boulders by Dan Wagner of Hamburg, PA

wait while the ghosts of dead families decide my sentence—
the judge is out and the jury sits in the big chair with a mallet
and pounds little birds into the woodwork

please! duct tape my heart to the inside of my head!
turn my skin inside out, maybe then, maybe then
clara barton will run away!

i dare you! look away from that cancerous dance in a box,
look me in my eye
and oh! how our insanity shall multiply!

do you feel it? the creeping madness?!
the hurtling stone in the heart, the bitter sneer of the lip
the excrement of a thousand subconscious lusts tingling in your toes!!?

and i will kick and kick and maybe finally, finally
my foot will fly off and land on the boardroom table,
and the moldy beasts with their black leather briefcases
will shrink back in terror while i hop to the kitchen to get a bagel

but oh! my love! if you read this will you still put my head on your heart?
will you still kiss my neck, run your hand down the appalachia of my ribs
and smile?

lightning! make me your mistress, we will find electric pleasures in the angry clouds
and i will hide in the forest when the sun comes home from work!

don't look! don't look! don’t look to the sea!
for salt and spray have betrayed you and me
and our boat's beams are made of bones

i am but a stone's throw from the chains of the sane—
thank god there are only boulders here.

Dan Wagner is a human being of eighteen years. He lives in Hamburg, PA. He writes poems and songs and takes pictures. lemmingtree.blogspot.com/lemmingtree@gmail.com

Submit your poem to drivebypoets@gmail.com

To The Woman...... by Denise Fontaine-Pincince

Denise Fontaine-Pincince, before coming to poetry, served as owner / administrator to two schools: a private elementary school, and a large day care center. In 2005 she sold her 25 -year-old business to pursue the arts. She is currently enrolled in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program where she has expanded her study to include poetry and paint. Her most recent project can be viewed at www.poetryandpaint.com

I know I know, the impatien I used in the photo is white....and is it even an impatien? Sorry, sometimes I'm impatient. -Jim

Pre-Reading Meeting with Steve Shavel, Alyssa Lovell, Jim Neill

Jim, Alyssa, Steve. Allegra didn't show. Michelle bailed. The reading is THIS WEDNESDAY at 7PM at the Forbes Library.

Drive-By Poets reading at the Forbes Library in Northampton set for Wed. Oct. 1st at 7PM

Wed. Oct. 1st at 7PM, at the Forbes Library in Northampton, I've been asked to curate a poetry reading of five local poets upstairs in the Coolidge Museum. This is the first of six Wednesdays of poetry readings at the library. It'll be me, Steve Shavel, whose book on Verse Press is "How Small Brides Survive Extreme Cold," Alyssa Lovell, who guides the monthly Monday night poetry discussion group at the library, Allegra Mira who writes the Valley Poetry blog on MassLive, Michelle David, whose poems have appeaed here previously (scroll down) and myself, Jim Neill. Just to get you in the mood, here's a poem by Alyssa Lovell which you can also see out on the streets. Um. The poem, not Alyssa. CLICK THE POEM to see it more easily.

Drive-By Poets mentioned in Tommy Devine's Online Journal

Drive By Poets is a kind of dadaist consciousness expansion group that gathers poetry, prints copies of the best poems, and then run all over the Valley leaving their poems everywhere to be found by innocent passerby. As they put it on their website:

Drive-By Poets is a non-profit public poetry postering project in Northampton, Massachusetts. Anyone may submit poems to DriveByPoets@gmail.com. Every few weeks week we choose one, print a hundred or so, & blitz the bulletin boards, bookstores, launderettes, libraries, & bathroom walls until they're gone. This blog has many of the poems we've posted. Feel free to submit your work.

Here's a recent sample:

This white unswaying place

I'm sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply gleaming

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
Anid I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.

-LAURIE SHECK

The Reason Why The Closet Man is Never Sad by Russell Edson

CLICK the poem for full size.

Rusell Edson is one of my favorite poets. You should investigate his work further.

Oddly, a week after I chose this poem for a new Drive-By broadside, this story emerged in the news:

Homeless woman lived in man's closet for year
Japanese man became aware of her presence when food began vanishing

updated 9:23 a.m. ET, Fri., May. 30, 2008

TOKYO - A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.

Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.

One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left, and he called police believing it was a burglar. However, when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.

“We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide,” Itakura said. “When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."

Woman found the home unlocked
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man’s house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

The closet is part of a Japanese-style room, one of several rooms in his one-story house where the man lived alone — or so he had thought.

Police were investigating how she managed to go in and out of the house unnoticed, as well as details of her life inside the closet, and if she had taken anything else besides food.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and apparently even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."

Simone Castillo - tomorrow won't be what it was

Click the poem for full glory.

James Tate "Desperate Talk" from Ghost Soldiers

Click the poem for best results. Jim's new book of poems is delightful as expected. You think he's making this stuff up? I believe he's simply a reporter who wears night vision goggles in the daytime and sunglasses at night.

(Flesh beaten thought) by Michelle David

Click the poem to read more easily.

Drive-By Poets Boxes Pepper Downtown Northampton in front of Thorne's Market, Broadside Books, and Fitzwilly's

Click on any picture for a better look. Each box dispenses the latest poem and provides the submission email address: DriveByPoets@gmail.com