Hey! If you write poetry and want to be on my online poetry magazine please send me a message, submit your work to me, or hashtag your work with, ‘#newwavepoetry’

I’ve been doing poetry on this site for thirteen years and am trying to do what the people did for me when I started.

Please don’t be a stranger and get your work out there! I’m trying to do what poetryriot once did. The tumblr poetry community thanks you! “#newwavepoetry”

Blue is my least favorite color

It’s a beautiful sunny day.

I go outside and instantly notice that the city’s buildings stand especially tall towards the sky like an invitation from cosmic horrors no one believes in.

The sky scrapers are pointing me towards the vast open mouth of the universe and poking fun at my fear of losing oxygen in a vacuum that no one can see.

I lunge for the floor, anything to grab onto, the discarded plastic bags and newspapers laying next to my clammy palms can’t help me now.

This time it’s really going to take me.

Don’t the onlookers know what’s about to happen?

How can they just watch as if they don’t care?

I wish I could slip through the sky’s fingers but I don’t think I’d ever be so lucky.

When the time comes I know I will have wished I hadn’t gone outside that day.

Mourn for the Before Times

before i shut myself in a room and crossed that line before i tried being "somebody" to young somebodies     and every day it wiped me the fuck out before i condemned myself from anybody and everybody before i fell into my fears, starved myself of connections on purpose before i doubted everything i had to say, before i said everything     to you and thought somehow that would be okay. i wanted to care about something because I didn't.

i started calling it depression, and it definitely was but, that didn't mean I had a clue how to stop it. I couldn't stop it. and I do forgive myself, because hindsight is clear as fuck and maybe you forgive me too, because you aren't responsible for me               now

I made the mistake of looking at old photos of us, from Before and I miss that, that thing, the net we fell into, the parachute of it all and we were young. younger made me scoff and shake my head like "damn" what happened? I don't know. but I know those times need to be put down like an old dog who can't stand up, shouldn't suffer any longer rest

The world is a dangerous place

We have to take measures to be at peace, and to survive - but also to converse. The things we see in general are tremendous and insane, but we can make sense of it in the last analysis, because the confines of rigorous identity are correspondent to the original unity of various things, that we have gleaned from simple analysis and that happens all the time, because there is something fundamental about the structures of the ordinary world in which something is ascertained through the simple ways of the crazy work that we fabricated with the hard work of the crazy things that will forever happen in the trajectory of visible actuality in which crazy events continue to happen even though we are feeling something visible in the essence of philosophical attitudes towards normal things that we have never before seen, and we move crazily towards the ordinariness of insane trajectories in which happiness is caught and something may happen that hurls us, frantically, towards the normality of ordinal systems of thought in which the happy generation is always moving in columns towards the systems of the ordinary happiness in which something silly is caught and we are structuring our feeling in a generous motion of the hand through the essences of the world in which the silent generations captures some newer reverberation. I see that something may happen and we do what we can to stay forever in the same place, but we do what we can to structure the visions of the new world with arduous revelations that move sillily in the direction of eternal happiness, and we do what we can to sustain a movement of the crazy world in which we have no choice but to relent forever against the visibility of the universal arousal that structures our behavior, in fact; but something is still moving us in the direction of mad attitudes towards strangers and we are standing on the brink of a newer and wiser motion, that we sustain and that we hope for in the silence of ordinary things which we have forever returned with happy attacks to the structures of normal attitude: a control, of ordinary things that helps us create happenstance silences in the eternity of perennial wisdoms that are still constant in the final analysis.

In fact, someone called it finally and we are coming to that position where everything is called for and everything is necessary. We are going to launch an attack on the higher places in which we are hiding. We are forever hiding in the necessity of normal action and something may launch us with vehement violence into the things that send us - incongruously - into a limitation of the strange attitudes that have forever stuck with us because they are real and our hope is vested on it in fact because we are going solipsistically away from this aroused reverberation that stands gaping at the vestment of new revolutions that continue resolutely into the direction of mad restructuring of the new order in which foul dimensions are restructured in a silly and revolutionary dimension that we all need and that seriously corresponds to vehement reactions that finishes the combinations of the better kind that we all need because there is a reaction happening in the violence of the new order that somehow returns us - foolishly - to the constancy of the main attitude in which there is only idiocy. The returns of the true bank is silly and diminished but the reports of the renunciable directions of the main attitude kind of send us back to the endless country of the main restructurings of the main system in which the ordinary people are caught; and I truly send them all back to the callous refractions of the simple reaction of the happy people that are forever teleporting with vehement violence into the direction of ordinary revolutions that we really need because there is some essence in the simple action of simple reactivity, which is a kind of new order in which ordinary people reform their habits and truly act with simple violence against the attitude of the entire world and they build systems of simple action which are revolutionary, in some weird way because there is a lot happening but nothing can send us back to the eternity of the pastoral report that really happens somehow because there is something silly going on down in the reports of the eternal world, and we are stuck, attentively, in the structures of simple hope in which there is only reaction, and we the people move altruistically into motivation which is just a kind of silence that we always reconnect to the maverick development of the cheerful, hilarious attentivity that has kind of recounselled us to continue pristinely across the harrowing wastes of the ordinary people, and we continue attentively systematically to structure some kind of hope.

Some kind of happy accident will always contribute to the progress of civilization. I set whatever I want in motion, but there is a lot of things happening that has nothing to do with the contours of simplicity reactuated against the law of nature, and I am just a simple man who tries to do what he can to rediscover the opportunity to live systematically in the novel of the unique writer that nevertheless is just another prefect of the empire of harrowing sorrow that in some version of history returns the hero to the vicinity of build-up discourses in the entirety of the ordinary world which is just another nature of the third kind a nature that I have verily wished was mine for the taking but it is not. I do what I can to hope miraculously for typhoid fever but I should not put God to the test. And frankly I am terrified of disease, I only want to ascertain the morbid authority of the old masters that will - to this very day - reconvene, in silence, as the world slowly disintegrates into a fiery hotchpotch of insane authority in which the ordinary people can only swim and abrogate the law of the old prophet; and I sincerely wish for a higher calling that I have never before seen because I am just a lewd master that never wished for a release from the repositioning of the silly world and we do what we can to understand the mysterious soul of the people but the people don´t wish to live in a virulent state, they only wish to regurgitate and mitigate the sorrows of myriad actions that will never return to the hopefulness of the little children building sandcastles on the Beach of ordinary reproductions that go on and on and just situate themselves in the philosophy of commonplace things and we wish silently for the death of innocence which is just a newer kind of purpose calling for the investiture of the great kings into the might of robots and marshal who will to this day make sense of the chivalrous war on terror and the simplicity of simple people. And maybe there is a chance for creative enterprises to go forth and stand in the peacefulness of placid attentiveness which is just another shape or size of the grand opening of the chess match of the true players: the things go on, and we do what we can to situate our maverick tendencies into the hallmark of every true Scotsman who builds up the arcanity of the old university and everyone wishes things to take their normal course but it just doesn't make sense.

I bellow at the opportunity of the mad creators of the silly world that continue the war on terror, but I also restructure my offensive against the virulent dictators of the old style that we nevertheless assault whenever they wish to continue that virulent strike versus the happy reporters of the journal of war that we read and peruse at our leisure, because we are in fact hard men, we do not care for simple trifles, for simple delights: oh! The fact remains that structural revolutions of a higher kind will help us care for the ordinary people who do what they can to help us and I have truly seen that there is something simple about the attention for wandering minstrels that do nothing but report what they have heard and really wish to help people aid their friends in the Kampf against the silly reactions that will never help us recover from the Gebrauchten attitude of their commonsensical, non-handicapped friends that do what they can to stand up virtuously against the revolutions of simple action in which the nonsense of the world will find its final expression; oh, and we do repeat ourselves! I am not a man who can write deliciously, in fact, frankly I only write passionately, which is not the same: we are stuck in the repetitions of pure horror that somehow corresponds, sickly, to the continuation of mad revoluting against the simplicity of denotational necessity that tells us automatically what we really wished to do in our silence, taken up in the arcane incantation of the greater wholeness that will never return us spuriously to the refinement of our tastes, the glamour of our struggle - but there may be something going on that we can truly apprehend which is still continued in the viscerality of good action: the appropriation of the simple activity that somehow returned us with great violence to the present moment will always and in every possible situation tell us what we really wanted to know, frankly because there is a revolution going on down that tells us exactly what to think and what to savour; and something does happen, to run-of-the-mill deadbeats, that verily sends us in a mad ecstasis into the religion of God and the continuation of our laid-back mannerism, witticisms and silent prayers.

Something is coming on down the train of ramified sentencing that really helps us restore the unity of the world, the unity of nature in a silent prayer that sends some word, some act directly to the desirous arms of the old king, who will forever nourish the feeling and bravery of the happy men that build standpoints on the course of simple activity; and they will forever nourish the hope for something better, something universal that can, in some way, report the wishes of the old king in some silly reverence to the continuation of the old style of conversing, in which we truly set a course for the happiness of happiness, and we are truly set in stone like the Buddhas of the Far East that build necessities out of their own arm-sockets and send a trajectory against the villainy of the sober action-heroes that really want to contribute, solipsistically, to the reporting of the better kind that can somehow aid us in the virulence of the old world, in which happy people are still caught, in fact they are forever caught in it and we cannot do anything to save them, in fact we have to save ourselves. When there is still silence in the air, when there is still happiness of spirit, we can build a restoration of the truth that will in the final analysis help us reposition ourselves in the style of the philosophers that really want to help us return with violence to the ordinariness of structural divisions that help us congregate in great numbers before the Lord of lords and the King of kings; but I have not renounced the play of words that somehow wishes a hope to emerge in hiding forms from the great area of world war one, that still burns in our memory like a silly revolution that we truly wish was here and there in the notions of happy war that we still contain in our ordinary structures that we build with ardour on the banks of the old nile; and I have truly built structures with my mind even though I am stuck in limbo, but there is something going on, something silent that we can really help to do. I wish there was something bigger happening in the vastness of human potential, but we truly can't reminisce in the quietude of ordinary action, because our life is waiting in the waving assault against our senses - and maybe, in quietude, my activism will bear fruit of some sort.

So I have said much. However, maybe I said almost nothing. What is the point of industry? (As opposed to meditation?) What is the point of saying as much as possible? - in a as short as possible amount of time? Well, we're supposed to kind of get in the zone, I think. I think this is why we listen to jazz. However, it is just something to do.

lots of talking tonight. always lots of talking. lots of pictures too. too many? maybe. not sure if possible actually but my phone’s space might disagree. the life of social media management can sure fill up one’s mind with thoughts that leave you speechless.

Jack

The secret white mind whispers

And it had this to say: And the hippopotamuses were boiled in their tanks, and the tanks won't stop until they've drank at the water hole, and the waterhole is made of wheat, oil, and tar, and Jesus abiding in those fields of wheat was refused food & board for looking a little too effeminate, and who would risk such a thing in our economy? The economy is about disposable income, in come the cash and out comes the cravings for more, out comes the cash out of jean pockets bubbling and bursting forth like improper dew, giving out their due, out and into the world and into the mouths of cash registers and into the pockets of skeletons in parliament and insurance company boards, and god finds no tithe for Him in there, and at the church they also take your money and say that God "can make the money fit through the camel's eye", this is the religion of accountants & sales clerks & egotistical entrepreneur, receiving into their empty dog-like paws, receiving into their palms, the psalms of some obviously secret revelation, and into my palms there is nothing but the insalubrious psalms of my own salvation, and wrapped around my fingers the serpentine phallus that serves me as a pen, and this black notebook much like a void, a ravine into which visions are dispensed with, like corpses thrown from the bridge down below, and a the body of a dog follows after them.

And I had a dream about this ravine and aren't the mountains high? but don't the vultures soar even higher above the peaks? And although they gorge themselves on filth and gore don't they reach heaven before us? And the dream that I had was that we were all stuck down here in the ravine, and in flowed the filth and shit from the world above, all the disgusting juices of humanity, and a series of vultures with human faces and human hands and human teeth forcing our heads down into the muck, slowly turning us into more & more disgusting vultures ourselves, until the transformation was achieved and we'd fly into lone dirty empty kitchen rooms and take our pleasure with each other in the slime with long slimy penises that wrapped around our perches, but at the moment of orgasm me myself that had become a vulture realizes that we weren't down in a ravine, but up on a mountain ridge, and the filth and muck was nothing but the clearest, purest, rainbow filled water possible, and the vultures and their awful penises were purefaced angels with their swords,

And the world of vultures and the world of angels weren't separated but always already there, and through the world of vultures you could see in negative, like the imprint of the sun on the retina, heaven reflected, and in the world of angels you could see in negative, like the footprint that suggests the foot that was there but which is not anymore, hell reflected, and they were one and the same, and we are already in heaven, otherwise the vultures would be there before us.

Autumnal cycling at the break of dawn

rushing through the streets beating heart rosy-cheeked shaking off my slumber

blinded by the blinking lights teetering between consciousness and sleep

caressed by the cold breeze emboldened by the carouse of rock'n'roll in my ears

a boy on his bike a man in the night a soul in flight

Reasons I Am Not Working On My Novella Today

I sat down at my desk, wrote a few lines; a passage about The Alley and the coffin full of vintage pins. How you were supposed to pay for them—a quarter in the early days, fifty cents by the last time I visited—but I don’t think anyone ever did. And then I had to find the pins I stole all those years ago, as research (I said to myself). All those one-inch badges for punk and new wave bands. Blondie, Buzzcocks. The Clash, The Cramps, Tom Robinson Band. Those pins are mostly older than I am, and I’ve had them since the end of the last century; the metal backs are tarnished, the images stained, peeling. All the old songs stuck in my head, a scratched record playing a single groove, as I sifted through my bag of badges. I pulled them out one by one, found myself lost in other places, other moments, a sea of words and pictures once cultural signifiers, now significant only to my memory project. I stuck my finger on one which was not fastened, pricked myself on that rusted spindle of the past, and I got timesick.

A memory came; sudden, unbidden. Of a drive from Chicago to Michigan, late November, maybe December. Passing through a slivered crescent of Indiana, cupping the lakeshore, the smokestacks of Gary cinereous, up past the dunes, crossing the stateline, the New Buffalo Welcome Center with its tiny ersatz lighthouse, say yes. Yes, heading further into Michigan, the northeast curve of I-94, the surge of the hills heavy with snow, the woody, gnarled fingers of winter-dormant grapevines. All those vineyards in West Michigan, near St. Joe, Benton Harbor, Coloma. And the sun setting off to the west, over that inland sea, disparate streaks of orange and peach commingling into gold-limned coral, the last light before the long night reflecting, lurid, a starshot wound, upon the hills and snow.

Break off from I-94 at Marshall, continue north/east on I-69, and eventually you’ll reach Flint. My childhood; the earliest place I remember enough to call home. The children of Flint, the people of Flint, still are drinking leaded water. My childhood no idyll, but I had clean water. My childhood, not idyllic, but now I remember Flint in flashes, three-dimensional images in full-color Kodachrome turning through the ViewMaster of my mind. Click: the bruisy, rose-vanilla dusk inside the lilac bushes in our backyard; the stale-penny smell left on palms and fingers after playing for hours on jungle gyms, monkey bars. Click click. Sticky swirls of strawberry & cream cheese oozing from oven-warm croissants at John K.’s bakery. The thagomizic glass spines of Autoworld, a Godzilla-sized misstep, a fossilized monument to Flint’s failing industry.

How hard it is to raise children in this ever-failing world. How the water is full of lead, schools leaded with bullets & disease.

Today is my oldest son’s birthday. My son, a vessel of noise; the bleepbop of the video games he plays, the stories he hums as he runs back and forth and back across the house. Today I found a Valentine’s Day project from back when he was in school, where each classmate wrote down what they liked about each other. The ones for my son read: I like you because you make cool noises. I like you because you play video games. I like you because your favorite color is light blue. Oh my little boy blue, my humming baby blue-boy. How many years I spent worried no one would like him, his sounds, obsessions, only to find those were the very things they liked most.

Today is my oldest son's birthday, and he requested a big breakfast. I spent the late half of morning baking biscuits, toasting hashbrown patties, frying up bacon and chicken-apple sausage, making omelets thick and gooey with tomatoes off the vine, green onions, spinach, colbyjack cheese. I fell into a breakfast reverie, a diner daydream. Fat scent of butter and eggs, coffee strong and black and steaming in the pot, sizzlepop of meat in the skillet; I could makebelieve I was in a place all griddle and chrome, walls grease-stained and hung with old records by Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers.

As I diced and fried, I listened to a jazz playlist. “Peace Piece” piano swelled up around me, a lonesome meditation, and then another memory. Of a boy I once loved, who knew how I loved that piece, and one Christmas tracked down the sheet music for me. He gave me a painting, too. His heart splattered on a canvas, a heart so blue, floating in a pastoral sea of violet-gray. I thanked him for the ornamented melody line, I shunned his painted heart.

He often said things to me, unintentionally cruel things, so I cut right back. Cruel, on purpose. A month point five post-Christmas, I broke (up with) him on Valentine’s Day. He cried for two hours, while I watched, aghast, said nothing. Harsh or sweet. I hadn’t meant to hurt him, that time. I only knew I needed out.

And oh the cruelties we visit upon each other’s hearts; accidental, with purpose. Oh, the undulations of our affections.

There I was, “Kind of Blue,” and Miles Davis on the playlist, too. I remembered: nights at the Jazz Showcase, place of legends; gin martinis and the infamous table Miles once set fire to. Thought of angels jazzing over the Loop, legendary bop angels, hark the dark heralds with their trumpets, setting fire to the night, its sea of stars.

More jazz and I got ready to make art. Donned my tomato-red beret and felt self-consciously arty, had to take some self-portraits to commemorate it, daddy-o. Baby, oh, I remembered my art and writing room from that flat in Bayview, and the vintage kimono I owned. A silky thing, butter-yellow, a dragon and flowers embroidered abloom upon the back. How I’d wear it while snapping photos of myself; myself writing poems or jazzing on my ukulele or draped across the futon, smoking expensive cigarettes from a chintzy plastic holder. How it caressed me like a lover, how I felt beautiful whenever I had it on. What I wouldn’t give to have that feeling back.

A different playlist; this one of piano and accordion en français, and I cried, my tears viscous, Gallic, remembering another room, this one in Brooklyn. Remembered the boy I loved there, who would squeezebox-serenade me with valses. Un deux trois mornings we fucked in the gray gloom, three nights starshot with white powder and we sat by the open window holding cigarettes (Galouise, or hand-rolled) between our yellow-stained fingers, watching the drip of snowmelt on fire escape and past that the wind blowing the trashcans across the brickwalled alleys.

In the midst of tears of memory, I drew a crow. Spent an hour or more getting the shading just-so; layering bluish-gray over dark gray over black, over ultramarine, over cobalt. And oh the crows outside my window, and the weather so bitten-cold. November. The sky gray, clouds alluvial, loops and scallops etched into the silt.

Gray, cold, and I wanted a hot toddy. Mixed ginger tea, bourbon, clover honey, squeeze of lemon, drank it while feeling the weight of time, the press of the squeezed and undulating years. Then time to make dinner. Stirred pots of cranberry and rosemary, orange smiles of butternut squash salted with maple syrup and coriander seed-beads. As it cooked I checked Facebook and saw another new book by a poet oh, so much younger and wondered, as I always do, why not me? Wondered if they’ve had more opportunities, or worked harder, or if they’re just better, oh. This envious jealousy I choke on is a sour apple, a shriveled grape from a dormant vine that makes the bitterest wine.

It doesn't improve my poetry, or write my lines, or bring any opportunities. And all the success in the world won’t stave off death. I remembered that when Low came on the radio, Mimi’s clarion angelvoice singing. I don't need a laser beam. Rest your drunken mind. I remember the last time I visited Duluth/Superior, that time I went north to chase the autumn and run from love. How I scaled that rusted out-of-use railroad trestle with my squeezebox in hand and sang a lullaby to the captains of industry and the inland sea.

And now I lay me down to sleep on the banks of another, sick with remembering. Goodnight starshot voices, goodnight angels. Old songs, old rust, accordion waltzes. Fingers of smoke and pennies, bourbon and the sky, goodnight. Goodnight all the cruel rooms, the boys, and all. Of the time.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, 11/13/22

2532. The Serial Killer’s Spontaneity

This is “The Serial Killer’s Spontaneity.” That’s not it, no. 

The serial killer woke up and slipped on a banana peel when he got out of bed. He fell backwards into his bed and laughed. Who put that there? he said. (But it was him who really put it there, just before tucking himself in at night two weeks ago—another method of inspiring spontaneity and frivolity in his life). 

       The papers declared the serial killer’s murders “random” and “seemingly unplanned,” which thrilled the serial killer. The murders were, in fact, overly organized, highly detailed, and took months to enact. 

       The serial killer got up from his bed, putting his feet on either side of the banana peel. He picked up the banana peel with a glove he had placed in the night stand next to his bed two weeks ago. He then placed the banana peel in the small bag he had prepared two weeks ago once the act of spontaneity had been completed. He then placed the small bag, perfectly sealed, into the bin in his kitchen labeled “REFUSE.” The small bag with the banana peel in it would make its way to a large dumpsite on a large barge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean six months later, when the serial killer would be dead. A self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The final act of spontaneity in a life brimming with them.   

Poetry With A Dirty Pen

Old friends dancing around

On psychiatric drugs

Dressed up as Gram Parsons

Radio humming

Mocking standardized high school tests

Violent

Passive aggressive

Sweet

Unset ink

Accidentally smudging

Flicking rhinestones into oblivion

William Blake dissolving into modern concrete descriptions

Jack Kerouac kept in hell for not asking permission

Gregory Corso outliving both

Reading Shelley w/o reading Shelley

Slide guitars rambling in the distance

Stolen cars moaning in the background

Old trees croaking

Whispering, “I love you”

Candle lit

Shelves hung up with thumb tacks

Ceramic songbirds settled

Trying to keep up with the seasons

Time is passing quickly

(The narrator is afraid)

Oh, no need to worry, life is so unbearably infinite, there's absolutely no rush. Look, it's 9:30, practically the crack of dawn! And hey, midnight is basically the perfect time to start your day, isn't it?!

WOW, the clock is ticking quite loudly but oh don't you dare leave just yet, it's definitely not time to go or say goodnight or anything! how silly! Let's push it to the extreme and reach 3 a.m.

Wow! No one’s ever called me that before!! What about you?? have you noticed what I put in your food? Have you watered your plants yet? Fed your dog?? Skinned your cat??? And hey, do you have work tomorrow? Because I wouldn’t punch in if I were you.

Oh, goodness me, it's already 12:30! And what an odd realization that I actually might miss you!

The clock is kind enough to tick louder now, just in case we didn't notice it before. So, here we are, it's time to go, time to leave, time to say goodnight. But you know, I wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to make a fool of myself in front of my beautiful guests!

It's 3 a.m. now, and let me just ask, does anyone have anything remotely important to attend to tomorrow?

Please, dear people, do you not know that I have waited so long for your presence?

- Dorian 10/12/23

I love concerts, the way they warm your heart and rinse your soul.

They make you feel alive.

It's not just existing any longer, but, for a few hours, living.

There's bass in your veins and a fire in your soul.

Job Interview.

Yeah I think I botched that interview today. Don’t think I’m gonna end up getting the job. I kept looking at her eyes -- both of them for that matter. Nobody hires someone with shifty eyes. Nobody. I couldn’t decipher which eyeball was more beautiful. Lost in the sea of blue/greenish. I’d want to be on an pink floaty with a drink and letting her eyelashes brush against my loose leaf toes and soles. Basking in the beauty of her pupils. 

AH fuck.