News: published in Minus 9 Squared

Minus 9 Squared is a literary zine that contains poetry, prose, photographs, artwork, and many other products of the arts by various contributors. It has only been recently set up and the first issue can be viewed here.

I was fortunate enough to have my poem Chaos to Silence published in this issue, and my friend Michael Fogarty also had a poem published (and, by random chance, the poems feature beside each other in the online magazine on pages ten and eleven, which is always nice).

All the work, both written and visual, is excellent, and hopefully there will be more to come from Minus 9 Squared and its contributors in the future.

Chaos to Silence

I

Strobe-light chaos splits time with black spaces,
Seconds divided, just like stop motion
Animation without any purpose.
Bodies come together and sway as one,
Shaking the floor in time to the rhythm.
Elbows crack ribs as sweat rains down from those
Perched on the upper levels, surveying
The alcohol fuelled ecstasy below.
Alone I stand in sobriety, lost
In thought while moving thoughtlessly to the
Beat that goes ever on and on for no
Reason but to inspire the masses,
Granting courage to those lives without it.
Now they hang from each other, boy and girl,
Boy and boy, girl and girl, all playing the
Tease with the desires of the drunkard,
And when they drop their glasses, yelling in
Uncalled for anger and futile despair
As all their aspirations fall apart
In their man-made spiralling abyss, it
Is clear I shall forever be alone.

II

And that is the way I left the city,
On my own, expecting the chaos to
Pervade the streets as society lets
Itself fall into the trap of being
Too comfortable in uncomforting
Times, with the sly men and whorish women
Screaming and vomiting under street lights,
While the innocent night workers curse their
Prayers that were prayed in vain to the deafest;
But instead of finding bodies crisscrossed
Along the paths of deceit and sin so
Frequented by the ever ossified,
My eyes fell upon nothing at all, save
A solitary cab and its driver,
With only three jobs in thirteen hours.
Then he told me stories of a recluse,
And how the night sky mirrored the events here,
So empty, not a soul nor star in sight.
And as deafening silence drowns my
Ears while we race the night’s casting shadows,
Solitude becomes random, not certain.

(another night out, another poem about that night out).