featured poets & artists

Dave Cook

writer. I've lived in a lot of places, but for some sad pathological reason, keep on coming home. Cleveland is more a symptom than a location. Here in Cleve. we grit our teeth and talk about lashing our broken tailpipes to the leaf springs with old coat hangers. In the slush and salt. It's not a place, it's a lifestyle...HA! It's an asylum!

well i'm up in the northwest, just got in and got myself over some tough humps, in & out of a few very uncomfortable situations, and now its my time to find a way to thrive and have some well-deserved fun....through a combination of luck & pluck, get a gig taking names and finding these names places, all goes along very well, the nights are becoming my nights, all is good and wise and wonderful and it keeps getting better....easy & fun, and one night, swinging down the sidewalk, along comes this girl with little freckles and cinnamon hair, she falls into a rollin easy stride with me alongside, and in a flash i know she is mine and i am way gone into this equation...we laugh and chatter in a familiar fashion, our banter is rising in bubbles of helium and once among the clouds these bubbles::: pop!:: and every so often i see a cloud breaking into a wide jazzy grin no doubt our fault so i laugh again and this rising joy reverberates halfway around the world i swear, and this crazy girl and i are popping eyes & goofy smiles at one another...our rhythms are creating this enormous syncopating whoom! for a few moments I wonder if we'll be feeling this for the next decade....and then everything sort of returns to perspective and its just our heels pittering and clicking..a little sidewalk ditty...& once at my place, she tells me her life story but its a small life and a smaller story.. i really dont need too much but this is ridiculous... every morning i steal a rhododendron bloom from a neighbor and she wakes with it next to her, on a pillow. every evening she steals a bit of my heart, and when i awake, it is next to me, on a pillow. she is wrapped in silk when she sleeps, and i cannot refrain from touching her, silk is almost harsh next to her soft freckled skin, her cinnamon and ginger down i could drown in that soft richness. & to think i would steal her a flower.

between Irv's and the Crystal in banged up cars or riding fuming buses away from the rapid and getting bold as the day broke cold up through the cemetery with its cold stones rocking chick jon and i would go singing far away from the crashes of a few nights ago, twisting up a bugler and planning a scam whether it was the poultry market or a laundry room deal anything to keep warm when the wind blew cold death up the skirts of 123rd sitting on the steps of garfields tomb the deep chug of the town below some huge engine booming subaudible my diaphragm thrummed along one night the chick and i stole some bread from bikers not too bright a career move but we were cold dry and hurting bought wine and threw the rest of their money at cars passing by laughing and crying never caught us and thanksgiving waiting for the right shopping cart i hope i'm forgiven but we robbed some old lady of a cart full of expensive food and found a room and every hungry freak we knew didn't go hungry that day the chick and i we made a good team

...we went to the bar, the C-Saw it was called, in its heyday boasting an assortment of scruffy and occasionally dangerous folks, hell it was a sort of united nations of the warped ill and criminal element, we went there to see if anyone had any grass or something going on, what the hell, there was always good old beer if we could find anybody with money. things were as usual not going particularly well, our cup wasn't overflowing with love or anything and hungry a person can handle but sober is a cruel mistress indeed. no sense in asking for credit, ann and bill knew we were poor credit risks and we were lucky to be in the place at all, you can only nurse a beer for so long and that was all she wrote breadwise...down and out we go..another day in fucking paradise....the air had that cold brittle chill that whispered little intimacies through your hair, winter was closing in and then all the little girls would be back in school, lonely days indeed, the street buttons itself up like an old baglady and icy sidewalks are filled with people going places, no fun, no hangers on and nobody to play with save the few hard cases with no place to go and all the time in the world to get there...crummy and harsh, the wind whistled a mocking tune into my ear, straight up from the lake and across the cemetery, leaves scuttling like tight brown crabs across the streets and sidewalks. yer collar turned up against the chill and gray the sky a sullen dark and the mocking wind promising more and worse and all too soon...suddenly moving south with the geese seemed like a good idea but like all good ideas inertia stomps em flat and is a restraining hand on yer chest and heart and you know yer not gonna go anywhere but right here, shit ya might die here and that doesn't sound too bad not really. just about then here comes my pal scott, a true friend and one who still liked me for myself, i never could understand why i just guess it was due to some major character flaw he had but this particular angel could have had a harelip and 3 eyes, he also liked me and also always had money. things are looking up..packing into his car glorious music and warmth overwhelming like a mother's caress and a grateful tug at his bottle another and better warmth filling me and eyeburning relief, tonight things will be okay.

sometimes drifting in and out of my own in and out of my mind/mindless and heedless of the looks from others i scuttle down the cluttered sidewalks to the magic bustout bus stop stop me before i kill again, i want to scream, but no one is listening anyway.....so why make like a tree falling down in a forest? Nice to think that the good shepherd is listening but i have a hunch its the fucking nsa they just love to play god, i dont believe in the nsa either but i suppose ill have to change my mind about that when my door has been kicked in and the bastards have shot my dog....i doubt thatll be the lords work either.... i keep dreaming of moving my ass out of here and going somewhere else, somewhere a man can be free hey joe where you gonna go? picking up pennies for the old guy whimpering while i work...hee hee markk my words losing it really isnt all that bad the bastards want you to feel that way dead men pay no taxes and aint that what its all about? death and taxes not to the liking of the pig farmers er politicians hee hee bye now someones knockin at my door...

well i'm up in the northwest, just got in and got myself over some tough humps, in & out of a few very uncomfortable situations, and now its my time to find a way to thrive and have some well-deserved fun....through a combination of luck & pluck, get a gig taking names and finding these names places, all goes along very well, the nights are becoming my nights, all is good and wise and wonderful and it keeps getting better....easy & fun, and one night, swinging down the sidewalk, along comes this girl with little freckles and cinnamon hair, she falls into a rollin easy stride with me alongside, and in a flash i know she is mine and i am way gone into this equation...we laugh and chatter in a familiar fashion, our banter is rising in bubbles of helium and once among the clouds these bubbles::: pop!:: and every so often i see a cloud breaking into a wide jazzy grin no doubt our fault so i laugh again and this rising joy reverberates halfway around the world i swear, and this crazy girl and i are popping eyes & goofy smiles at one another...our rhythms are creating this enormous syncopating whoom! for a few moments I wonder if we'll be feeling this for the next decade....and then everything sort of returns to perspective and its just our heels pittering and clicking..a little sidewalk ditty...& once at my place, she tells me her life story but its a small life and a smaller story.. i really dont need too much but this is ridiculous... every morning i steal a rhododendron bloom from a neighbor and she wakes with it next to her, on a pillow. every evening she steals a bit of my heart, and when i awake, it is next to me, on a pillow. she is wrapped in silk when she sleeps, and i cannot refrain from touching her, silk is almost harsh next to her soft freckled skin, her cinnamon and ginger down i could drown in that soft richness. & to think i would steal her a flower.