by Albert Glover

honey or the whip…ahhh, Melissa

she the sweetest thing
        you’ll ever put
                on yr tongue

in her cave lives
         the secret of the ages

             sweetness rules

gaze into the pools
        of those eyes, guys

toss your ithyphallic
       bronze toy
                there

bind yrself in the coils
       of her amber hair

power?  no    
        breath
                   before death

or else alone with yr bone

by John Roche

i.
brooding
abiding
pining
imbibing
praying
puking
bawling
all the necessaries
banished
by electric light

ii.
Yahweh brooded
o’er the waters
the old gal got her chicks in a row
thus the stars were hatched

iii.
Climb to our proper dark

iv.
incubation
of the poem
as with any disease
takes patience
something poets and patients
aren’t known for

v.
brooding
blank
brooding

vi.
fire helps

vii.
drink down fire
breathe in fire
breathe breathe breathe
remember to breathe
breathe to remember

viii.
music helps
or a tune in yr head
best the tune that wakes you out of a sound sleep
and sets you dancing after the red rose-bordered hem

by John Roche

There is a house on Crescent,
Buffalo, New York
no oddity
American foursquare
no Doctor Who phone booth out front
but always a chair for an Odysseus who arrives with a new spin on an old tale

Not Burchfield’s House of Mystery
but Ohio just as true
a triple-story

Not FL W’s Darwin Martin
(that’s up around the block)
but just as open–
the music bubbling forth (piano or vibes
up the well to gnosis

Not exactly Corbin’s interstitial barsakh
but a space-within-to-be-lived-in
Wright paraphrasing Okakura translating Lao Tzu:
why the house isn’t the doors or walls or ceiling or floor

Just that ole crescent moon older than Islam as Legba’s crossroads predate their cross
homed Ishtar and diamond-eyed Venus hearing flute of lapis lazuli
that the dead may inhale the incense
Aphrodite at her milky bath
the horns of our dilemma full filled
stories passing through gate of horn
transparent to the few

Through Dolphy’s music Jack’s gaze
—silence before speech—
open book
between us

by John Roche

Driving West Virginia Turnpike
up from Black Mountain/Lake Eden tour (courtesy, Jeff Davis)
listening to JC reading, accompanied by CK
playing beaten string bass, hi hat cymbals, barrel drum, finger piano,
oriental gongs, rattles, and prerecorded
live in Buffalo, Nietzche’s 5/20/1984 & TheatreLoft, 3/13/1985
(Vox Audio, Bruce Holsapple, 2009)

Through Through Through
East River Tunnel, Into the Stone
along winding mountain roads
Gassaway Gassaway Gassaway all!
Birch River, The Return of Hecate
better than meeting sad silica ghosts of Gauley Bridge
Burnsville’ s burning bridge Bifrost
Mother Jones standing guard above Painted Creek Cabin Creek
Lost Creek, home of John Henry and the Dogon Nommos
Bridgeport, where I wave to Casey Jones

Tectonic notes shift
syntactic plates collide
wary that a word tsunami might sweep you over the unfigural
edge, The End of This Side, indeed!

But you go with it
and around it
and through it
all the way to Pleasant Valley and Fairmont

Resting in Pitts’ icy burg
seeking magic kernels

laetrile for the soul
cancer eating Gaia
God of the Gaps
Barsakh
Monk’s rests
Cage’s silences
Jack playing piano at post-Tralf party while Diz nods approvingly
Pollock’s atomic interstices
Wright’s space within to be lived in
Charlie’s primopraxial path bands
interval between acceleration and deceleration
mettle to the peddle
pause that reformats the world
The Rekindling of the Planet
Beginning the Other Side