Punk Monk Press/Magazine

Nerves terminally frayed like fiber-optic threads unevenly broken off at the ends, jangling spurs working their way up and down your spine. A little prick here or there (especially there) to let you know you're awake dreaming still crunchingly conscious of the soothing background noises. Blinds creaking across the street. Scrape of a pair of worn-down dress shoes. A whining that seems to be coming from somewhere much too close by. You take another handful of frazzled filaments, stroke them across your virtual whetstone, admire the way they glitter under the neon lights. --Jeffrey Park

Jobless Something's wrong   you're doing   what you said you'd never do teasing men for a date and dinner at the restaurant table   inspiring him to take a peep at your cleavage then as he glances away   you hide a chunk of steak and bread in your purse saving it   for home and your hungry father. Nudist Wishing I was a flower showing my inner colors not worrying what others think sun caressing my petals no man moaning blasphemies.

I live on a midriff. I'm a souvenir of a birth twenty five years ago. I zigzag down a cheek. I'm the evidence of a knife-fight, just last year. Once I could burst into flame with just a touch but I'm calm now. The embers are faces. The ashes are spread throughout this world  I'm a story teller. I say to you tough guy, I can eat pain. I'm supposed to grow more invisible with the years, though maybe that's indivisible. I just say that as long as I live I will be the unsmoothable join of anger and terror. And I've got brothers and sisters up and down two arms, I've got a second cousin crisscrossing a heart. Better than that, I've got a body hanging off me that was a billion or more scars in the making. --John Grey

December twenty-twelve and if the Mayans got it right I can stop fretting about my bi-polar suicide attempts. I'm happy now, thinking of disaster (outside myself!), the unequivocal joy of swift and certain annihilation. Gone the agonizing dilemmas of just how to do it (gun, blade, pills, gas… rope, bridge, booze, risky sex or radio in the bath)…I'd considered both razor and rat poison, an anchored dip in the frigid black lake at midnight. Meteor, earthquake, asteroid. Hail big as the moon (come soon!). Take my mom, too….she owes me money, whoa, this is getting good---so many problems solved in the blink of an eye. DEAR WORLD, if you read this (hopefully in some exotic poetry magazine) we have survived . I remain, no doubt, screwed-up as always and fantasizing my own demise. Me, me, me, on a globe of you. Forgive my narcissism, petty thieveries. Come Valentine's I'll be jolly again, really manic, Hell-bent on chocolates and red-velvet ...

Anxiety swirls within my bones and fills my fingertips with poison And my feet with a beating, a bleating, A wanting something to quell the pulse, To still the beat that brings the restless sense Of darts rushing towards me, through me, in me. And I am sure one of those darts will pierce my heart. I tap my foot and my voice shakes. But to be manic is to be fully alive; to feel each pulse Coursing through my veins and want to feed from it Want to move, fly, smile, cry for joy. Work and mere thought becomes the simplest of tasks. You can do anything. You are a king, a president, the master of your Universe and the stars line up to praise you when you are around. You stop the dart with your eyes, catch it in mid-air, and send it back to where it came. You make a bull’s-eye. Then comes the crash. Depression takes the wind out of you like an embalmer removing all of your fluid. You can’t move. Your limbs are weighed down by the very air you breathe....

You were gone when I got home at midnight from a double shift. Now you’re back, two years later. I had no idea where you went so I packed up and got a room. Long ago, I begged you not to leave but that was then. You can keep the house, the car. I'll come by some starry night when the moon is bright and you're asleep. I promise not to wake the dogs. When you get up you'll find I used my key to take the kids. -- Donal Mahoney