Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse

A large treasure chest,
gleams with shimmering jewels:
sunrise o’er rooftops.

“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a poet of Japan.

Haiku
by “Birdclaws” ueee

A huge, perching hawk
sits atop the backyard fence;
a little dog barks.

U “Birdclaw” Eese is a poet of Japanese poetic forms.

~~~

36 Years On
by Eric Awesud Ble

It was a bright and cold day in October’s autumn wind.
The clocks were turning thirteen, quietly amidst the din.
One’s chin was hidden in one’s breast in order to escape
the rape of Han King Xi Jinping, one’s mouth shut closed with tape.
One slipped through the glass doors of Victory Apartment fast
in order to prevent the filth from coming in, alas;
for it was everywhere one went. The nation bathed in grit.
It was as if one could not ever get away from it.
The hallways always smelled of b.s. Free speech vanished with
the Party line, the many martyrs of Communism’s myths.

The New World of Communism
by Eric Awesud Ble

It was a great rectangular, constructed building there,
impersonal and futuristic, windowless and bare.
It was impressive, like some manufactured factory,
spectacular and powerful, ferocious cruelty.
It was a massive, Soviet and grandiose display
of ruthless Communism, Socialism, cold and gray.
It was spectacular, a heartless, brutal poetry,
a mindless manifesto of cement and crushing speed.
Here was no love, no contemplation, peace or happiness;
It was the emblem of the violent and meaningless.

Eric Awesud Ble is a poet of the developing Orwellian nightmare.

~~~

As Heraclitus Pointed Out
by Esiad L. Werecub
“Poetry is news that stays news.”
—Ezra Pound

As the fluidity of docupoetry points out,
things alter all the time; that’s certain. How can’t there be doubt?
Just when you think you have a story, it begins to change
into another metamorphsis, and rearrange.
Important truths about existence and the state of news
are ever in a state of flux, as if fixed on a fuse.
The strange, electrical snake writhes through winding, wriggling routs,
and one’s amazed to see the thing exploding into founts
of colour, tranformations, perceptivity and like,
as Heraclitus pointed out when he was on his bike.

Esiad L. Werecub is a poet of Ancient Greece.

~~~

Claucus of the Sea
by Aedile Cwerbus

Glaucus, a Boeotian fisherman, lived by no ocean; rather by th’ Aegean Sea he lived. One day into ‘t he down dived, finding there an herb* by a magician planted, slanting in the wat’ry wafting. Picking it, he placed it in his large mouth, all about him lovely mermaids laughing,
eating it as if he’d been in great drouth. Suddenly he, Glaucus, turned into a fabulous divinity, amazing in th’ ability to prophesy, say many an extraordinary thing, like how fortunate it was to be born a Roman man when the toga was worn.

Aedile Cwerbus is a poet of Ancient literature. This is a prose-poem. The herb is obviously not a bitter vetch.

~~~

The Free City of Budapest
by Béla Cedew Suri

The early Celtic settlement turned in to Aquicum,
a Roman city in Pannonia—Let water come!
The Magyar tribes arrived to it in the 9th century,
establishing its culture and its language—Hungary.
But it was pillaged by the Mongols in 1241;
The Magyars had to fight to keep the land that they had won.
The re-established Buda rose up in the Renaissance,
but it was terrorized by for years by cruel Ottomans.
In 1686 it was set free from Turkish pride,
and Budapest became a major city unified.

Béla Cedew Suri is a poet of Hungary. Joe Biden suggested that the freely elected Hungarian republic (next to Ukraine!) was a “totalitarian regime”. Shouldn’t he rather say that of China, or did the Chinese Communists buy the Bidens off?

~~~

The Isle Usedom
by Uwe Carl Diebes

An island in the Baltic Sea in Pomerania,
divided in between the Polish and Germania,
the sunniest spot both in Poland and in Germany,
the Isle Usedom of marshy lakes that one can see.
The Karnin Lift Bridge rises over Oder’s Preenestrom,
a technical and monumental form in Usedom.
Now major holiday and recreation area,
in World War II, the Armia Krajowa carried on,
where V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets were worked on
at Peenesmünde on the sunny isle of Usedom.

Uwe Carl Diebes is a poet of Germany.

~~~

An Afternoon Sojourn
by Urbawel Cidese

It was a journey to another place, if not a plane.
o, traveling, unraveling the gaze of glaze and grain
past fast gas stations, massive grassy fields of bundled hay.
another sunny day that runs away before the gray.

Hey, there along the highway…Pay the toll mechanic’lly…
and exit round the speeding vehicles, beneath concrete.
a chance to purchase, at the glossy mall of glassy eyes,
some uniforms, some puzzles and a Halloween surprise.

Hej, a pit stop, fresh jam in jars. returt in gleaming car,
from highway to the sky by ribboned route, not all that far;
and then a fast-food stop for chicken sandwich, coke and fries,
an eighty-mile trip between the buildings and the lines.

Urbawel Cidese is a poet of urban spaces. He loves the Metroplex, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the USA, which includes cities, like Dallas, Forth Worth, Arlington, Plano, Garland, Irving, Grand Prairie, McKinney, Frisco, Mesquite, Carrolton, Denton, Richardson, and Lewisville.

~~~

An Image from a Book
by Cale Budweiser

West Egg still figures in one of my most fantastic dreams;
.I see it as a night scene by El Greco, streaming gleams:
a hundred house all conventional and yet grotesque,
beneath an overhanging sky, the full moon lusterless;
four men in dress suits with a stretcher solemnly progress
along with a drunk woman in a bright white evening dress;
her hand is dangling o’er the side, jew’ls sparkling brilliant flame;
the grave men turn up at the wrong house; no one knows her name;
and no one cares. Why does that image still stay in my mind
long after all the rest had gone, and I was going blind?

Cale Budweiser is a poet of drink. Cf. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”.

~~~

A Stack of Rounded Rocks
by Red Was Iceblue
“There the eyes are…”
—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

The photograph is out of focus. It is black and whute.
One can make out, a bid is in the distance bathed in light.
It’s true, though one is going blind, one still can see some things:
a stack of rounded rocks, like speckled eggs there teetering.
How can they stay still in the picture’s square, without a sound?
How can one keep on going forward, when one’s falling down.
There is no statue—Christopher Columbus is not here.
There is no tall Mount Whitney rising in the atmosphere.
There’s very little here at all. The fog is everywhere.

Red Was Iceblue is a poet of Modern, Postmodern and New Millennial art.