CAUGHT IN THE NET - Seven
NOVEMBER 2001
Editor - Jim Bennett
Hello again. This is Caught in the Net number SEVEN.
I have had to make a few changes to the range of publications produced through the PK Poetry List. One major change is the reduction of CITN from a 12 issues per year to 8. This is just to help me fit it more easily into my academic year.
My thanks go to everyone who has submitted work for inclusion in this issue and my apologies to those I could not include. I follow a policy of publishing several pieces by the same author in order to enable the reader to see the range of the poets writing, but if space does not allow I may publish the same poet in several editions. I hope you enjoy this new edition of Caught in the Net and continue to support it with submissions and feedback.
Please note that no particular spelling convention has been followed and the spellings used reflect the national usage of each contributor. We are always looking for new poets and poems for CAUGHT IN THE NET and our other, web based, magazine TRANSPARENT WORDS both of which are hosted on the site of PK POETRY LIST The PK Poetry List is a poetry workshop and discussion list. Anyone interested in joining the list or in finding out more can do so at the main PK site which is at -
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/9952/index.htm
There are already over 950 subscribers to CITN but please feel free to pass it on to your friends.
Copyright Notice - All the work produced in this ezine is the copyright of the individual authors and cannot be reproduced without permission. All writers have exerted their moral rights to be identified as the author of their work.
Submissions - always welcome - please send to - caught_in_the_net@hotmail.com
Contents
| Jessica Cooke - (UK) | LOST FOR WORDS | |
| Frank Joussen - (Germany) | FACE TO FACE WITH UN/REALITY | |
| CHECKING OUT WHEN CHECKING IN | ||
| NO MORE OPEN QUESTIONS | ||
| TEMPORARY SANCTUARY | ||
| Lacotea Elana Jones - (UK) | SCATTERING THE ASHES | |
| A WALK BY THE SEA | ||
| Prasenjit Maiti - (Calcutta, India) | MOMENTS | |
| Michael P. Riley - (MD.USA) | OLD ESKIMO WOMAN | |
| WHO IS IT FOR? | ||
| FOR PEGGY HOLLAND | ||
| LEAGUE ALLY: OSTEGO LAKE | ||
| DOWNLOAD | ||
| Carol Sircoulomb - (Kansas, USA) | SNORING | |
| Ruth Smith - (UK) | REALISATIONS | |
| Rosemary Whittingham - (UK) | MISS |
Lost for Words
by Jessica Cooke
I can’t find my thesaurus
Yesterday I used it to balance my tea
Which spilled, swamping the text from A to F;
G surfaced from a red-brown sea,
A shadow of its former self.
Atlantis sank again. Titanic and Iceberg,
Twice-shy, steered aside. The Holy Grail
Winked in and out of sight. From the high ground,
Xenophobes approved the massacre.
No Cow jumped over the Moon.
Obeying nature, I have found it
Propped on the cistern, fanning open,
Puffed like a peacock, displaying not beauty
But the toad’s erudition, a mild reproach
For its new brown birth mark.
FACE TO FACE WITH UN/REALITY
by Frank Joussen
talking to someone real
in your latest cyberworld
is like an ancient
emailless miracle
but I´ve always been behind
my own chatroom times
face-to-face sex
in the big satin bed
of a tiny hotel room
is too spacey to be true
when of top of it all
you´re both in love too
blue neon advert
switches on and off
the white-flesh landscape
of my human universe;
I´ve never been to Japan before
and I´m not there now
Tokyo´s noisy midnight street
is unmysteriously lit
by flashes red and yellow,
the sirens are not slow to follow;
I could never stand city life,
I can´t cope with it today
warm heart beating
beneath your white
too-bony rib cage
makes you frailty incarnate;
we are alive at this moment
but have you ever been here
CHECKING OUT WHEN CHECKING IN
by Frank Joussen
more and more people´s lives
in our own Western world
have come to resemble
amazingly quite obviously
bourgeois one-night stands
in middle-class hotels
in rooms with a view
not looked at:
checking out when checking in
small talk given for small change
with not so much as a
sideward glance at your
'I´m-not-really-fortyish-looking'
partner in petty crime
moving on before truly getting there
leaving nothing but anonymous stains behind
NO MORE OPEN QUESTIONS
by Frank Joussen
?there
was no God who wanted me
in a garden at the centre
of a no-chaos universe
was no monkey aping his parents
more than my ancestors were aping theirs
in the stone-throwing age
was no psychopath less human
no genius more humane
on Freud´s joyless couch
is no other inmate of this zoo
controlled more from within and without
by "Mother Nature" than you and me
how come I´m still the one
who dictates my hand
what to write next
here?
TEMPORARY SANCTUARY
by Frank Joussen
in children´s games and adults´ bibles
charity and free time zoos
in love and friendship too
every sanctuary is a temporary one
Scattering the Ashes
by Lacotea Elana Jones
How dead you are!
There, stiff in your uniform
I never saw you wear a suit when alive.
Strangely, it becomes you,
So handsome in regimental finery.
We will make sure that you are never dusty,
Creeping with mildew or crawling
With the fat, white bodies of insects
Biting holes through the good cotton.
We sat around afterwards and discussed you.
Living room: the TV switched on,
Ham sandwiches, as stiff as your Godly fingers, are ignored.
Somebody dug out the ratty shoe-boxes, clinging to life with sticky-tape
There now are the photographs,
The man in sepia is so strong, so stiff straight-up spined,
With stripes on his arm,
And a bride on his arm
Where are you now,
So quiet as gravel,
In the card box upon the sideboard.
Smoking tab-less cigarettes and practising lighter tricks.
The sky is full of faces offering friendly smiles of comfort,
In the cloud of nicotine they are quite like fog-lights,
But their sympathetic noises drip soggily from their lips,
Onto the linoleum floor.
What would you have me do - mourn for you?
I could throw plates at the wall, but they are my best china,
And as soon as those sandwiches are placed in the trash-bin
Those plates are going back on the shelf.
A Walk By The Sea
by Lacotea Elena Jones
Grey days are ahead,
I thought we’d put all that behind us?
We were meant to tear down the past
But while the walls crumbled
And the wood grew rotten
We realised we had nothing to build us.
Your shirt is greasy, the collar is frayed,
Secretly, I feel ashamed
Walking beside you.
A hole in your shoe is letting the tide seep through,
I hear your sock surrender,
I want to turn here
And leave
You
Could catch me across the pebbles.
My heels could give way, my ankle
Could be persuaded to break,
I would never make it
To the safety of the promenade,
From this ill and ignorant sea, and you
In the coat with the stain on the sleeve,
Your hand merely inches from me.
You despise me,
That much is clear,
Your eyes are numb with the cold.
But while I keep my ill hidden
your thought prints the label
On a bottle of vitriol.
Moments
by Prasenjit Maiti
I have come to you after a while
after the second coming of nothingness
I keep on dreaming of nothingness
and my fears and inanity
I think of lines that when written could
well have been formidable
but they don’t come back to me
like some women, like
some moments spent with them
that were never mine
* * *
nothingness lolls about in neck
ties and prefers gin
to tonic and
whimpers in its
nothingness nothingness
writes, makes love, makes
small talk
is jealous, horny, hungry
and sedate all at the same time
sleeping always with
the same nothingness
nothingness is always like
the same nothingness
Old Eskimo Woman
by Michael P. Riley
Falla, you
forgive me when
I was young
we ate them
as they died
there was no other
food, this
they understood.
Who Is It For
by Michael P. Riley
You sit down on a wide white beach. The sand stretches
to accommodate you. you are settled,
waiting.
See how his body seems to explode
how the sinews and muscles of his arms and shoulders
are pulled to you, see
how this parallel skin divides the air.
How later the skin is filled,
the wind hiding behind your ears says softly
I know, I know
softly, all day long.
For Peggy Holland
by Michael P. Riley
your child screams for words
even these tears have plans
you will not know faith
until you are lost so will the scales
I have watched that delicate matter
move, have seen it cross boundaries (we know)
(we know) why we put the dead in the ground.
LEAGUE ALLY: OSTEGO LAKE
by Michael P. Riley
Half a foot, half a yard, half a foot backward
my beamish boy, cast, cast and retrieve,
lake storm gives lucky you fifteen minutes then
a star burst in the backyard
filled your eyes so you sweared it landed a hit
a palpable hit
and in the morn you'd think to find burnt traces but
in the morn sunfish, small mouth bass and
undefined ones still
slash, are hooked,
are released.
The morn's ten foot fog mourns not a thing, says
past this milked sight is forever
the flat water pregnant with fish, a threat of moon, and if
you will
meaning
for ten feet.
Most want no more, most want not even this talk
meant to
part the lake;
the life short worker with scleroderma wants his
fingers a bit longer than the doc
has promised
or predicted, which you would reckon is more
than the special boy then special man
trolling his special boat
along shores that for him are his and never change
could ever want; his father is gone somewhere his
Mom may go, probly will go may be soon but
still the lake his boat
someone with money a guvmint check
to go along shores that for him are his and never change.
Download
by Michael P. Riley
My Da, a lifeguard at Rockaway, member of the Coast Guard Academy swimming team, Captain on war's waters, seeker-finder of lost souls
In the Japanese Current,
says he has yet to surf,
to stare at bits and bytes.
We share there. Something Irish, I fear,
some loathing for the gifts we never got or got too late,
that all we could lawfully carry was a stick
against the British knife, pistol, cannons.
When he reads "download", he reports, he sees diapers.
Maybe he'll never surf, find enough in the screen to take him from his wife.
They care for all their old, I care for the old as totem and template,
meaning and mold, and all to be broken.
snoring
by Carol Sircoulomb
I snore even with the machine to prevent snoring
two years and my mind has learned how to snore
even as my brains are being sucked on and pushed out through my noseby the
compressor-vacum I am now an insomniacthe little pomerainian snores wrapped
around my headthe manx cat snores as she sleeps on my cold feet
my husband snores next to me with his compressor-vacum the bassett hound
beauford snores from the recliner and the britany springer snores and runs
dreaming of chasing a squirl
my sons room is silent
Realisations
by Ruth Smith
After the Bible story
we’d be led away
from the wheeze and pedal-clack
of the harmonium
and sat at a table,
sharing a box of crayons,
to draw pictures of Jesus.
Christmas was babe-in-a-basket
with a single tinfoil star
and during the year some of us
achieved a tall cerulean saint
with one hand upraised
and a halo as big as the sun
we’d already coloured in.
At Easter we needed green
for our high, domed hills
with their rickety crosses
and someone used all the red
to daub a hanging man
whose whole weight fell
from arms that measured
the paper with their fingertips.
When we went to museums
we got to know his owlish face
from Byzantine mosaics
and liked the colours, the silver and golds
in their shining cubes. In time
we’d recognise him anywhere.
Miss
by Rosemary Whittingham
This is odd;
nobody pulling at my sleeve,
no “Miss, Miss,” urgently repeated.
I can’t believe the silence.
Once forty pairs of eyes,
innocents and streetwise,
would turn to me
as I came in,
each with a grin -
“Good morning , Miss!”
But this!
This is like an alien land,
hard to understand.
Outside, the unchanged buildings
square, tall, grimy;
remember the time we went
to the jam-factory?
We and the wasps, that is.
Most unsatisfactory
but they liked the smell.
Inside, small chairs and tables,
plasticene and Aesop’s Fables;
voices pleading
“Can we come in, Miss?”
“Miss, me knee’s bleedin’!”
Or me nose
or me elbow...
My piano has gone!
Poor Jenny would be a’weeping.
An empty hamster-cage -
no Beauty or Cuddles,
no Barbara Brighteyes, sleeping
no Shep. Shep?
Ah well, what’s in a name, anyway.
Playground duty.
“Can I ‘old yer ‘and, Miss?”
Confidences told and respected -
“Me Uncle Benny came last night , Miss.”
Uncles Danny and Pete
(Jim, Johnny, Kev)
came other nights.
None of my business and erased by
“Miss, she fell!”
Don’t we all, sometimes?
Sleepy, sweat-sodden heads
on Summer afternoons,
dropping into dreamland
with Pooh and Piglet and others,
watched by waiting mothers
who peer through windows
pointing and giggling
(like their offspring)
at their offspring.
At last the bell
and the exodus;
empty now, my room;
but no -
“Can I stay an’ ‘elp, Miss?”
Or hinder.
“An’ me, Miss?”
“Yes, that’ll be lovely. Thanks!”
“I wish you was my Mum, Miss.”
“You wouldn’t, if I really was,”
“I would, Miss!”
Such faith.
Soon my room will come alive again,
but someone of more tender years
with much to learn, maybe,
will soothe fears,
dry hot, salt tears
and answer to
“Miss, Miss.”
from my children’s children.
Be kind to them, “Miss,” -
I loved them.
This poem
was the winner of the Sycamore Poetry Prize 1999