Maurice Oliver
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Sometimes Suicidal by Aimee DeLong
Sometimes a suicidal person fixes her hair. Sometimes she looks in the mirror to smooth it. Sometimes she goes four days without washing it.
Last Night at Southport by Justin Hyde
tell her i'm a butterfly
with sixteen wings
beating in
succinct
anarchy.Categorical Imperatives by Maurice Oliver
Try to imagine a small room where the only/ furniture is a TV. The TV has a hundred/ channels and two sets of memories.
1. A canoe full of moose meat
2. Beerwigs
3. The Great Vodka Massacre
4. The Bootlegger & the Professor
5. Puke-O-GramVisual Art by Claudio Parentela
What is Out (In) There?
Don’t give advice.
Eat an apple a day.
Get rid of any spare tire around the waist.
Never hide in a missile silo.
Straighten up your living quarters before the
ozone is all gone.
Make eye contact with a gas pump.
Become a foster parent to a snake in the grass.
Be skeptical of all bail bonds and try not to
consume any more than two a week.
Add a valued customer to your glass ball collection.
Never trust a pair of go-go boots.
Demand a shotgun wedding but settle for anything
that resembles a Bar-Mitzvah.
Plan your day so you never have trash.
Don’t think that progress exists. It does not’t. And
neither does a fire escape.
Categorical Imperatives
Try to imagine a small room where the only
furniture is a TV. The TV has a hundred
channels and two sets of memories. The room
suffers from amnesia and has a leaky ceiling.
There’s a bowl of fruit on the TV and the room’s
floor once was the life of an oak tree. Neither
the TV nor the room has ever had a headache
or felt contempt for a total stranger. But, the TV
does wear glasses and the room is terrified of
the dark. The TV wonders what it would be like
to have a dent in the bridge of its nose and the
room longs to know what a clock sounds like
when it ticks. Personally, I try not to wonder
about much of anything other than how robust
this exercise in the use of your imagination
has been. I’ve provided a space below where
you can leave comments. While you scribble
yours, I’ll go stand at the window and watch
the Pepsi truck pull up to the asylum so a bottle
opener can fill the vending machine.
Progress, Disguised As A Centipedes
And when the dust finally settles, here’s what’s left:
-A row of concrete dividers on a receding hairline.
-Every wood-framed church in the Bible Belt.
-Trains that are only used to scare away ghosts.
-A building that was originally scheduled for demolition.
-Thickly spread peanut butter wedged between two silos.
-A coat rack made from barrels of Agent Orange.
-One lamppost that longs to be a lighthouse.
-A pair of spectacles that desperately need polishing.
Biography
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, Taj Mahal Review (India), Dandelion Magazine (Canada), Stride Magazine (UK), and online at thievesjargon.com, interpoetry.com (UK), kritya.com (India), blueprintreview.de (Germany), and is forthcoming in The Arabesques Review (Algeria). His forth chapbook, "One Remedy Is Travel" was published in August '07 at Origami Condom. The editor of the ezine Concelebratory Shoehorn Review (www.concelebratory.blogspot.com) he lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a private tutor.
