DISCOURSE FLAMED OUT

by Kenneth Johnson

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Words once enlightening,
now smoldering on a trash heap,
thoughts unraveled like smoke
rising, intertwined, undecipherable.
The air, thick with thieves,
is a place where meaning
crumbles, dissolves
before it can be formed.
Voices that once nurtured
dialogue now carefully hone 
their obsidian edges.
Once, we built conduits,
word by word,
constructed to withstand scrutiny,
to span great divides.
Now, we stand at the ruins,
watching the remnants 
flicker out into darkness.
Discourse flamed out,
the ashen particles
becoming less dense
as they float aimlessly,
finally disappearing.

Kenneth Johnson is a Pushcart-nominated poet and visual artist living in Claremont, California. He is the author of the chapbook Molten Muse.

OCTOBER SURPRISE

by Ed Goodell

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP/Corbis via New York Magazine

a dramatic dialogue

dedicated to "Lyin’" Ted Cruz

and that "Sniveling Coward," Donald Trump

Speaker 1

Did Jupiter blink when the sun slid low

In the fall of a savage year?

Or was it something else, a weight, I fear,

That subdued what truths we did know?

Speaker 2 

Your concerns are of no concern to me,

Less real than an effervescence.

This purchase you seek bespeaks no presence –

Let us trust in fortuity!

Speaker 1

I never questioned the unintended,

Nor held certainty above chance;

But this is head-knocking, not providence:

Little fists, duress, lies tendered.

Speaker 2 

Trifles trifling! Change inevitable!

These old gods – we’d never progress!

From a future of ease you would digress,

Your plaints most plainly pitiful.

Chorus

New alliances forming, landscapes shifting,

Nestlings stay nested as trees take wing;

For November winds bring indefinite things

When the leaves are adrift and drifting.

Ed Goodell is a teacher of English and Journalism at Jakarta Intercultural School in Indonesia. When not in Jakarta, he makes his home in Olympia, Wa.

WAIT

by Janet Leahy

President Obama called the Iran vote on Thursday “a victory for diplomacy, for American national security, and for the safety and security of the world.” Credit Andrew Harnik/Associated Press via NY Times, September 10, 2015

       after Galway Kinnell

Distrust everything

if you must, the politicians,
the news reports, the agreement.

Distrust Iran,
but trust the long hours of dialogue
the talk round the table of peace.

We have rehearsed the sorrows
of war
generation to generation.

Remember the desolation
the emptiness
of those who return

from the battle fields
—everything changed.
Do not talk of bombs

there are consequences.
Wait and listen.
Listen to Beethoven,

to his Ode to Joy, listen
to the Native American flute.
Wait,

do not go early into war.
Listen to the sitar
to the classical lute

to the children singing.


Janet Leahy lives in New Berlin, Wisconsin.  Her poems are published in journals and anthologies and appear at TheNewVerse.News and other on-line poetry sites. She has two collections of poetry and is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.

SOCRATES AND CASEY ANTHONY, A DIALOGUE

by Jan Keough

The poet's photoshopped image of Casey Anthony with Socrates and a young student in Raphael’s "School  of Athens".

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The Florida sheriff's office that investigated the disappearance of Casey Anthony's 2-year-old daughter overlooked evidence that someone in their home did a Google search for "fool-proof" suffocation methods on the day the girl was last seen alive. . . . WKMG reports that sheriff's investigators pulled 17 vague entries only from the computer's Internet Explorer browser, not the Mozilla Firefox browser commonly used by Casey Anthony. --Huffington Post

The wily fox, as some called Socrates,
spoke with Casey Anthony the other day
at an unknown cellular location.

Casey, in hiding after the trial, and Socrates,
freed from bodily inconvenience after his trial,
converged to resolve a thorny dilemma.

“Which is best,” she texted, “to escape punishment and live to regret?
Or to face the punishing side-effects of actions
made from a selfish and immature attitude?”

Socrates, reclining on his metaphysical marble couch,
lifted the Droid close to his eyes.
Texting was not his favorite method of communication.

He preferred to gaze directly at those
who wished to be freed
from the burning disgrace of ignorance.

“Tell me,” he began,
“which Browser is best to use,
Internet Explorer or Firefox?”


Jan Keough lives in RI and the internet.  She is co-founder of The Origami Poems Project which aspires to free the poet by promoting micro-chapbooks of original poetry.