POETRY

rejoice in the dog

millennium maggot

dispatches from the war against the world

albanian poems

french poems

the hells
going on

suicide for
non-beginners

fearful symmetry

book disease

foreground
trouble

the transcendental hotel

cinema of the blind

lament of the earth mother

uranian poems

haiku by okami

haiku on the edge

black hole of your heart

jung's motel

vasko popa

BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE

maxims

PROSE

houses for the dead

womb of half-fogged mirrors

overcoming tourism

anti-fairy tales

this sorry scheme of things

satan in the groin

houses for the dead

irish genius

french genius

egregious.org

PAGE F THE MONTH

February - March 2001

We hope tha t the next Page of the Month
will feature your best work.

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THE BISHOP OF DADA

by

Bernard Towers
Norfolk, England

he walks in wearing his features
between the gods and the creatures
guesswork creases his eyes up
just one mission - to wise up
his suits are the cast-offs of dead men
he has no time for honchos and head men
The Poetry Society hate him
only the riff-raff rate him
he's got no sense of proportion
he treats his shopping with caution
he likes his music with noise in
he spits out things that are poison
he speaks with breath ever bated
he says sacred and scared are related
he sows the spores of amazement
they grow like mould in the basement
he smokes and listens to dub which
is why he never gets published
plus the publishers don't understand it
it's much too clear and too candid
the fact's a fact and he faced it
he and his dæmon are wasted
there is no place in the system
for oddballs uttering wisdom...

TORONTOPOEM (UNTITLED)

by

Anthony Metivier
Toronto, Canada

and it's smart if you don't waste your breath
because she's bound to tell you
she'll say every catchphrase in the book
because she carries it in her teeth
baubles and beads and something red in the centre
fifty bucks for a blow or for blow, whichever is better
I watch her tongue dance like a snake
I hum as it curls enacting slivers of drool
which spill silver onto the street into pools
waiting for a toronto wind or a long-winded hero
to blow us viscous, still and cool
and down
into
a
subway
grate

APOTHEGM

by

Anthony Weir
Loch Caolán, Northern Ireland

Snow
falling
tells me
that I should
stop
thinking.

GENERAL EDUCATION CLASS
IN THE PIERCE COUNTY JAIL
THE DAY BILL GATES
LOSES 12 BILLION ON PAPER

by

P. Pedersen
Washington State, USA

She's a nail, aimed at
but hit crooked, skinny
as a throwaway
needle, teeth left behind
in fists. All she can call her own
are her kids: one in Juvie
for running from foster-care -
and the eighteen-year-old: she wants my help
to write him a letter, tell him he's got
to guard her uncashed check:
two months' wages
washing dishes at Taco Bell.
Her voice, a yellow balloon rising
in a gaudy blue April sky:
"My stake when I get out."

PREVIOUS PAGES OF THE MONTH
going back to March 2000

BUILDABLE LOTS

by

Lisa Beatman
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA

Three wormy apple-trees lean against the fence;
their nesting tenants gossip in the shade.
My yard is so big I mow only half,
the rest is tall grass and fireflies in June.
My hammock is strung in a corner
where I can't see the road
and the road can't see me...

That was last year. Now I'm elsewhere,
and there are three craters in that ground.
The apple trees and their inhabitants
have also gone.
Heavy machinery eats the fertile dirt
and money begins to grow.

CRUCIFIXION STORY

by

Suchoon Mo
Pueblo West, Colorado, USA

divine weather
naked under the sun
such a beautiful body
at the end of his tether

he wept and cried
why did you forsake me ?
why did you ?

why ?

they died together

EVERGREEN

by

Lisa Beatman
Somerville, MA, USA

Seduced by golf
they mow the last
remaining land,
fence it. cut
the Ponderosa pine,
haul away all the shade

White balls weed up,
champions of chemical warfare
they loll in the shadows,
nibbled by fewer and lesser salmon

Mountains frown
from their water-
trapped reflections
as if remembering wolf
and wild raspberries
and tipi-smoke...

Men still squint
intent on their game,
carted now
by the harnessed sun

I am in their
line of fire -
mutters of
"This is not a park!"
chase me over
the chainlink border

Lakeside weeds wilt
as the banks grow
to the chug-chug
of sunset pumps
that feed the links
and keep them
evergreen

GLOSS ON A POEM BY SAIGYO (1118-1190)

by

Anthony Weir
Loch Caolán, Northern Ireland

I feel that what I feel
is hardly real,
and that the world outside my head
is even worse than what it seems.
How can I have the effrontery to feel
that other people's nightmares
are only dreams ?

GREETING CARD

by

Michael Ceraolo
Ohio, USA

When you care,
but not enough
to compose something yourself ...

CIVIL OBEDIENCE

by

Damian Bradley
Seattle, USA

advertising beaches bleaches
minds white knees stained greed green
praying on finely clipped
summer desert lawns
sprinkled daily from river
damned reservoir

baptized in industrialized waters
yearn to drink from shiny cans
sshhcssstcraaacK aaaahhhh
dribble ritanal-ized frito-lay
drool from gaping lips open to learn
disney scripted history fables

crib turns cubicle
model parents unblinking gaze
into blinking screen
don't dream but manage
time surgically sliced
and neatly divided

sterile bedside tray
bleeds digital red
and screams BLEEEEEP
yawning awake eyes focus
suburban flavored mediocrity
try a bowl for breakfast, mmm yum!
the government recommends a daily dose

GOD AS POET

by

Giovanni Malito
Cork, Ireland

He invokes all
Nature, inanimate
and animate

and he creates
his own Muse, fashioned
in the image
of his own Myth
of himself.

EASTER 2000 RAP (R.I.P)

by

Neo Diogenes
Manapouri, New Zealand

"He that has a gospel
To loose upon Mankind,
Though he serve it utterly
Body soul and mind,
Though he go to Calvary
Daily for its gain -
It is his Disciple
Shall make his labour vain."
- Rudyard Kipling

Hey, Mr Jesus
on your clever cross
Here's an Easter egg in vinegar
rolled all the way from Gaza to Laos.

Hey, Mr Know-All, you've sussed it by now -
that more evil will be done -
and terrible destruction of the Earth
- because of you and in your name
than was done before your
precious mystic birth.

I wonder if you realise,
Mr Anti-Family, honey,
that all religions exclude
and the most exclusive is
the religion of money.
The richer they are, the more
unreal their expectations, the angrier,
the more impatient, vindictive,
intolerant, nastier.

Hey, Mr Saviour
on your Roman cross,
you weren't set up by Judas
but by your disciples' Boss.
He wanted a Jew-Messiah
and so you have to die
to make a Greek Christ
triumphing in the sky,
and have all of what you said and did
turned into a world-sized lie.

ENJOYING SCHIZOPHRENIA

by

Rodney Cole
Birmingham, England

1. TODAY'S PLANS
Converse with the gods
Meet Christ in Crouch End, London
Be John the Baptist
Know the glut of the night fox
Observe death in the spaces
Discover HeavenOnEarth beneath one's fingernails
Divine the thoughts of others
Obtain a personal audience with His Holiness
Wag one's tail diskinetically

2. THE TREES
fly off into the outer dark
The planets
enthrone the worms
The wind
disposes of the ocean
The earth is vomiting
a tremendous
skeleton
A dragon
There it is, brontosaurian
Armies and civilisations
are squashed
The moon gapes
like a stranded jellyfish
There it goes
Lumbering
bumping and heaving
Away
Into the night
On and on
And I'm Sitting On Top

3. KILL
the television
mirror
self
from the 19th floor
headbutt the door
why me ?
best hide
now finished grubbing
out the days
a bloody pullover
in the sink
as the leaves were falling
Reality has many frequencies

SIX POEMS

by

Olaf Macintyre
Gjirokast ë r, Albania

1. GOOD PEOPLE DON'T EAT MEAT

"Western Values"
value only values,
insisting that
the moral world is flat.
In the virtual gulag of normality
there are no good people;
time is only self
and wisdom only
terminal fatigue.

2. REFUSE TO SPEAK ENGLISH

The only freedom is difference.
The only integrity is dissent.
The greatest dissent is generosity.
Dëgjo me kujdes: gjuha shqipe
nuk është aq e vështirë.

3. THRENODY ?

The 'greatest' art is
many things to
many people
Which is to say
meaningless

I mourn for
'great art'.

4. THE SMOKING BEAGLES

say that what you call your Soul
is Satan sanitized, and civilisation
is the bombing of a country by the USA
every minute, every day, all day,
all night, every day for Nine Years:
Stalin sanitized.

5. BE GOOD, DO GOOD:

one does not imply the other.

6. EMIGRATION

It is better to be hated
as an American
than as an Albanian.

REVLON REVISITED

Gavin Jones
Nantucket, Maryland

They say gin's a whore's drink.
A paint for the innards.
A crust of make-up.
A song for the neon dark.

She, shunned by Revlon,
licks the busted teeth of psychopaths.
They, hissing death and whiskey,
tear at her waxy knobs.

My, my my,
every night
their boiled bodies
roil in flight

jerking
like the severed legs of antelope
in jackal-dreams.

THE TERRIBLE GARDEN OF RECYCLED TIME

Malcolm Walker
Seaforde, Northern Ireland

It puts all Heaven in a rage
to see a living creature in a cage.
Nature is almost at the end of its tether.
Religion is man's first dangerous attempt
to gain control of weather.

Haiku of the Month

by

Okami
Reedlake, UK

Amphisbæna:
making love is not an act
- but an animal.

Sa nouvelle maison;
le loup-garou derrière
arrosant une Pensée.

Previous Haiku-of-the-Month

by

Valerie Laws
Whitley Bay, UK

The moon is too big
too bright, too early, too round:
a shout in the sky.

and by

David Steele
Norfolk, England

Collecting cat-hairs
for its nest: the sparrow
with whiskers.

Across the valley
a tractor crawls all day
colouring a field.

and by

Okami

Relentless blue skies:
the smug sameness of
hundreds of haiku.

Fantastic offer -
Western Values
(happiness not included).

*Orchids! The most liberating
admission: that you don't
really like sex.

* The name of these flowers derives from the Greek for 'testicle' ,
which their bulbs resemble.