Author: 17numa

A Savage Sentience

Urban Fox
by Christie-Luke Jones
 
Through gritty, parched eyes I squint,
As hazy boulevards wind ceaselessly ahead.
 
The soupy June air weighs heavy on my shoulders,
A cruel curse befitting of a cruel hour.
 
I snarl and thrash and seethe.
I pray for a swift end.
 
Highgate lovers, swathed in crumpled bedsheets,
Gaze down from high windows in dreamy, post-coital nonchalance.
 
The soft light emanating from their cigarettes
Reminds me where I should be,
Where I should have stayed.
 
Her cascading onyx locks and melting stare, so far from here,
Snatched away in a frenetic dusk.
 
In the murky, nocturnal depths of this Hadean Borough,
The thought of fusing my weary torso
To the elegant curve in her back is a blissful escape.
 
To sweetly kiss the nape of her neck,
And watch that sensual smile paint joyously
Across her sculpturesque face
…for a brief, heavenly moment, I’m there.
 
But mine is the oppressive still of a North London night,
Where bountiful summer trees loom black and menacing
Over deserted pavements.
 
But lo, wrapped in my internal struggle I have omitted another.
One who neither pines, nor laments, nor regrets.
 
A weightless astronaut,
He skulks through the night air with a humble grace.
 
His sinewy frame, that restless, twitching muzzle,
An opportunist cat burglar, thriving in his concrete woodland.
 
He slows as I approach. A cautious arc.
His marble eyes reflecting the street lights above.
What does he see?
 
We halt in unison, we share the stillness.
 
His keen nose analyses my scent,
His pointed ears flinch at my slightest movement.
Such devotion to the senses is something I’ve long forgotten.
 
Suddenly I feel my heavy feet beneath me,
Notice my short, agitated breaths.
This wild animal has coaxed me out of my own head,
Made me living again.
 
He watches intently as I find the strength to move forward.
Down this path I myself chose.
And as I glance back, I ponder his sentience
…did he share in my epiphany?
 
Succumbing to sleep I envy the fox.
Long to dream his savage, unquestioning existence.
 
——————-
Christie-Luke Jones is an actor, writer, poet and philanthropist from Henley-On-Thames (UK). He studied French and German at The University Of Exeter, also spending 6 weeks as an English teacher in Madagascar, as well as living and studying for a year in North Germany. He is co-founder of Henley Flow, an independent charity festival of the arts which recently raised over £1000 for Madagascar charity The Dodwell Trust. To find out more about Christie-Luke’s work, visit christielukejones.com.

Poet Interview #17 – Christie-Luke Jones

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? At what age did you start writing? Have you always written poetry? Who/what first inspired you to start writing? Who are your favorite poets?

I took an interest in creative writing from a very young age; as a kid I used to enjoy writing and illustrating my own short stories and then presenting them to my mum and dad to read and appraise. To be honest, I had very little interest in writing poetry until I went to university, at which time I was exposed to a lot of fantastic writing as part of my French & German BA. Even then, I was still pretty emotionally immature and couldn’t bring myself to get my feelings down on paper. I was a big volcano of emotion and sentiment just waiting to erupt! When I arrived in the world of work, the floodgates opened. The daily victories and struggles associated with being ‘a grown-up’ seemed to give me that extra push I needed to open up in that way. Favourite poets? Oscar Wilde always springs to mind straight away, as does Charles Baudelaire.

How do you first start writing a poem? Does it come to you out of the blue, or do you have a set time where you meet with your Muse each day and let the words just … come? Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poetry?

I find that if I actively try to schedule writing into my day, it just doesn’t happen. My best ideas seem to come at the most inopportune times. I’ll be in a meeting (yes, I have a 9-5 alas!) and suddenly a line will hit me and I’ll be compelled to run with it! In terms of my own personal idea of what poetry is, I’ve definitely tried to stop adhering to what I think other people expect from a poem. It’s too restricting. Nowadays as long as I’m happy with it, that’s all that counts!

Are you on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media? Does that fit into your writing life, and if so, how?

Indeed I am, feel free to add me on Facebook! My twitter handle is @Mr_ChristieLuke and my personal website is christielukejones.com. Obviously it’s nice to get a mention on any of those when one of my poems/short stories is published, mainly though I like to keep abreast of other new writing – it keeps me on my toes in the sense that if I see something really good written by someone else, I’ll think ‘Come on, Christie, time to step things up and get writing again!’.

Do you have a writing group or community of writers you share your work with? Who are they? What are you reading right now?

I share my work with any literary zine/journal that particularly catches my eye (your good selves at WISH included!), likewise I have quite a large group of creative/arty friends who I like to throw a poem at now and again…that way if I’m churning out something fairly generic they can scribble all over it with a red marker and send me back to the drawing board. Right now I’m reading a big collection of short stories by H P Lovecraft. Honestly, I can’t get enough of his writing. If you read enough of my work you’ll probably see a few Lovecraftian flourishes dotted around. The whole Cthulhu mythos is just so addictive; you think you’ve kicked the habit and then you get sucked into reading just one more story. Give it a go!   

What words of encouragement can you offer other poets who are trying to get their work noticed?

Don’t be put off by rejections! And keep reading – the best way to improve your craft is to immerse yourself in as much poetry as you can – new, old, good or bad, it really doesn’t matter!

Soul – Synapses – Source

Two Poems
by Stuart Buck
 
Thirst
 
there are times when i can taste my heartbeat
i can feel
my blood slipping through my ecstatic veins as it
rushes from my brain to my bones to the
beautiful stars
and it is cold out tonight but i feel like the eyes
of god are
burning burning
a hole into my needs and desires and
he sees what it is that my soul thirsts for
and it is to walk backwards into the sweet
blue ocean.
 
 
Mechanics
 
We are only alive for a cosmic second
and each gluon and quark and photon
and electron individually is like a nebulae
if you look at it hard enough and each
millimetre of our bodies contains
1000000000000000000
atoms and quantum theory tells us that
the universe is made up of the reaction
that takes place when a blanket of things
that are everywhere and nowhere at the
same time interact and we can see and we
can breathe and everything that can happen
will happen but it only happened because of
an infinitesimal bit of luck but you know what
that is ok because the universe is so enormous
that infinitesimal luck occurs all the fucking time
and because of that we are probably surrounded
(in as much as we can be)
by civilized life and beautiful trees and seahorses
that shoot babies from their stomachs and even though
I can comprehend all of this I still can’t understand
why you died.
 
 
—————–
 
Stuart Buck is a poet living in North Wales. He writes freeform poetry based on life, dreams and why everything isn’t much good anymore.

Poet Interview #16 – Stuart Buck

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? At what age did you start writing? Have you always written poetry? Who/what first inspired you to start writing? Who are your favorite poets?

I live in a tiny village in North Wales called Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog. It is situated in the Ceiriog Valley, named after John Ceiriog Hughes, the famous Welsh poet so it a very beautiful, inspiring place to live. I have a wife and two children. I have been writing for a while now, but really only started seriously in January 2015 when, because of health problems, I had to give up working as a chef, a job I’d done for years. Now I focus fully on my writing, without the stresses of 90 hour weeks!

My writing is very cathartic, so I suppose I needed to write rather than was inspired. It gradually took over my life, like anything you love, and is now as much a part of me as my flesh and blood.

My favourite poets are a varied bunch. I’d say the first poet I fell for truly was Bukowski. His ability to just lay down beautiful words, so effortlessly and so approachably was mind-blowing. He may not have been the best role-model for a human being but as a poet I think he took a lot of beating. I also love Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman and a guy named Steve Roggenbuck, who is more of a visual artist than a poet, performing most of his stuff on YouTube. But really, I consume so much poetry that I stumble across things every day that I fall in love with.

How do you first start writing a poem? Does it come to you out of the blue, or do you have a set time where you meet with your Muse each day and let the words just … come? Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poetry?

I wait for it to come to me. No set time, but when I think of a line or a phrase or just see something I feel I could write about I stop whatever I’m doing (unless I’m using heavy machinery!), put my headphones on, play some Arvo Part or Brian Eno and just write. It comes out as one, long line which I then edit down later once I’ve had the chance to look at it properly. Poems can take me five minutes or five hours, but it’s usually the former. I write very quickly and just try to imbue everything with passion, love and emotion.

My earlier poetry was very heavily Bukowski-esque. It was almost all monologues and pumped up versions of things that have happened to me. I have traveled quite a bit and had a fairly unusual life, so I had material! But once it started drying up, I adapted. I now write sparser, more spiritual poems with a smattering of Quantum Mechanics thrown in for good measure.

Are you on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media? Does that fit into your writing life, and if so, how?

I tried, I really did, to love Facebook. But I can’t bring myself to be that interested in other people’s breakfasts. I am on Twitter but mainly to keep posting my work via the website Write Out Loud. WOL is my main source of getting my work out there; it’s a wonderful site full of good poets and people who actually read your work.

Do you have a writing group or community of writers you share your work with? Who are they? What are you reading right now?

I perform every now and then but my poetry never really comes out that well on stage. I am getting better but nerves and a lack of practice cursed me up until now. So no real network other than the one online at WOL.

I am currently reading ‘Island’ by Aldous Huxley and ‘The Quantum Universe’ by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw alongside endless streams of poetry from magazines, books and online. Aldous Huxley is a wonderful author and his book ‘The Doors of Perception’ is the reason I am married with kids! I met my wife online via a philosophy blog I was writing and recommended the book to her. Eight years later here we are!

What words of encouragement can you offer other poets who are trying to get their work noticed?

I have found poetry is 50% writing and 50% submitting. There are pages dedicated to calls for submissions where lists of people who want work advertise. Get your work out on sites where people can comment. Poets are like sponges, we exist on praise. It will give you confidence to keep writing. Always have a notebook with you. My favourite poem I ever wrote came from one word I wrote down in my notebook at 3 am in the morning. Don’t give up and read, read, read. You have to read.

Harvesting the Hierarchy

Some Are More Equal than Others

by Troy Cabida

 

Through a fear of neglect

to ourselves we turn in reflection

and inside we see a tunnel, dark and deep,

and for light we toil through deeper

but we mustn’t complain:

the CEOS work six days a week.

So hard we work our joints numb,

that eventually our thoughts dwindle from the ground

and our brains slowly follow, practically ignoring

the big bosses’ gently exempting us

from luxuries that equate to our hardened spines and

aching muscles, wilted wheat given in exchange for missing greens

within increased/increasing slavery hours

they keep the milk and apples;

our epiphanies and rebellions are silent and premature

forget society’s age old silencing

so-called manners

and rebel revolt be sarcastic sardonic

use your voice you have a voice use your soul you have a soul

throw away the love songs

and smash the guitars

at their mouths uttering extraneous utterly superfluous nonsense

 

we deserve all of the fruits

 

—————–

Troy Cabida is a Filipino writer from London. His recent work has appeared on Thought Collection Publishing, WORK and Pinched. He is a columnist for Miracle, Time to Gander and has edited for Siblíní Journal and Thought Notebook. Troy’s blog can be reached via this link.