Use the jukebox to
 listen to some cool music including Winter Beach by Suchoon Mo as you browse the site

All the content of this website is © Copyright erbacce © Copyright on individual poems
remains with the authors; nothing may be reproduced without express permission.
If you download a copy of erbacce all copyright rules still apply.

23. Featuring: Chris McCabe (UK)

Including:

Laura Bottomley (uk) + John Burroughs (USA) + Leilani Cesnek (UK) +
Cyndi Dawson (USA) + Vlado Kreslin (Slovenia) + Hosho McCreesh (USA)

Still Time

The sparkle in my eye I renounced for sand,
For bricks I sold my face,
My shadow I exchanged for land,
And dogs, my only companions.

Now I live in this quiet house,
This golden house of mine.
I open the door only to those
Who bring me fresh eggs,
And take away my trash.

I still have time to learn whether
I should stay or go.

One day I might tear down this fence,
Perhaps one day I might leave,
A new face will breathe with this house,
A new pair of glimmering eyes,
While only dogs remain.

I still have time to learn whether
I should stay or go.
I still have the time to learn
The ways of right and the forbidden,
Does the clouded sky hold the answer?

Vlado Kreslin

PRE-RECORD, NOT FADE AWAY

I am thinking of your voice.
How thinking of your voice?
I try & all I see is how you looked.
Sometimes, without hearing,
I picture the sound of your words.
But where is that?

How the Tube makes us read
ourselves each time new
– under the Thames the tremulous –
I almost panicked; is there anything
remains in analogue of how
you spoke, once, captured as a joke?

I create the format to support it
picture the reels on which you spoke
but when silent to listen, all I see is your face

Chris McCabe

Ahem (a hymn)

 
Stand up, stand up for Jesus
While his father knees us in the nuts
Plugs us in our butts
Aims to please us or displease us, as the case may be
By leading us into paths of unrighteousness
For his name’s sake
Never giving us a break
Teaching us to take more than we live
Die more than we give
 
It’s the same stale story
We distribute his excrement
In this world gone grim
And attribute the government
Of this shitcan to him
 
To God be the gory
Grating things he hath done

John Burroughs

THE SIMPLICITY OF ALL THINGS FAR AWAY

She said she was going to the shop with me
She was going to the shop with me
She was going, she was going
She was gone. Gone
And yet she wasn’t at the shop with me
The door was in front of me
A big oak door with brown and cream
And did I scream?
Hell, yes!
And I banged and banged, but
Still the shop was there
And I was here.

Leilanie Cesnik

1986: A No Heat Space

We might have been listening to The Ramones
but God knows I have long term memory loss.
What I do know for certain is that you
were high as Orpheus and we skated through
hallways, imaginary blades connected with feet--
unaware of frigid air, this no heat space.
Dishes stacked for days blended into stains
in an old porcelain sink...

It might have been you who said it first,
that only blocks away Sid had murdered Nancy.
You can’t make this shit up. Something about it
seemed so romantic. Because you had
rockstar shoulders, necklaced by low slung guitar.
Because we were chemically parallel, we were
sailors coasting same city floors, tilted.
If you killed me now I might be famous, too.

Somebody turned on an amp. Then I heard it...
Her singing, from another room, siren in its
ethereal, and I knew she would come rabid for you.
I knew if I slipped prostrate, glimpsed you,
beautiful with light slipping from pore and lip
that the way her hips changed with seconds
You would reverse coma a kiss for her
Hoping to tear skin, hoping it would end in blood.

Cyndi Dawson

Sushi

I waft the rice with a table mat
while you rake
like a gardener who likes lines.
The steam gathers under our faces
  hangs there
static

The vinegar odour, shocking as distillation fumes,
will be with us for days in hair, skin, jokes.
We test it, taking it up in sticky snowballs
and throw it.
Squid unfolds as it is ripped from itself.
Salmon is held to the light, slapped,
Unfurled over the palm.
The artery tweezers rummage
for the splinters of glassy bone.
Pulled clean out
like teeth.
Satisfying.
We pass the fish, raw as blood, between us.
You pinch the rose-peach flesh
between your fingernails and swing it in,
closing your mouth around it.
The daughter shows the father how to make shapes.
He listens like a child.

Laura Bottomley