Alone With Everybody - Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone 
and they put a mind 
in there and 
sometimes a soul, 
and the women break 
vases against the walls 
and the men drink too 
much 
and nobody finds the 
one 
but keep 
looking 
crawling in and out 
of beds. 
flesh covers 
the bone and the 
flesh searches 
for more than 
flesh. 

there's no chance 
at all: 
we are all trapped 
by a singular 
fate. 

nobody ever finds 
the one. 

the city dumps fill 
the junkyards fill 
the madhouses fill 
the hospitals fill 
the graveyards fill 

nothing else 
fills.

- Charles Bukowski

Late Fragment - Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

Check this out..... why do I live here???

Gerry Loose

HAVING REACHED THE HOLY REWARD

  

Her body fades with her hair becomes invisible her skin is a salmon.

Singing eye sings her songs together kine alpine kine grazing.

Guarded life is guarded shielded ringed with soldiers.

South from our slit ribs bees swarm north.

Now is elsewhere jealousy did this.

Thieves clean her breasts.

A bower is constructed high in the thorn.

Three fires jealousy love and death maggot us.

Under no place there are no trees there is no place.

Pulse great throbbing blooded heart harts live in her irises.

Gerry Loose

Happy Valentine's Day ; )

But There's No Wind

He said.

It was two days after the operation

a balmy -28 celsius

almost all the birds had fled

excluding the blue-jays and chickadees –

two of his favourites.

Growing up we always had

a bird book handy 

if anything exotic to us appeared

we would find it out.

Cross-billed, red-breasted, the way

they perched or landed

all part of discovery.   Now at ninety

the hospital was just a perch

that he successfully flitted in and out of.

A winter bird that wears the feathers

of endurance, and most of all
never cease to soar.

Debbie Calverley

Thinking of a Friend At Night - Hermann Hesse

• In this evil year, autumn comes early...
• I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,
• The wind on my hat...And you? And you, my friend?
•  
• You are standing—maybe—and seeing the sickle moon
• Move in a small arc over the forests
• And bivouac fire, red in the black valley.
• You are lying—maybe—in a straw field and sleeping
• And dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.
•  
• It's possible tonight you're on horseback,
• The farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,
• Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.
• Maybe—I keep imagining—you are spending the night
• As a guest in a strange castle with a park
• And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping
• On the piano keys by the window,
• Groping for a sound...
•  
• —And maybe
• You are already silent, already dead, and the day
• Will shine no longer into your beloved
• Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,
• And your white forehead split open—Oh, if only,
• If only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you
• Something of my love, that was too timid to speak!
•  
• But you know me, you know...and, smiling, you nod
• Tonight in front of your strange castle,
• And you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,
• And you nod to your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,
• And think about me, and smile.
• And maybe,
• Maybe some day you will come back from the war,
• and take a walk with me some evening,
• And somebody will talk about Longwy, Luttich, Dammerkirch,
• And smile gravely, and everything will be as before,
• And no one will speak a word of his worry,
• Of his worry and tenderness by night in the field,
• Of his love. And with a single joke
• You will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,
• The summer lightning of shy human friendship,
• Into the cool past that will never come back. 

HERMANN HESSE

In a translation by James Wright.

In the New Century I Gave You My Name - Alex Dimitrov

The orchestras kept playing. They had a gin fix.
Why in this fog I still see you I can’t say.
With your beard and high darkness around me.
In your small machine many messages
and faces that once let you in.
The ocean drowns time all the time, slowly.
Everyone had a birthday and buried something.
I was coming from one person and into another
when really what are we: some accident.
In this show where we all have a favorite.
What we have is a taste for that thing we can feel,
will not say. Some of us wanted more
and in all the wrong ways too.
There was of course an escape…
in a year, on a street, in some near distant past
when what had us was childish and flame.
And maybe it would have been different
and maybe it would have been this.
Do you remember my hair when I met you?
Much longer. The violins ended it well.
Outside, the city continued to tease us.
Hurricanes came, storms couldn’t please us:
it was all very fast and beautifully made.
You ask why I’m thinking of death
but I’m thinking of you and it’s fleeting.
We were terrible, unrelenting and everywhere then.
All I know is I can’t stop writing about people.
So much happened. I can’t stop writing about love.

ALEX DIMITROV

Pine

Pine

She opens her heart, a heart
full of needles 

and stands at the sink
pulling flesh from bone. 

She waits and watches
the broth for boiling 

and wonders if
she'll see him again. He, 

the stack of wobbly
coins. He, the train 

shaking the rails. The pine
bent heavy with cones 

whose boughs
reach down to sweep 

the roof this morning as
she opens the door 

and casts her hope
on the new snow, but 

finds the tracks
on her threshold are stars 

from raccoons
last night casing the house. 

LAURA VAN PROOYEN

Our House Was on Fire 

Knowledge of Snow

Looking out at the sea
her heart pangs
to the endless beat of blue.

The tips of her fingers
hold secrets, words like frozen -
her toes remember squishing
into boots, while teeth recall
the chatter of an open mouth
the gasp of inhaling January
all at once

Back home, 'tis the season
of stalled cars, frozen tires
plugged driveways, the way
a sun looks warm but isn't.
She knows looking out at the sea
her heart will pang
to the endless beat of white
always longing for the beat of blue.

- Debbie Calverley

Je Suis Charlie

One more in the name of love.

This film, like many others,
claims we'll enjoy life
now that we've come through 

difficulties, dangers
so incredibly condensed
that they must be over. 

If the hardship
was undergone by others,
we identified with them 

and, if the danger was survived
by simpler life forms,
they're included in this moment 

when the credits roll
and we don't know
when to stand

RAE ARMANTROUT

Still lots of beauty in the world

Damn Dreams

I had a dream last night
a great dream
there were lyrics and everything

I woke up singing something to do with
coming home to television

there was a tune and everything
unrecorded
I guess that's what dreams are

all about

- Debbie Calverley

For my Old Pal Steve Parker.

Five Moose Night

Wonderful, really, the way the full moon
casts an enormous shadow of a seemingly tiny
but in truth enormous moose across the meadow grasses
stroked by wind. Happy, too, the way the wind
in my face does not blow my scent to the moose.
The wonderful moose and the wonderful moose shadow,
the very possibilities of which I have never imagined
but the reasons nevertheless I walk in the woods at night.

His shadow dewlap's a yard long, his antlers vast
spatulate hands holding up the moonlight
and the brightest few barely visible stars.
Wonderful, the abundant chartreuse wolf lichens silvered,
the meadow grasses dimly flashing, the moss-filled
not uncomfortable depression of stone I have seated myself in.
Intermittently dark, the shadows under the trees,
into which the tiny moose, at last, herds the enormous shadow one.

Lonesome, the thirty more minutes I wait, the wind
wandering also away, and half-blind, my walking
into the woods myself, watchful, slow, straining for silence.
Wonderful, the silence and the shadows of the trees,
and wonderful, the light from the kitchen window,
a golden parallelogram illuminating both the bird bath
and the great bull moose lapping with its shadows,
one cast to the left by window light, one to the right by the moon.

ROBERT WRIGLEY

Crazyhorse
Fall 2014

Merry Christmas

How Beautiful.

Prior to Departure... I love my designers!

Ah, at last!!!

Star in My Eyes (*)

There's a star in my eyes

and although I rub and I rub

I can’t get it out -

next to the eyelash

due north of the orbit

never will my lens accept
the reasons for

this great divide.

Somewhere
a sparrow shudders
as it flies.

-Debbie Calverley