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  Selections From The Poets Of

  The Guerilla Poetics Project

  Edited By

  Ed Kauffman

  Published By The Guerilla Poetics Project

  Copyright 2011 Guerilla Poetics Press

  This free ebook may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, and transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. We offer it with our deepest thanks for your interest and support. If you enjoy it, please seek out other work by all the included authors.

  Table of Contents

  Editor’s Note — Ed Kauffman

  David Barker

  The Wheels Of Government

  To The Lady Who Fell Down The Stairs

  Just In Case I Become A World Traveler

  justin.barrett

  Alone

  Downtown

  Heredity

  A Portrait Of Ourselves Only/30 Years Down The Line

  Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

  Four Crickets

  Something Beautiful

  The Rust Factory

  Seed

  JJ Campbell

  You Can Only Watch The Same Movie So Many Times

  Sadness, Through Male Eyes

  The Unexpected Death Of An Old Friend

  Making A List, Checking It Twice

  Alan Catlin

  Hugh Casey And Ernest Hemingway: The Artist And The Ballplayer

  Working Girl

  No Smoking

  8-30-06

  Leonard J. Cirino

  Logic

  Modern Times

  Sorrow And Joy

  The Rich And Famous

  Glenn W. Cooper

  A Room Like This

  4 Year Old Collecting Eggs

  A Destroyer Of Men

  Some Men

  Christopher Cunningham

  Words Like Terror

  Nothing Is Remembered

  A Moment Of Something Glittering

  These Quiet Nights

  Soheyl Dahi

  No, Not Me

  You Know

  I’d Give It All Up

  Dave Donovan

  A Toast

  In Memory Of Ray Augustine

  Driving Lesson

  Doug Draime

  The Earth Is Exploding Where Lawrence Of Arabia Once Slept

  Ivy

  Old Homeless Man In St. Francis Hotel Lobby

  If I Could Paint I Would Paint This

  Nathan Graziano

  A Vampire In The Mall

  A Frat Guy On A Motorcycle

  Two Girls In A Tub Together

  My Wife Has The Memory Of An Elephant

  S.A. Griffin

  Everything Is All Right In Time Even Death

  This Place Of love You Make

  Lady

  One Night In San Francisco

  Christopher Harter

  Poems For D.A. Levy

  Poem

  Farmer’s Market (6.16.07)

  To The Quiet Voice Of Tom Kryss

  Richard Krech

  Mindfulness Of Changed Circumstances

  After The Storm

  After The Intermission

  That Place Is Always Attainable

  Mike Kriesel

  The Great American Novel

  Country Garage

  September’s Almost Gone

  Watching Boxing

  Ellaraine Lockie

  Man About Town

  Censured At Starbucks

  Edge Of Night

  If You Go To Budapest

  Adrian Manning

  For Tomorrow

  Your Anger

  There Must Be A Way

  Black Days

  Hosho McCreesh

  Call It A Battle Cry, Call It Guttural…

  Dark, Dank, Ignored Spaces…

  In Every Place The Sun Drags It’s Light…

  Brian McGettrick

  Alright?

  From The Shore Out

  Tanning The White Band

  This Drawn Out Thing We Do

  Amanda Oaks

  Sirens & Lullabies

  Gravity: Iron Hearts You Can’t Save Or Kick Start

  Lost Petition For An Endangered Species

  Insurgency

  Bob Pajich

  Beer Without Sugar

  Missing You

  Magnolia

  On Hearing Of The Bankruptcy Of Converse Shoes

  Kathleen Paul-Flanagan

  The Megaphone Man

  I’m No Soccer Mom

  Inevitable

  Michael Phillips

  I Don’t Understand Birds

  The Benefit Of Distance

  Crawling

  The Only Man For The Job

  Sam Pierstorff

  The Grammys Were On

  The Perks Of Being An Editor

  The Changing Station

  Coming Home

  C. Allen Rearick

  Death Comes For Us All

  The Terror

  Poem For The Dying

  These Tired Hands Can Hold No More

  Charles P. Ries

  Birch Street

  I Love

  Big Woo

  Communion

  Ross Runfola

  Suburban Killing Fields

  Nothing To Lose

  Orange Juice & Death

  William Taylor, Jr.

  Test Subject

  In Our Best Moments

  The Heat

  Don Winter

  Buffing

  Lonesome Town

  At The Tavern

  Tacoma Tavern

  Editor’s Note

  I've taken the liberty of presenting the work as consistently, page after page, as possible–striving for balance between the "individuality" present in the poems as originally written, and the book's overall formatting needs. This is most evident in the "standardization" of poem titles–presenting them in a consistent "title case," while the bodies of the poems are presented as originally written, creating some significant differences, poet to poet, in punctuation, grammatical liberties, and even format. Beyond that, a very light (hopefully invisible) editorial hand addressed minor, forgivable grammatical concerns: typos, hyphens, misspelled words (of which, despite much recent criticism, "guerilla" is not one–look it up)...with extraordinary care given to never change the poet's intent, line breaks, or anything beyond all of the above mentioned. It is my sincerest hope that these changes will go quietly unnoticed by not only the readers but the writers as well, and please trust I meant no disrespect.

  I’d also like to thank the generous efforts and contributions of all the inventive fund-raisers involved, without whom this book could never have been completed. I hear tell of a vintage Vegas poker chip that fetched a right pretty penny on the auction block, the entire proceeds of which were donated to the project and this book specifically. That is the quintessential spirit of the independent press—namely doing any and everything to crack the nut. It’s all a simple question of alchemy—what you start with and what you do with it. The wealth of this project lies not in its meager ends but rather its near limitless capacity for innovation, owed mainly to the type of personalities it attracts. Creativity is creativity, no matter the medium.

  It’s been a real honor to be asked to cull what I thought was the strongest work for this ambitious project, and if there is anyone to thank for the strength of the book it’s the fine poets presented here. Decades of under-appreciated work among them, I’m proud to help bring just a little bit of what they do to light. If you enjoy the read half as much as I enjoyed putting this beast together, then, you are in for a real treat!

  Ed Kauffman, editor

 
David Barker

  The Wheels Of Government

  three of us

  hobbling down the sidewalk

  towards the capitol building.

  two bad hips and

  a gimpy ankle.

  none too steady on our feet.

  all three spy retirement

  on the horizon.

  outside the hearing room,

  a sea of black suits. we shuffle in

  and take seats.

  7:30 AM,

  the gavel bangs and

  they start testifying.

  I have a file thick with numbers

  just in case of questions.

  everyone thought to bring coffee

  but me.

  To The Lady Who Fell Down The Stairs

  I didn’t witness that accident,

  but I heard about it later, and

  when I saw you on crutches,

  your leg in a cast, you seemed

  embarrassed by your misfortune. That

  was the first time that I saw you

  as a person, and not an adversary. We’d

  had some turf battle years before,

  when you first came to work here. Something

  in your mind, not mine. I think you

  saw me as a threat to your status, not

  realizing that I wasn’t after anyone’s

  job; I was just doing my own. Things were

  tense for a while, but we got past that,

  and later when you learned that I’m a writer,

  and told me of your own work in journalism, we

  had something in common. You

  even bought my chapbook, the one

  where I talk about all the crap I’ve

  gone through at work, and you were shocked

  that I was “so bold” as you put it. And I

  explained that I hadn’t told

  the half of it in there – that there’s

  plenty of other stuff that I’ve

  kept to myself. I think you saw me

  in a new light after that, and our relationship

  was friendly from then on, asking each other

  “how’s it going?” the few times we

  ran into one another in the hallway.

  So it came as a hard thing,

  when I got that email from the boss informing us

  that you’d suffered from cardiac arrest

  on Tuesday night and were in the hospital

  in intensive care, lingering in

  a medically induced coma, and that the prospects were

  not good. I’d just seen you that morning

  during the emergency drill, and now

  I’m glad that in the chaos of the moment, I had

  taken a second to say “hi.”

  They said it was a rare event, but it

  happens: you’d

  fallen asleep on the sofa, and in that

  cramped position, a clot had formed and

  traveled to your heart.

  Wave after wave of sadness

  hit me all that day. Not

  because we were close – we weren’t – but

  because we were coworkers, and I knew it could

  have happened to any one of us in that building. And I

  remembered back to the stairs, and how you would

  really be embarrassed if you could only know what

  had befallen you now.

  Well, don’t be. There’s no

  dishonor in falling downstairs, nor in

  falling from life. It happens to the best of us. It

  happens to all of us. And you know what they say about

  how the good die young. There must be truth to that. You

  were only 45, with a husband and a 6 year old daughter.

  On Monday the second email arrived, the one I’d been

  dreading. I didn’t have to read it to know

  what it said.

  Don’t think me cold because I

  worked the afternoon of your service. It

  wasn’t indifference. It wasn’t because I had too much

  work waiting for me to take off for an hour. And

  it wasn’t because I didn’t care (I did). It

  was for the same reason that I skip all funerals.

  Because they’re too painful.

  The stoic husband ... the

  weeping child. There’s nothing I can say. They

  don’t need my pity, my

  minor grief.

  In the days that followed, I took a closer look

  at my coworkers, even those I’d

  battled against, and they all looked

  damned good to me. I have you

  to thank for that. I was wrong when I

  wrote those words. Wrong about everything.

  Just In Case I Become A World Traveler

  my daughter tells me that

  if you go barefoot in India

  these small worms in the soil

  with hooks on them will

  stick to the soles of your feet

  and bore into your skin,

  get inside your body and

  give you diseases.

  at first I suspected

  she was passing along one

  of those new urban legends,

  like alligators in the

  sewers of New York City,

  but she assured me she had

  read it in her Science

  textbook.

  now I've had to add

  walking barefoot

  in India to my list of

  things to be avoided

  in foreign countries,

  along with drinking

  water in Mexico, and

  taking snapshots in the USSR.

  justin.barrett

  Alone

  a dying streetlamp

  flickers

  orange light onto

  the road

  as an empty

  beer bottle

  sits on the curb

  just like

  me

 

  Downtown

  smoggy

  gray

  guy walks by

  and points

  to a single red

  flower

  growing

  in a crack in

  the sidewalk

  “beautiful,”

  he says

  and

  it was

 

  Heredity

  my mother used to tell

  me that i could

  be anything i wanted

  to be when i grew up,

  yet here i am

  working a menial job

  for minimum wage,

  thousands of dollars in

  debt with the drink

  as my only escape.

  i don’t ever recall

  wanting to be

  my Uncle Jimmy.

  A Portrait Of Ourselves Only

  30 Years Down The Line

  We walk down the halls,

  holding hands,

  like a couple 30 years our senior.

  She shuffles as best she

  can, I shorten my

  steps as best I can.

  She does well, considering.

  Then we see another couple,

  one of the ones 30

  years our senior, only he’s

  the sick one; and she’s holding his

  hand and encouraging

  him along.

  When we pass,

  my wife squeezes my

  hand a little tighter,

  bringing it closer to

  her hip,

  and we shuffle

  our way down the

  bleak, sterile hallway.

 

  Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

  Four Crickets

  A great singer

  forges his song

  from behind a

  few blades
of grass.

  He is small

  in stature, but

  great in depth and

  sound. He is small,

  fits in my hand.

  Perhaps two, three,

  four such singers

  would fit as well.

  A quartet of

  small, great singers

  would fill this room

  with giant songs.

  Something Beautiful

  Let something beautiful out,

  a song you can hang the moon on,

  the one-word lovers mean

  when it’s not a game.

  Let the suicides die and madness

  mend its own mind. Let the light

  out of the caves and

  bring out the paint to

  color what lacks. Take sadness, grief,

  and sorrow and find it

  a new face: the smile

  you fell in love with.

  The Rust Factory

  Working in the rust factory

  the foreman's on my case

  my job is in danger because

  profit is lower than morale

  my sweat is nothing to them

  it stinks as bad as their

  treatment of the workers

  each affected by the rust

  the blood we cough up each morning

  has colored the walls and

  floor of the factory crimson

  and black when the rust hits it

  I am looking to get out soon

  the asbestos plant is

  willing to pay top dollar to

  any worker with balls and lungs

  Seed

  I want to be buried

  off the side of the highway,

  where green grass grows

  and crows feed and sing.

  I don't want to die.

  this is not what I desire.

  What I want is to be a seed

  firmly planted in the earth.

  I haven't decided

  what type of seed, but I would

  like to grow defiantly

  in all four seasons.

  I want to lie down

  and disappear under roots

  and under the soil and rest,

  living in my dreams.

  JJ Campbell

  You Can Only Watch The Same Movie So Many Times

  i see you're rushing

  toward another brush

  with an over the

  counter suicide

  and quite frankly i've

  lost all my desire to

  fight with you over it