Than a stop sign’s silent evaporation
is lost to emptyness when
the hours forget one another
is lost to emptyness when
I spend all night staring at the cracks in my face
The moon is a bright crack in the sky

I
the trees look like nets capturing sunlight.
they are so greedy
and delicious
the sap ambers over your head
like a syrupy halo.
O look,
your head
is a stack
of pancakes.
And I am
a fork and knife
ready to dig in.
The trees in the forest
Are like niggers
Torturing sunlight with their skin
Spinning their dances in the wind
Is there enough
syrup for them?
II
There are thirty of them
Throwing rocks through
The broken windows
Smashing my thighs
to bits
The pieces of thigh
are bacon
sizzling on the ground
Your tongue is
scrambled eggs
hot
scrambled eggs
which burn my tongue
The abrasion
tastes of
tastelessness
The trees laugh
like angry street children
I am embarrassed
but, more so I am concerned
that …

Psychosmology
Black holes must have difficult childhoods
                       consuming everything that gets too close
They probably have to go to special schools
                              and definitely can’t play Little League
Imagine a black hole trying to lick the tip of an ice-cream cone
                                      or hug the dog
The dog would fall forever into a lightless crushing void
                                                   the mute hum of space
                                                   wind through obliterating dust

She Hears A Fire In The Night
With the slit wrists and forefeet of a modern messiah
A self-inflicted wound ignores the death of a married man
Every duckling is an ugly duckling, my Dear
Says the old widow to her glass eye
Then plugs her ears with fire hydrants

The Johnsonville Press Daily Edition
Today’s Submission by: John Kropa
1. Recommendation of the Day:
Listen to Beach House. Put on their record, turn off your brain, and enter a pool of liquid ambience.

http://blog.dailycal.org/arts/files/2009/10/bh-photo2.jpg

2. Quote of the Day: “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.” — William Blake

3. Fact of the Day:
Experiments conducted at several college laboratories demonstrate that hard rock music played to colonies of termites cause the insects to enter a kind …

I. A Sudden Convalescence Of Childhood Amnesia

Reminds me that I never got over the superego of my latency

phase and it’s thanks to you dreary

statue and your dark face that spills like an open cradle over my chest

Because I am here now attempting to fill your stone pockets with something mortal that may be

passed down to mortals but my jejune jabbering New York City is there but cannot be

I was able to make it to Mason Gross’s MFA Thesis Exhibition about two weeks ago. Having never been to a Mason Gross exhibit before, I had no idea what to expect as I walked up to the School of the Arts; I can tell you the transition from noisy New Brunswick street to silent art exhibit was equally as enthralling as the transition from 53rd street to the Museum of Modern Art.

Color Matters
The outside of a black hole
is equally as black as
the inside of a black hole
When discussing black holes
our conversation should
never move passed the color
black
Unless of course we consider
white to be a color
And ask If a black hole is the absence
of matter and white is the
absence of color why isn’t a
…

Poem by Jake Parisi
Critique by John Kropa
.
“The Oak”
.
Of a danky, concealed base,
There are only gnarls illumined,
As the shadows of my other selves
Glimmer through projected lines.
.
Now at this base of more or less,
The sun-pulse throbs and grows its stress,
And a single, stoic trunk of tree
Belies my wanted unity.
.
Then there’s, “Suddenly!” as Bely knows,
So a twisted linearity explodes
From out of mind,
And out of time,
Leaves ephemeral and overlapping,
Tethered like a mental clapping
Of ropes to moments, to the last,
All mystically gone slipping past.
.
Here comes a knot! Some funny business,
Particular, yet quite ambiguous:
A feeling that …

“[It] means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” — and everyone eats. I picture them sitting at long tables in a dirty mess hall, mouths open, shifty eyes following one other, caricatures of taboo.