April 2003 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
I am coming
the second coming this year
preceded by my friends’ same
worn routine:
“When will you come?
Today? This hour?
In a month, or two,
or…what?
We’ll have cold beer!
Maybe even a keg!
And will sit at your feet
listen to stories
of places you’ve been.”
I wish I could raise them
to their feet and shake each
calloused hand of those
that have remained to work
on the farms or in the plant.
Show them I am no better
because I’ve been at the
un-i-vers-ity, bein’ pointless
book l’arned while they’ve been
workin’ workin’ workin’
punchin’ the clock at 7 A.M.
shortly after I’ve fallen asleep.
I’ve no good stories to tell,
no knowledge to bestow
that they haven’t already
known for years.
Here are my hands
to prove it, the scars have healed.
Now they are just useless,
long spindly fingers, that could
and would snap in an instant.
Here are my sides
free of marks–bruised
& broken ribs, this is what
the years have given me,
what they have taken away.
And I can’t drink much,
anymore.
April 2003 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
If I were governed
by the Law
of Thermodynamics
then I was (1) never created
and never will
be destroyed
I can only be
(2) transferred from mind to mind
and will continue
in this way forever
I am a debilitating neurosis
the (3) entropy I generate
always increasing in
your closed system
April 2003 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
with two toes I test
the temperature
of the linoleum
like a rookie member
of the Polar Bear Club
wondering if I plunge
right into the day
that the floor is as cold
as it looks from the cocoon
I’ve made with my bedspread
that the tiny icicles
forming on the AC ducts
are really part
of my imagination
then I’m forced
to look at Vonnegut’s
Cat’s Cradle lying
at my head board
and laugh so hard
that I’m crying
I jump out of bed
throw open the curtains
outside it’s bright
with just a touch of gray
April 2003 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
[i]for Modern Poetry Fa02[/i]
“Can you imagine
if T.S. Eliot were
to enter the room, right now.”
Beckoning the call,
almost unnoticed, insignificant
dusty silent wings fluttering
in the mid-afternoon,
the karmic incarnate
sailed into the classroom.
We were unmoved
to the unannounced visitor
to the discussion, somehow
always retrospective to certain
expatriate literary geniuses.
How for fifty years (maybe more)
the accomplished poetic deities
lorded over form and words,
commanding
make it new!
let no words not add!
Forgotten now are radio speeches,
recantations, fascist salutes–
men now only in what is left
on signed printed pages.
Cinematographers love
a hero, but the literary world
will always worship a villain.
And now in this place,
if the insect would metamorphose
into human form, who among
the struggling minds striving
to add to a generation would not rise
and proffer a hand
as if to a long gone friend.
Instead, we sit intense–
eyes glazing–bored–
asleep–dreaming of the ability
to say anything worthwhile…
The gray unidentifiable moth
slips through the chalk-scented air
(the rustic classroom befitting
of an appearance)
and does not land,
wary of being crushed
by a student wanting to destroy
history under an ignorant hand.
I wonder if some of us
are dreaming of being human
when we are really moths
set to disrupt the harmonic-
balance of the class.
March 2003 | back-issues, fiction
a fiction short by Pasha Malla
([email]pasha [at] ekno [dot] com[/email])
[b]Rm #312 – Ludwig Van Beethoven[/b]
Mr. Beethoven checked in with only one piece of luggage, a leather- bound valise. He failed to tip either the doorman, or the bell boy. In the elevator he broke wind and blamed it on a child.
During his two-night stay, Mr. Beethoven amassed a substantial bill viewing pornographic films on pay-per-view television. Evidence of semen was found in the bedsheets, wastebasket, shower and bathroom sink. Upon departure he was heard to refer to the hotel as a “shithole” and refused to offer identification while paying by personal cheque.
But in the room where Mr. Beethoven stayed sound has changed. The door opens not with a creak, but the chirping of sparrows. The bathroom taps pour a desert wind. You speak and your voice comes out thunder.
[b]Rm #801 – female novelist[/b]
A certain prolific female novelist stayed recently for one night in Room 801. The novelist, who was listed in the registry under a pseudonym, mainly kept to herself, emerging only to use the ice machine and remark how pleased she was to “have a room of (her) own”.
The novelist was pleasant, but confrontational when it came to hotel policy. However, it should be noted that while she persistently questioned the necessity of specific check-out times, no one was at any point afraid of her.
One peculiarity has emerged from the novelist’s stay: Ms. Maria Jimenez, the chambermaid assigned to Room 801, has since been unable to tell stories. Ms. Jimenez, who has worked at the Sarnia Best Western for close to a decade, and is renowned among the hotel staff for her sense of humour and intriguing tales of “the old country”, has become plagued by the worry that each anecdote she recounts will only be a version of the memory of the last time she told it.
[b]Rm #609 – Tyco Brahe[/b]
Tyco Brahe was a delightful guest. He beguiled both staff and patrons alike with lectures on the cosmos. In the sauna, he was consistently the first one up to pour water on the rocks.
Mr. Brahe spent four nights at the Sarnia Best Western. He was cordial and clean. He tipped the chambermaids generously. He allowed the children of other guests to look through his telescope. Mr. Brahe did, however, become agitated when kept up by a fornicating couple in Room 607. He resorted at 2:14 a.m. to paging the front desk the concierge, while sympathetic, felt uncomfortable intervening.
The smell Mr. Brahe has left in Room 609 is queer. It is familiar. It is the smell of your own home or rather, that specific smell of other people’s homes you never assume your own to have, but of which you become suddenly aware only after returning from a lengthy vacation.
(Story first published in [url=http://www.opiummagazine.com/storymallawestern.html]Opium Magazine[/url])
(c)2003 Pasha Malla