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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY - 05/2012
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MAURICE OLIVER Or Musical Instruments Like The Guillotine... Most people go to sleep at night. My insomnia screams like a leaf-blower of blinding blizzard hiding in the Siberian cupboard's rattling snowplow. It grabs my keys then races along the freeway in a retro shoot 'um up Western then shouts a loud bugaloo down Broadway using lip-liner sirens. It's made of steel tacks mixed in the nine inch nails and rattles every ordinary tin roof scattering fluffy pillow feathers. It has no smitten eye piece but a starry sledge hammer of acid rock amplifier plugged into my tumbling dice. And when it really gets angry it smashes my glasses of warm milk against the four-poster bed tsunami over and over again until I'm forced to get up from the lazy-boy recliner and stagger to the bathroom mirror where a face stares back at me with eyes that dangle down from their dark circled sockets like earrings the shape of kiwi fruit. Techniques In Cloud Grooming Two days later the lawn mower dies and goes to hell. But first, the bushes suffer severe razor burn. The lawn sprinkler executes earth worms before burying them in unmarked graves. The fire hydrant is caught in an airport men's room sending smoke signals to a toilet paper dispenser in the next stall. The white picket fence writes a letter to the President demanding a goldfish pond and the driveway has cosmetic surgery for its basset-hound eyes then declares bankruptcy to keep from paying the non-insurance covered bill. I spend the complete 48-hour period scribbling alphabet soup in a large bowl of irrelevance... brassy doorbell ringtone gossip-prone trash cans full-figure cat nap's meow... only a streetlight sees the hand-writing on the wall and begins the tedious job of cloud grooming, using hand-made porch cement as it seriously begins to question the probability that anyone will believe any of the meticulously gathered statistical data when it is aired on the local nightly news at six. After almost a decade of working as a freelance photographer in Europe, Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990. Then, in 1995, he made a life-long dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months. But instead of taking pictures, he recorded the experience in a journal which eventually became poems. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in numerous national and international publications and literary websites including Potomac Journal, Pebble Lake Review, Frigg Magazine, Dandelion Magazine, (Canada), Stride Magazine (UK), Cha Asian Literary Journal, (Hong Kong), Kritya (India), Blueprint Review, (Germany) and Arabesques Review (Algeria). His forth chapbook was One Remedy Is Travel (Origami Condom, 2007). He edits the literary ezine Eye Socket Journal at: http://eyesocketjournal.blogspot.com. He lives in Portland, OR, where he works as a private tutor. |
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