
on politicians’ lapels.              Funny,

This choir of dignified horrormeisters, each with his or her own
Gift—liar, thief, murderer, pederast, torturer—on display.

No one can make a joke.  No one can take a joke.

Mendacity            Mendacity             Mendacity


Sons, brothers, sisters, mothers
Dead, more than 1000 dead

Below the 49th parallel days begin with expensive coffee
Days end in bad news. 

Heart stunned and dream deprived. 
Sun glistens.



Vase

Composition is not easy
You think these flowers just jumped into the vase
Arranged themselves according to size, color, texture

You think making a beautiful home is easy
You think the domestic is about floor plans
And ecologically correct cleaning products

I AM SICK OF THIS DULL HATRED OF THE EVEYDAY

Get yourself something exciting to do,
Investment banking
Or Internet Interface proxy
What?

I don’t know.  I just love this vase
And you dropped it BY MISTAKE?

And it’s in pieces
And the floor is dirty
And we can no longer afford this house
Anyway

And GO FUCK YOURSELF
AND YOUR MAMA TOO!

What?  You say I sound ghetto, well
Eat this dream and shit it out in New Jersey.

I’ll stop crying when this vase is replaced
And I can sleep in a bed owned free and clear!




Kinder


Walls surround the garden
Inside the illustrated children motion
A paradisal mode

All strawberries and huckleberries
And heavy ivy hiding the treasure
Old people cannot see.

Why are some children allowed this fantasy
And others eat dirt every day?

Is that the way of all possible worlds
The blonde child in the Gap ad
The lovely Eurasian in Ralph Lauren
The Black preppie in crisp linen
On an expansive lawn in Sag Harbor

How will they negotiate their prosperity?
With the people who will take them

Sometimes hence, on the road;
in a board room, off the Internet?



Marigold


Oh luscious girl friend
When last did you take a bath?
Water everywhere and yet you remain
Dusty as a road in Georgia

Or Alabama or Arkansas
You keep away the mosquitoes,
the blue flies, the little bitty things
that bite your neck laughing as only
Insects can laugh.

You’re free of all that—perfume—was
in a former life; so was dancing on bars
and wearing shoes found mostly in bad
80’s porn films.

So how did you find your way here
And are you staying through the season

And will the tomatoes grow better if close by
or just a litter farther away to give the sun more space
to embrace their vines?



Saturday, November 20, 2010

Peter Marra

Peter Marra is a writer who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Among his influences are Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Edgar Allan Poe, Russ Meyer, and Roger Corman.
He has been published in amphibi.us, Yes Poetry, Maintenant 4, Beatnik, Crash, Danse Macabre, Caper Literary Journal, and Clutching At Straws.
He is currently constructing his first collection of poems.


 
animals clothed

animals clothed in
yesterday’s night sweats
run into the meadow

clothed in concrete
always checking the time
watching and  waiting for

something to change
ridden by women
women always laughing

without smiles
lightning rinses out their minds
while the clowns touch each of them

the women greedily
guard their prey
and strangle them

by the telephone poles

(somebody tell them
what went wrong

stop.there’s.blood.everywhere…)





Friday, November 19, 2010

Wayne Mason

Wayne Mason is a writer, sound artist and factory worker from central Florida. When he grows up he wants to be Kannon. His work has been published throughout small presses and he is author of several chapbooks. The most recent Poet Laureate Of A Dirty Garage is now available from Erbacce Press. 



We Reckless Alone

 
Cheesy factories
Now on to the noise....
Everyone Florida
wrapped in apathetic

Flesh and tired old
infinite gestures

Mmmmrrrrgggghhh
another middle finger




Soft Pink Characters

We are
wallowing
spewing
faceless sad

There it was
in steel toes
of Lakeland
via nothing
but death

Trees grass
purgatory
soft pink
characters
inebriated

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Eric Asboe


Eric Asboe lives and works in Iowa City, IA.


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Chopra
rachana
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Ramba  Ramba
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Reema Sen  Reema Sen  Reema Sen  Reema Sen
Rekha
Reshma
Riya Sen  Riya Sen
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sarawat hani
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shriva  shriva
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sidu thulani
Silk Smitha
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sneha  sneha  sneha  sneha  sneha
Sona
sonal chouhan
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sraddha
Sridavi
Tabu  Tabu
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Trisha  Trisha  Trisha






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Indian Actress

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Aamisha patel
Aarthi  Aarthi  Aarthi
Aarthi Agarwal  Aarthi Agarwal  Aarthi Agarwal
Aarti  Aarti
Aarti Agarwal  Aarti Agarwal
Aarti chabbria
Aarti Chanria
Aarti Chhabria  Aarti Chhabria
Aash Shain
Abhinaya Sri
Ashinayashri
Abhinayasri  Abhinayasri  Abhinayasri
Adhithi
Aditi Govitrikar
Aishwarya
Aishwarya Rai  Aishwarya Rai  Aishwarya Rai  Aishwarya Rai  Aishwarya Rai 
Aishwarya Rai
Akshara  Akshara
Akshaya
Akshita
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Anushka  Anushka  Anushka  Anushka  Anushka  Anushka  Anushka  Anushka
Anushka Sharma  Anushka Sharma
Archana  Archana  Archana
Arti Chabria
Asin  Asin  Asin  Asin  Asin Asin  Asin
Ayesha Takia  Ayesha Takia
Banupriya
Bhavana  Bhavana  Bhavana  Bhavana
Bhoomika
Bhumika
Bhuvaneshwari
Bhuvaneswari
Bipasa Basu
Celina Jaitley  Celina Jaitley  Celina Jaitley  Celina Jaitley
Charmi  Charmi  Charmi  Charmi  Charmi  Charmi  Charmi
Deepika padukone
Diya mirza  Diya mirza
Ekta khosla
Ektha Khosla  Ektha Khosla
Endhiran
Esha Deol
Farzana  Farzana  Farzana
gadde sindhu
Gajala
Genelia  Genelia  Genelia  Genelia
Gopika
haripriya
Hema Sinha
Ileana  Ileana  Ileana  Ileana  Ileana  Ileana
Illeana  Illeana  Illeana
Illeyana
Jyothika
Jyothirmayi
Kajal Agarwal  Kajal Agarwal
Kajala
Kajol
Kajole
Kangana Ranaut
kaniha
Kanika
Kareena Kapoor  Kareena Kapoor  Kareena Kapoor
Katrina Kaif
Kayeri Jha
keerthi
Kim Sharma
Kimmi
Kiran  Kiran
Lakshmi rai
Laya
Madhumitha
Malayika Malayika
Mallika Kapoor  Mallika Kapoor  Mallika Kapoor
Mallika Sherawat
Mamata Mohandas
Mantha
Meena  Meena  Meena
Meera Jasmine
Monalisa  Monalisa
Monica  Monica
monika monika
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Nattamai
Nayyanayar
Nayanthara  Nayanthara  Nayanthara  Nayanthara  Nayanthara  Nayanthara 
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Neha Ahuja
Nikita
Nikitha
Nila
Nisha Kothari  Nisha Kothari
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Parvathi Melton
Parvathi Milton
Pooja  Pooja
poonam baja
priyamani  priyamani  priyamani  priyamani
Priyanka Chopra  Priyanka Chopra  Priyanka Chopra  Priyanka Chopra  Priyanka
Chopra
rachana
Rachana mourya
rachna mourya
Ramba  Ramba
Ramya
Reema Sen  Reema Sen  Reema Sen  Reema Sen
Rekha
Reshma
Riya Sen  Riya Sen
Sada  Sada  Sada  Sada
Sameera Reddy
Sandya
Sanghavi  Sanghavi
Sania Mirza
Saniamirza
sarawat hani
Shakeela  Shakeela
Sherin
Sherlyn Chopra
Shilpa shetty
Shivani  Shivani
Shreya  Shreya
shriya  shriya
Shriya saran
sidu thulani
Silk Smitha
Simran  Simran  Simran  Simran
Sindhu Tolani
sneha  sneha  sneha  sneha  sneha
Sona
sonal chouhan
Sonali Bendre
sraddha
Sridavi  Sridavi  Sridavi
Sridevi
Tabu  Tabu
Tamanna  Tamanna  Tamanna  Tamanna
Trisha  Trisha  Trisha

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Charles Crawford

Charles Crawford was born in Asia and writes creatively as a student at the University of Iowa.  His likes include tap water and debauchery, and he is horrified by bees.  He is not allergic to them, just terrified by their presence. One stung him in the ear as a child.  Perhaps that is to blame.



The Apple Tree
As a kid I often caught my mother smoking—­­­­
Cloves, mostly, sometimes Camels—­­­­­­­­­­­ though one
Time I saw her light a joint beneath the apples
Of her wedding gift from uncle Leo, who said it reflected the soul
Of her marriage to his brother.  He told a lie,
Though.  Their marriage was never so perfect as that tree.  No

Matter, because uncle Leo couldn’t know
That my mother would not always be the smoking
Vixen she was then, or that my father would lie
Sincerely, to me and to contemptible men, more than one
Time, to get away from her too-pure soul,
And her stabbing wit.  And he hated her silent fits.  But the apples

On uncle Leo’s tree were absolutely perfect; the apples
Belonged in the garden of the Hesperides.  I know
They’d have been appreciated there:  After all, nymphs are the sole
Purveyors of the truly perfect things, like smoking
A cigarette in a field with your beautiful mother one
Sunday, when the grass is thick and moist where you and she lie.

The first time I caught my father in a lie
Uncle Leo’s tree was barren of Apples.
I asked him “Did you eat the last one?”
He licked his lips and said “No”.
But he didn’t know I’d been smoking
Out by the barn. It was fate that I watched him pick the sole

Fruit from the low branches of our tree.  If he ever had a soul
It’s in Hades right now.  I remember many things about him; the lye
Burns I got the day he disappeared, how distracted he was, smoking
his stinking cigars.  I remember, too, staring at the apples
Of the tree one day listening to him.  He didn’t know
That I was on the other phone

While he spoke with the asylum, the same one
That would come for my mother, who’s only flaw was sincerity.  Her soul
Would not let her tell the men who came that she was not insane.  I know
She did not want to go, but she could not tell a lie.
When they came to carry her away, Aeolus roused the winds.  Falling apples
Bruised the men as they led her off:  She spent her remaining years smoking

In an asylum on a hill.  She nearly hung herself more than once.  No one there spoke to her
And she got so lonely.  But I will not lie, smoking was not her sole solace.
I brought her apples every day, until the tree died.  After that she would see me no more.