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featured poets & artists

 

don lee

don lee is a 40 yr old taxi driver in fayetteville, arkansas. urban occult hipster, father of one beautiful kid, poet, great enthusiast of the new york school & the san francisco renaissance. published 2 chaps and 4 issues of the fayetteville city poetry review. has taught variously and run the fayetteville poetry rodeo writers group for several years. donthepoet@yahoo.com

 

Jacket blurb for "how to pick up women in bars and other public places" by dr. Loomis burkhead, ed.d

"Contains more than 1,500 weird, controversial,
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The Raptor Variation, The Hallowe'en Gambit, Double
Duck, The Frankenstein-Dracula Variations, & even The
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unsuspecting & often unprepared opponents."

 

Belly Music

I have written lines on the edges of your pages sweet
friend giving it a quality both humorous & romantic.
(The combination of harpsichord with seagulls I never
would have thought of in a million years, but it works
on you.)

I can't get out of this green city of clocks. Sorry.
You are here for one thing, I'll show you when you
come over. Everybody is young & they have beautiful
babies you can see at the edges of photos.

We should hang out more. At least Christmas is sexy
here, all wooden & gauzy & full of Americans (*grin*).

But I digress. I am beside you thru the ghost of
winter, hungry lions, you are a landscape I navigate
daily. Trees & the sound of a river running. Some
river! Amor fati. Optimism is a revolutionary act.

 

October Poem

Red Bud Inn, Mountain View, Ark.
Rain tonight, out,
Silent sidewalk town
Who knows solitude
Of the polar night
In this dank burg?
The girl at Hardee's sweeping
Glad to see my ass go out the door.

I don't want to take a walk
Or read someone else's book,
I want to make love to you
In a field of wild flowers,
But you aren't here.

Something in the delirium
Of the night hours,
I am a universe etc.
I'm happy with our hermetic games--
(Do you love me
Despite prevailing conditions?)

Rough, beautiful intoxication of you,
Poetickal,--Breakfasting on rain,
I think of your eyes.

 

No Air on the Moon

Late at night he hustles wine,
Believes in things--"Baffling combustions
Are everywhere!" In my backpack,
In Heidi's sweater, across town off Garland Ave.
In my x-girlfriend's goddamned spice rack!
In this Friday slush I stride through
Off-balance and stern.

Four walls mean something (others have noted this),
We make love to pretty girls when we have time,
Otherwise stomp Lyrically across the wet & purple day
When on fire, like now, pregnant w/ mandrakes
& making "vast apple strides" toward the ice floes.
Caught up in the talons of a gigantic eagle, a really
big One, the biggest one of all!

"It is winter. We are here. AND THERE IS NO MONEY."
My dream a nest of light & heat, the 2 a.m. quilts &
Rain at the windowpane & Love: "real as keyholes,
Real as affadavits"--

The trouble with comparing a Poet to a '64 Mercury
Comet:
Comets don't develop scar tissue blazing across the
sky
At 2 a.m. like a remonstrance--

But you will.

 

Oceanography of the Human Heart

...that there is no mention of directions, a certain
way of standing, to see just so, but not how to get
there, nor what to do later, after it's over and has
worked, or not worked, when you feel that tremendous
sense of elation or crushing anti-climax, and wonder
why you bothered at all--you will always find things
that you were not looking for, birds or ghosts of them
singing in your heart, poised, awaiting the call that
never came. you cannot call them. but it's okay you
wanted to.


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