Winner; with a vote from every single member of the panel: Tim Taylor
Runner-up; with five votes out of six from the panel: PD Lyons
Two other poets were mentioned as ‘exceptional’ and we shall ask each of them to be a featured poet in a future erbacce-journal; this will mean they’ll be interviewed and one half of the journal will be dedicated to them and their work: Elio Lomas and Richard Hughes
There were 5,450 accepted entries and just over another 300 were rejected for not following submission guidelines
So that’s it for 2014. Thanks go out to all of you who sent entries and right now it’s time to get together your submission for 2015; we’ll be open for entries at the beginning of January and we’ll close the 2015 contest on May 31st
Poems portray pitfalls and ecstasies of memory, as well as exquisitely wrought impressions of Here and Now. Rewarding to read and ponder deep insights and wonderful juxtapositions in this poetry.
Edith Jones Rubin, publisher/writer
P.D Lyons’s new short collection of poetry, Myths of Multiplicity, is a body of work primarily concerned with themes of a colourful nostalgia; of memory, & its uncertainty & the unreality thereof, of love, all composed with a deceptive ease & sureity of liquid language and beautifully placed & balanced lines that carry the reader through intimate landscapes, as they are cinematically revealed. These are beautifully balanced poems, written by a poet possessed of a keen sentience, an exactitude of observation throughout these highly visual/ impressionistic & retrospective pieces. The reader will also find recognition in the existential dilemmas scattered throughout this collection…This is fine writing, & should not be ignored, & is very much recommended. –
Michael Mc Aloran—‘The Zero Eye’, ‘In Damage Seasons’.
The working man’s pickets were cushioned by gently curving yellow lines and Lady Love was smoke in the back seat. There was nothing to say so he sat back and watched the houses go by, halfway wondering about the people who might have lived in them. There were dance productions; they liked dirt roads, gypsy trails with coloured ribbons tied to pigeons as they circle high above your caravan. There were children worshiping anything sweet and there was love that was not innocent. Nevertheless, there must be good places in the city. Mysterious places with that special type of darkness and dirt that put glamour in your eyes – neon tails, pin ball glitter buzz, juke box spewed songs of no particular importance, sticky sweet glitzy ladies drinking long rums on palace floors. It might have been cold on the streets, but the sun hung out for pie faced men in blue uniforms with gold buttons shined brighter than the sky.
He watched houses turn to wooden tenements and then brick and then bus stations and stairs that only went down into an earth never knowing sky other than that of cracked tiles reflecting dim electricity.
Then darkness fell slowly, twice. After the second time he was crouched by a gutter fire drinking bourbon with black men who listened as shade party ladies told tales of the past. Watching the thick panorama of different coloured faces in windows that were not glass holding bottles that were windows, he aimlessly played with fire glass and melted containers that still had roses on them and lady love sang cripple songs on his shoulder to a false dawn.
1) At the star palace he played electric games for silver. An hour later he was sitting with drinks that held the names of stars and ladies. The glamour was sparkly tinsel and pointy toed dudes with glitter on their sleeves dealt funk across the room. One high heeled lady with snakes on her breasts was laughing with her jaded beau and every time she wiggled her snakes would strike at passers-by. Playing more electric games the colours trailed ringing bells through the open doorway down through the hall out into the street.
2) He saw women caging babies with wings as dark girls danced young with tequila in the streets. They sang of pentacles and cat’s eyes and the babies growled and the women pretended as they sat on imitation boxes rolling rounded cages filled with feathers. Across the long streets green with weeds from a sea that knew no salt and felt no beach, came the sounds of silver clouds along with windy faces looking for what they do not know forever.
Stay still she tells him. Painting his face with primary colour, his hair with light, his fingers with diamond, then dipping him in neon, takes him by the arm, out the door down the iron stairs that are still worms beneath their footsteps. She leads him.
She took him out that night, riding in a high-test vehicle, feeding him streams of drink and foods which even a man of money would have considered rich. The lights were bright, but it was her, that ever in illusion made him squint his eyes with smile. Laughter was limitless. Bodies electric with joyous sense of touching into morning when they found two people together dreaming. Two people they had never known before sat softly watching sun rise. When they got up? They were no more. Merely, slightly older, innocent with the sounds of newspaper rolling off a park bench.
Down the street mid-day left him walking to a place where it was darkness all day long, where even the drink was dark and sweet and dull neon was the colour of a band which sung of mushroom women and foreign language. He sat where he could occasionally peek out through the boarded-up window. Soon daylight would be memories forgotten and evening a memory to be lived. Remembering the dark deep colour easy on the eyes, cool on the body a swirl in the liquid of a woman.
3) There is a used to be Norwegian cafe we once went to and simple watched a brown girl tambourine her way through the tables asking for nothing more than that enjoyment be taken. He fed my head while her movement sped through my body like a shot filling, until her motion was my thoughts and my fingers moved to draw her dance. There in the used to be Norwegian cafe where black boards were tables, ash trays held chalk and we both got stoned on a brown hair tambouriner.
4) All along the boulevard stuff strutters and blue baby minglers in the liquid. Pretzel men and fruit stand women where he bought an apple and a pack of cigarettes. Sat on cement steps smoked dreams of you in silence brown pieces of cotton all remaining in his eyes.
The Vaseline dudes were across the way yelling in Hey-mans and leather Mary- Lou-do-da’s to a middle-class bar hopper who said she was born in Highgate looking for satisfaction but never thought some jerk in silver after dark sunglasses would try ‘n slip it to her. She walked by them into the early morning where smoke from bourbon fires and my last cigarette reached a sliver of sun caught through an already forgotten darkness.
5) Who dealt funk across Kallay Street? Who touched Glay Hornen’s nose and got away with it? Who remembered a thousand nights and now tonight was still looking for a place to play his heart deck quicksilver streak across a starless sky? Finally finding a palace called Baxter’s he played his money slow into the night. The cards would turn a twisting and a stretching along a muted orchestra’s fever, their heat tightening his butter ivory smile to turn a last losing heart. I had to laugh at his winning surprise. Then went to find a mellower darkness to call my own, a place where seriousness was a laughing touching colourless intoxication.
6) He stopped and harmonica playing the blues for the street choirs the silent eye-love ladies gathered by this boogie boy pumping stuff strutter madness good for making even ladies bounce as well as that the falling night was played ivory black and blue..
He was a stinger a person for whom everything in life is a cool excitement. I would be too, one of a slyer race. Hey Day! Stand over here. Silver lights the wheel flashing faces across their eyes. We were the even-steven odd couple for hours our laughter was the sorrow of their day and palace guards began to shudder, a thoughtless dry morning it would be! Oh yes, a glicking and a clicking.
I stood a clear glass liquor one doesn’t need to swallow at my lips. Whispers are shadows, glitter is nights, and I am lord of a slyer race. A cold excitement is how we stuff strut our ways around down and so around.
7) Stacking brick builder silence with piano blue dirt the old moonshiner came out of the hills for to sing us a song not taking the corn cob out of his mouth –
“Stag darted when I came into this world…
Sixty-nine years a running in this world,
Into your eyes I look
And I am gone”
My failing fingers release a shattering of glass. So much like the night I am a stinger, a spark of the night wind diamond spun through whose images the storm is constant.
8) It was a dirty day the wind came straight up from the streets, a d-r-i-e dirty day. Yellow car was smoke across the last blowing leaves a blonde hair girl in the back seat on expedition to secure eastern tobacco. A paper boy on the corner hustling silver from a storm full of dreamers, aimless there was no one there but still money making he questioned nothing. I was no questioner either I was a smiler from way back in the days of St. Martin when sitting in the park he would smile at me with his evil. Days were good then the sun brightened dew dipped green of the park and St. Martin’s eyes. The smoky nights of bourbon fires drowned in red and white liquid from brown bags making it a joy to be laughed and sunlight a blue sky to be music. I was the first rock n roll star he ever saw.
She was the first rock n roll star that ever was. She was the one who sang at west coast sea parks giving the crowd and their animals a beat to bounce their boots to. Plain fancy were the things she wore for these were early times when neither funk dealer nor stuff strutter, none wished to be grabbed and many of us were unaware of what was happening. It was quite a while later when I saw her in the Sage Palace that I became truly aware. On that night when glitter was something only me and the saint knew about – she was! She was electric neon silver on the stage her spangles reaching out fang red to all who caught her. Her voice the rock that stunned you into the blissful pain of her rolling you helpless through the dark until your eyes shone, and your body ran tinsel into pools of neon again and again – the colours skyrocketing reaching long past a thousand nights long past bodies fallen.
He once asked if I didn’t lose my identity as he had heard that happened in rock n roll. I told him identity only meant to be identical. He smiled knowing my answer. The nights were long red spangles and glamour our fancy, the style transpiring hundreds of numbers in the 54 Sage Palace where now I sometimes sing rock n roll good old daze blues.
Mad Maggots a place of cat dancing while we dined on Tasmanian porridge and lobster tails. The long glasses for wine the tall champagne bubbles bursting a thousand times my eyes.
Baxter’s a place of smoke and creamy white women whose breasts never knew sunlight. Darkness white light clear liquor burning and when every other place was stacked, and every other place was cracked Baxter’s was booming.
Backstreets was red and kinky hair girls playing navel hairs with your dreams all up and down the pin-balls wild and the strutters free and you could be anyone.
9) Fatness was a person named raving with hunger and the years between my life were bringers of me to this place with gold down my eyes and a fancy in my step which once was clumsed with unknowing. The statue of St. Martin is where I’m standing; the fountain pours silver over spitted wishes and pigeon feathers, feathers of a bird that knew no ribbons only the taste of confetti popcorn. Smiling is what I’m doing because I like to so much. a smile showing jewelled teeth and lips that like a kiss as well as any tongue. There is someone waiting for a letter they will never get. A letter telling how I no longer like shade parties and glitzy ladies, that I don’t believe the St. was a saint or that bourbon wasn’t made for trash can fires. It’s a letter they will never get because when my high heels hit the pavement I smile and go off to dark sweet evenings in times never to be forgotten.
~
children tiger of the smoke
spark off sweet high stepper
rock age stars and glitter daze the night
palace halls neon stains
glitzy women drink eyes of stars
I need nothing frilly
after all who really dealt funk across Kallay street?
Circa 1970’s
* Regards to Jefferson Airplane, After Bathing At Baxter’s
in 1974 I started work on a biographical/fiction. ( originally titled salamanders) incorporating bits of journal, drugs sex and drama from the point of view of a 18 – 20 something male living in an old factory town New England as he discovers drinks weed cocaine love sex marriage divorce fatherhood etc. it began by the river it hasn’t ended yet. here’s another excerpt – for what its worth. still ruff n ready I suppose ~
from NYC Sal A Manders
Part Three / I am feeling restless. “New York times” a song by the Motels is what I’m listening to. Restless. Hungry for what? I don’t know. I only know what I don’t want, and I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. Weekends are too short. (oh, how fuckin’ blue collar.) But what else? Yesterday spent the day climbing, feeling good, looking good. Today, I don’t even have the patience to write. Write about the climb? the people I was with? One of them a fifteen year old boy who had been living on the benches of central park until his sister took him in. So, at her request I bring him and her along. It was good showing them the ropes and now I can’t write fast enough.
Central Park thoughts. Yesterday finding time to cry over Wendy a-fuckin-gain. Was it Wendy or The City or what’s the difference? I’m doing what I’m supposed to here in Connecticut: School, Work, Saving money, Climb, Party but, but ,but today I cried over Beethoven’s ninth and my mother .Maybe the bottom line is I’m lonely. I guess. And I haven’t written anything in so long – some tragic shit attempts while hanging out in New Haven (a great town reminding me a little to the village, so it too is underlined with New York blues.).I’ve not met anyone interesting since Wendy, a few nights here and there but no one I want to be with, and I guess that’s not so bad but no one I feel good enough with just to have good sex with? I miss making love like I mean it. I resent the women I meet who can’t even tell my heart isn’t really in it; in fact, they act as if there really is something there and seem so surprised – can they really be that stupid? Can’t they tell that orgasms are not necessarily a sign of love?
Trying to exist without adventure, trying to maintain and oh fuck it how I just want to say fuck it all, cash it in on a one way ticket to somewhere as far as I can go. I don’t know why I don’t feel better about things. My life is full. I do well with school. I do well
with my job, enough money. Money to spend, money to save. Go to concerts, plays, operas, movies; keep a good running car… Is the adventure of romance so important to me that it counters everything else with its absence? I don’t just want to get laid; I want the danger of emotional intrigue. That’s what missing. I meet lots of women and even though some are really beautiful I just don’t have the interest in them. I don’t feel the attraction to them, to their bodies yes but not to who they really are. So, I’m busy. Busy at being a drug counsellor, a student but not an artist, not a lover.
It’s October 26 and the deadline for submitting to Princeton is November 15 and of course I haven’t even started. The last one “Lessons On Neurotic Conversations In A Foreign Language” was eventually rejected by both Yale and Pittsburgh. Screw it maybe I’ll just send it in as is and not get caught up in trying to anticipate their wants.
Painted a canvass a few months back – first one in a long time. Obviously it was not the beginning of something renewed. Smoking again not as much as last year but back at it again – just can’t get away from those ‘boros. Reading Jack Kerouac’s biography – not much to write home about.
When I was a child
There was the wind
Angels tip toeing
All around us…
Back in the early eighties I was living in Manhattan. Studio apartment on Maiden Lane 14th floor – in love wth the city and in love with the girl i was living with. I was working in Queens – took the E train. Was due to start school at the School for Human Services. The towers still stood and I’d cut through the financial center to get across the highway and go grocery shopping. The Batter Park was fairly desolate in those days, especially in winter, but i could wander, any time day or night always something worth doing always even going no where was an adventure….
he could not find you amazing
he could not touch your mystery
he could re call vast wilderness
adrift among archetypal feminine
a wash among deltas
Venus like salt mingling with new rain
blood like midnights paling lunary
a pleasure beyond wounds
a mingling beyond physicality
a hungrier type of mouth
willing to feed and to be fed upon
drawn up the spectre of a planet from the limbo of lunary souls — E. A. Poe
so back in bed with the morning coffee. needed to make some poetical notes, rummage for a piece of paper . found a hardly used note book from 2012 in the dresser drawer as one does. anyway scribbled what i needed to and then found this little bit of a poem. thought; should blog it. later in the kitchen doing some clean up popped on a CD hadn’t played in years Carrie Rodriguez, the last song on the cd done in Spanish. “La Punalada Trapere”. Had no idea what it meant but thought it might be cool with the poem. in looking for a you tube to post here, found one with her doing the song live on a radio show, she tells the interview where it comes from, her great aunt Eva Graza.
so here is the poem, which i would title “The Yearning / El Anhelo “, which is not about the song and the two versions of the song which is not about the poem but somehow of course they go together with my morning coffee, my kitchen chores and my long illustrious life. from here in Ireland. adiosa. mind how you go & watch your back.
in 1974 I started work on a biographical/fiction. ( originally titled salamanders) incorporating bits of journal, drugs sex and drama from the point of view of a 18 – 20 something male living in an old factory town New England as he discovers drinks weed cocaine love sex marriage divorce fatherhood etc. it began by the river it hasn’t ended yet. here’s another excerpt – for what its worth. still ruff n ready I suppose ~
Snowing
The black bird skim the tree the river the rocks and into sky is gone. It is snowing in May. The other day 80 degrees, now, since this morning a strange and beautiful sight, delicate greens of spring – lilacs in bloom, maples in red and the powdery puffs of sparkling white, white snow so white. Among the deep rich earth colours of spring – a winter thief. Birds singing snow falling. It’s snowing in May, and we have to get down to the shop and buy a battery for the car so we can try and sell it. Snowing in May. The car that since we bought it months ago probably only ran right for a few days was fixed and still not right was fixed again and again. So, to sell it we have to get it jumped hopefully make it to the shop buy a new battery and get it running long enough to sell it so we can get some cash towards buying another with. The baby is sleeping. I wanted to paint today; so far nothing has come of that. I wanted to do a water colour dancer wet down the paper let the colour mingle disperse, vanish, and coagulate, to dance into a dancer. I did not expect snow in May in fact I expected it to be sunny that’s why I planned to paint I was not ready for this day and am in no mood to paint unless the sun comes out, especially with this car thing hanging. My wife tells me all I do is waste my time; all I do is write, paint, read, fish. What else is there to do? And oh yes always want to make love. My wife says all I do is a waste of time. Maybe if I worked fifty hours a week and spent the rest of my time watching TV she’d be happy? I don’t know though sometimes the girl strikes me as one who will never be happy. It’s snowing in May; my wife doesn’t talk she doesn’t know how. I ask her what she wants, she doesn’t know. I ask her why she’s unhappy and what we can do to fix it, nothing. She says she isn’t unhappy. When I ask her then why are you always mad and complaining she gets mad and complains that it’s just the way she is.
It’s snowing in May, and I wish I wasn’t married to someone who doesn’t know what they want, and I wish I could be gone even dead. I wish it wasn’t snowing and I didn’t have to live in constant tension. I wish I was free and in a new met lovers arms and I wish I had someone else to tell my dreams besides this machine of type. This type of machine that has heard more of my voice than any human ear. So, does this machine make me one more victim of the modern age? If not for the invention of the cigarette and the typewriter, I would have no one to talk to!
It’s snowing in May and the machines are winning and the type of machine doesn’t matter only it’s a machine, the only dreams are told to a machine, my only intimate a machine, the only peace is the sound of machine pounding order, pounding everything into order, the order driving me insane is shorting my circuits, is making me die – I wouldn’t be surprised.
I am pouring cocaine into the nasal opening of this machine, cocaine the perfect lubricant making all run smooth smooth smooth no grinding smooth no squeaking smooth no pressure pounding, smooth cocaine cool soft so perfect lubricant. Not like the machine dehumanizer, cocaine the humaniser, cocaine the bringer of dreams, dreams no machine can dream.
It’s snowing in May and the baby is in his walker playing with a magazine while I am having black coffee. We take turns the child and me. He comes over to my work table, finds the basket of papers and water colours and is pulling on a picture that looks like an Indian Chief but at first was going to be a young woman, he chews it the background of ultramarine blue smears across his little face leaving his saliva splotches in the upper left-hand corner makes it our painting. Now he is playing with my cigarette pack which he is always attracted to … so anyway that’s the story of how my son became an artist before even being able to walk, his very saliva worked into the painting.
It’s still snowing in May the whole world gone crazy, the flowers, the birds, my wife, the motorists in the highway, the while river-fish-animal-plant-mineral thing is haywire and me and my son are having a ball making each other laugh painting writing laughing even at the snow, forgetting everything we ever learned I become the infant, and he remains infinitely wise. We are having orgasmic experience here and now – being human, being working here and now we enjoy the good work of being alive. He with his water colour blue beard, brave little fingers grabbing with delight the bells, the beads, the cigarette pack, and the paint tubes of the world. Me cigarette in mouth fingers cracking away grabbing too at my own life as he is as we are as the rest of the world isn’t quite as absurd anymore since it’s snowing in May – still.
There was this guy and his wife. They ran a Texaco service station in town. Their home was just behind the pumps and a two bay garage. Sometimes they’d sell Joey and me tickets when they weren’t going, face value box seat season holders since before the monuments. One of them would always pump the gas, no self service in those days, check under the hood? Checked the oil, front left looks a little low why don’t you drive over? We’ll fill it. We were just seventeen or eighteen, both of them were white haired and not yet feeble. But his face and neck had been corkscrewed pinks and reds. And one of his hands, pearl wax white wrung out like rubber a glove still twisted. One day we asked her and she explained someone had pulled in for a fill up, tossed a lit cigarette while he was pumping. They used to have perfect triangle pine trees at either end of the house and across the street instead of a highway was the entrance to an eighty acre city park, fountains, formal rose gardens, small stone bridges arched over clear running streams.
Years later another town another Texaco full service or self. Used to get my truck worked on, watched while I’d wait, his little girl and boy playing around in the driveway sometimes ride their tricycles. Now its a Mobil station and you can still get gas, no choice but to pump it your self and if you want; hot dogs, tacos, donuts, newspapers, coffee, lotto, butter, milk, eggs and you can still get a pack of Marlboro if you want to. And if any kid played in the drive way now? They’d probably get run over.
Back in the day when I first met this girl she told me about how she and a friend had plans for robbing a gas station. A full service Texaco, this one on the way out of town, run by an old fellow plenty of cash from travelers to New Haven. He was really old and lived in a trailer behind the pumps stayed open ’til after dark. I’m certain I talked her out of it, we talked of other things instead like getting married and living without our families, she became my first wife and as they say one mans saving is another mans hell or I guess you’d have to say purgatory
Afternoon starving to the refrigerator open the door look around find nothing but a queasy stomach, go back sit down, cigarettes. Began with getting lost in one of Miller’s books somewhere between the Tailor Shop” and “Jabberwhorl Cronstadt end up banging these keys to the sound of sobbing baby melody. My wife is away, she’ll trade a gallon or two of milk for some cigarettes and tapioca. We get free milk subsidy from the county if money was milk we’d be rich. My stomach tight in a knot, I’m all awareness ready to go my whole sensory being dagger sharp from the stone of hunger. Ready to go, ready for action but there’s no action, no destiny – the only thing that happens is my stomach bubbles, the baby cries, my wife stays gone, I still bang away these keys my bony fingers running out of juice no lubrication only brittle creaking of over used abused bone against other brittle bone the sound the feeling the imagery of my fingers is all that happens, the drying up process is all, that and my body anxious for food and tobacco and the baby still cries and the wife stays gone and there are two cigarettes I found today on the front stair landing one of which will now cure half my hunger and give my fingers a chance to survive.
Rain
Rain. Night rain. Stimulating scent of rain. Heavy blotches after weeks of 90-degree scent of summer rain rising from hot pavement. By the road side scent of summer barefoot children grateful in the rain. Night rain the sound of cars through the bedroom window, wide open hungry windows as is the earth as is the dwindling river as is the pavement and all the green and flesh and stone and scaly life for miles around hungry for fresh cool clean wet new rain.
The day past: a day of water cloudy sometimes sunny day of fishing for trout warriors, fierce quick warriors of the river cult. Catching first the dreaded sucker, small maybe two pounder of ugly brown flesh that I have no desire to look at let alone touch. Scavenger so necessary yet so hideous repulsive bottom mouthed creature, thick human like lips quivering with barbed steel. Pulpy soft fleshy lips tender peeling with steel, soft fleshy no fine sharp teeth of the warrior cult, none of the beauty rather brown slug like shape and colour and human like lips forever in a perfect O.
Then in white water deep between my favourite rock and hillside bank hard bend pole hard white water vibrating the line pulsating right up my arm silver flash of battle. Bold all at once hit no nibbling cowardly attempts at thievery. Fearless lusty trout battle as water as silver flash as raw life all too quickly over as another silver flash brings quick simple knife strokes as is the fate of all captured warriors a quick clean death – only children and vile suckers given quarter.
The day past a day of water remembering plants, fishing, cloudy sometimes sunlight sky refusing to give up its pleasure until darkness drew it out softly slowly blotches trickling pleasure across hot ground like finger tips my lover trickles across my skin softly slowly growing heavier until pouring out a pleasure of caresses soaks the earth the skin the sheets.
