Dry and cracked underbelly

Written by Chris Brandon

Dry and cracked underbelly,
finish torn and laid waste by cold sunlight.
Many months pass leaving collective damage and sorrow.
A warm breeze?
An awakening.
Once again a use has been found. Rolled over
in delight I sit.

Sleep: A Haiku Collection

Only in our dreams
Can we fly to brightest light
And fall to darkness.

- Simon Smart

A foetus in the womb
Dreams about sucking its thumb
While it floats in space.

Whimpering, whining,
Running after dream squirrels,
An old dog slumbers.

I dreamt last night that
You and I became lovers.
It was just a dream.

- Eleanor Gang

Eyes are shut firmly
Sights are odd, irrational
Now I am falling

- Sam Zen

Nightmares : A Haiku Collection

There was this squid, right –
whose tentacles touched and
rubbed the parts it shouldn't.

- Chris Brandon

Always shopping malls,
miles and miles of dingy stores...
Horror: no way out!

- Etienne Domingue

Monster under bed
Saliva drips to the floor
Feeding time begins

- Nick Wilson

Six-fifteen a.m.
Before the alarm goes off
The machines are back.

- Eleanor Gang

Palms remain sweaty
Breathing comes hoarse and ragged
End is not the end

- Nick Wilson

Alien drives car
Like Fred Flinstone with his feet.
River of acid.

(Based off of a real nightmare my friend had when we were kids.)

- Chris Brandon

The dark is inside
where we cannot murder it.
We become victims.

- Mathew Stiffel

I wish that it were
But the horrible truth is
This is not a dream.

- Simon Smart

I open my eyes
Only to discover that
I’m back in grade nine.

We cannot get out
Bridge and Second Hall; taken
Drums, Drums in the Deep.

- Gordon Lambie

Waking: A Haiku Collection

Why now, oh why now?!
On the verge of finding her
I woke, despairing.

- Etienne Domingue

Awaken to find
Someone has replaced your head
With a bowling ball.

(My sick day haiku.)

- Gordon Lambie

Smothered in my hole
Tons of black earth crushing me
I hunger for brains.

- Mathew Stiffel

Awakened quickly
Cold sweats, pounding heart and fear
Alone in my bed

(Autobiographical from 2:20am today.)

Opening my eyes
I greet the day as always
With the words "Oh, Fuck"

- Nick Wilson

Why dost thou leave me
Sleep? For Oblivion would
I forsake the world.

- Eleanor Gang

Cryo sleep over
A fierce itching in my chest
Oh no, not again ...

- Jeremy Low

Escape never lasts
The jealous sun is too proud
To cede to night, dream.

- Bill Moody

Morpheus Rejected or We’ll Sleep When We’re Dead

Written by Sheila Quinn

Lolling through tea-time, alight with the perks of sundown……

A long-standing routine,
the self-imposed nightly binding of my Isaac.
Only a loving deity rarely intervenes, and alas my sweet Isaac perishes,
and I don’t miss him until it’s too late, at my own hands demised.

Twilight, midnight, late night,
I offer him up.
To industrious nothingness, to the frantic results of procrastination.
To motherhood.
To satisfaction. To seduction.
To satisfaction again.

I give up,and night after night he is sacrificed.
I care, but not enough to cease and desist.
Ease and insist.
Please don’t resist.
I don’t need you anyway.
We’ll be together in death, because,

with you I’m restless.

But I miss you most
at new-found oh-six-hundred internal alarm,
eyes open and craving you.
I only want you when I can’t have you.
Even though I know….
How good you are for me.
How right you are for me.
You’ll only find me falling into your arms
by accident or because
I was out of options.

I have gotten over my fear of thunder

Written by Chris Brandon

i have gotten over my fear of thunder
maybe -
She stammered out as She jumped up
reaching out Her hands
grey clouds
heavy, just out of reach
as if they might strike Her down
at
any
given
moment.
as if
She could fly
in,
into sound.
i was the only witness to Her
Ascent,
unless you count the lake.
brooding and omniscient – forever.
Her reflection getting tiny as
She
rose.
the cold grey light
touched Her pale skin
with the wind that
played music in Her hair.
the Thunder
Clapped,
and so
did i.

Écorcher la Nuit

Written by Erik Wackernagel

The sterling intensity of this swollen night opens out like a flower
Beckoning, thrusting into the first falling spears of the morning light
Opens like a star bursting in joyous agony in the eternal song of
The flame churning inside its gut
And coming
And coming
Forever
Through our ears and nose and eyes and throats
The luminosity of a million suns
Dancing a twisted tango
Burning out in little lanterns over the charred blanket of a summer’s night
A winter’s night
Snowflakes turning pirouettes on the silent wind
Glistening in icy reflection of the horrid fires above
Snow falling like a shower of broken glass over the crude body of an asphalt cookie sheet
Bouncing and tinkling o’er the ground like raindrops and marbles
And prickling down into the impermeable black membrane of hell
Some sickly heidegger swimming in the ocean ooze of being
Where life may refuse to be stamped out by the shuddering folds of dark
Thick in the sweat of a dream of a river
Flowing between bodies
Little geysers sending drops and showers
And thirsty pores sucking down their fill
Licking saline streams and hard nipples beckoning in the never
A shooting star may sit a million years in nulle part
Just to swim a catapult stream arcing a lover’s back across the sky
A fire born for one beaming moment
One movement
For those who dare swipe at the jaws of the heavens
And cackle the grinning maw of a skeleton
To know that one who lives in death
Is a flower
Roots crackling whips on wind electric
The lightning flare of suckling fibres twisting a faint medusa
Revel in the wanting darkness grotesque
Over the sunken ashes of a house of mirrors
The real horror
To those who have learned to fear
Is the bathhouse of terrors
Swimming in steamy saunas and sultry waters
With snakes and feathers, fucked up grins and leather
Smacking the bars on a cage of desire
Plunging in pools of moonlight and stretching limbs in the velvet
To walk fearless in the midnight of good and evil
Stars fires limbs lovers tired sins

City leaving lights bereaving

Written by Chris Brandon

City leaving lights bereaving,
obeying the spectacle of air and sound,
slowly repeated to ears resting on the closed heads of martyrs.
Unwilling at best to make tools of voices.
Lights leaving it all to air and sound to go on repeating.
Bludgeoning on
unheard.
unheard.
unheard.
unheard.

Red Spectre Kill

Written by Erik Wackernagel

We have placed the luminous spectrum under house arrest,
Fearing the risk of wildcat paw bats
On the part of colours, autonomous agents
Infecting the quickest port of entry to the human mind.
Once colours are moving, they blow through
Reticent windows like crumbling old napkins;
Popping paparazzi shots in mirrors
That we had forgotten.

There is no catching a beast
Who slingshots itself riding airy cheetahs with
Six-packs of M-80’s for feet.
Sexless, there is no fooling it with the
Mimicking tongues of orchids,
Much as we might like to see wild mating
Forces colliding at the speed of light.
Colours are a breed hard to tease.
They laugh at the ease
with which clumsy fingers catch rodents.

The momentary leap through the solar system
Does not make me cringe,
As the crimson of lips expelling tingles
Despite the closing of eyelids.
Sparks tickling the orange glands in Floridian taste buds
Quickly sketch the allure of carbon
Clinging to metal-skinned potatoes,

Yet they can’t explain why
The human fires clutching to the bounds of imagination,
Strange in time and home,
Are white, and why the sun draws goosebumps
To arms seeking liberty in July.

The film will continue, despite the arresting
Silence of colours.
Gradient senses forget their old velocity;
Limbs settle thirsty in antebellum poses.
Faces are not sought for their expressionism
In the graphic science of terror. Strangely,
Blood is a poor mock-up for blood in the moving lens.
Beets crack the dry western earth in
Ghastly whims to clutch white blouses that collect
The sparse and quivering residue of the colour wheel.

The rainbow shrinks from the pressure hose
Spraying the Kindergarten. Abstaining words
Shut up the gathering climax speed of skeletal
Queers collecting in the water ducts,
Populating the paving stone landscape, haunting
Pumpkin-eyed families.
Colour-eating goggles lie in shadowy patience
In birthing clinics.

The Theater of Cruelty, born in white halls,
Sniffing bleach and tactile blackouts,
Offers murmurs to a tonsilly collection plate,
Where pupils leak into homeless death orgies.
New doctors gently peel away light wave receptors,
Nails plucking cheese wax.

The curtains kiss with the first tap of cold light.
Infants incubate by the dozens in the cinema;
Seats menstruate old strips of velvet robbed of blush.
Hue-drained thighs stretch and lift off from the resting place.
Stand and applaud. The whites of their eyes meet
and embrace in quiet abandon. In padded walls
Stained only with the off-gassing of odd dreams –
Together we have seen the solution.

The exit lights flashing
Cast the pale glow of 1939
On summery flesh filing in the doorway.
The narrator chooses to remain anonymous.

These whispers are a secret passage

Written by Chris Brandon

These whispers are a secret passage like the kind you find when you’re a little boy: where they lead, you’re not sure but you know they mean something. You know they go where you need to be, where things are better, where it doesn’t hurt anymore.

Sometimes the things you know are things that can be taken away.

Sometimes you just don’t even know what you know.