Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Editorial
Category: Writing and Poetry

is not permanence that gives life meaning and hope. It is that it passes. Examining our time, do we give most of our hearts to that which is solid, and faithful? No: it is that which is transitory, that which walks to the flame that makes us see how close we too are to burning. Though lovers encircle us, it is only when we are outside their embrace that we truly feel them; it is only when our existence shifts onto some new track, some new path that we feel the pull of the steps we have already taken. The past constantly calls to us. It is clear, though, that to make our way without despair we must learn to close our ears to this siren. Though we hear its voice, and see again in our minds the shafts of light it sings, we cannot allow this whispered yesterday to corrupt our way to enlightenment. We must constantly seek to look beyond our limits, to find new ways to comprehend our place in this maelstrom. Basquiat knew this: he was restless, constantly seeking the next shard of knowledge, and reworking his art over and over in his attempt to find it. We at Unquiet Desperation know it too. Though this black-hearted publication has found a place, we know that to be satisfied is to calcify. The issue after this will be UD2.1: not only will our focus change, but the main zine will be accompanied by a number of other publications each issue, infiltrated into places where THEY don’t want true art and writing to be. Our band of tyrannical philosopher-poets will expand, to include all that know there must be more than the hamster-wheel life we’re forced to run... and that includes you. Visit www.unquietdesperation.co.uk to scream what your future will be, and why we all should know you. The question is, are you still shackled by the safe and the cloying, or are you ready to risk so much that you could gain, at last, a reason to live?

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: It Wasn’t Supposed To Come Down Hard, But It Did by James Nemeth
Category: Writing and Poetry

poetry reading/
new york rican café, east 3rd street,
the village/
9:30 p.m………… pressed for time…….

28th street IRT
I’ve got my bag full of poems for everyone in attendance/
head down toward the platform/
meditating on what tonight’s audience
will be like/
great/ by goddesses/ bring the house down/
I’ve taken those clandestine poems that come
down hard

this is new york and I feel like playing hardball,
taking with me the cutting/ fringe end/
the hyperbolic poems with me like
"strung out babe", or "nightwatch", or
"smoldering with thoughts"

I’ve got to pick out my targets for the night
in the audience,
and let guy in the fifth set of tables know that he’s
not just going to soak this up like a sponge,
but unbeknown to him, he’s going to transformed
into an active participant.

22 minutes is all I ever take/
got to time this right/
spring water bottle/ evian springs/

I usually bring the house down,
but this time
there’s some thing special there/
get there early and size up the crowd…..

28th street & 7th avenue subway station/
I’m pushed aside by a transit officer:
"move over there –
  over there!"
I’m 60 years old and was meditating near
a group of young men/
shock//
pure shock//
I thought he wanted to frisk me

hey, look man, 60 year old poets who meditate
on subway platforms just don’t go around
being bomb carriers……….

why bother with me?

"my dog has to get through."

he passes through the heavy metal gate/
I run up to the turnstiles/
he walks on/
I yell out to him:
"I haven’t been here for a while/
 I’m not familiar…..

he heard me.

I would have you to know that you’ll
never be able to fully appreciate the
experience of walking with a heavy bag
full of poems across the width of manhattan.

hang tough, james,
just move

does anyone here speak english?
nobody knows what’s four blocks away?
so what do you do?

ask somebody who’s black, and you’ll be
99% guaranteed to speak in english,
and probably get the right answer too/

west 4th street, and with my sharp, swift gait,
I think to myself:
"just move on, keep moving on..."

the men lying on cardboard beds
in front of st. francis of assisi roman catholic church
are waiting
for a place in the shelter,
everyone one black, save one, spanish/
they look up at me,
as I look at them

something from all of them
hit me
that I couldn’t/ wouldn’t want to repel/
they all, in their own ways
had something to say to me/
they felt some expulsion of compassion
emanating from me

many regard me as a man of knowledge,
wise to the point of being a socratic fault/
I wonder why they think and feel that
way when they haven’t seen what I’ve seen
in my grassroots travels
across america
as "the carnival man"
and a lot else/
too, too much,
yet in my old age not enough either........

something in me says
the wisdom within me had better look
back and take that final look
at those black men, and lone spaniard,
and some revelation about them
will hit me at some point in the near future

I walked the parking lot of birchwood terrace
a few days later,
and then
the revelation hit me with the force
of a runaway asteroid:

everyone of those men
was in fact a man of knowledge
but at the time
I didn’t know it....

I had the time to look but not really see

being in a hurry
left me without what I could have gleaned
if only I would have taken a minute
to speak to one of them

an opportunity lost

while sitting on the brick stair steps,
I scanned the sky,
and asked my others
of the universes beyond,
why it is that I should feel
ashamed of myself, that I let
a vital lesson, once again,
slip through my fingers, lost
it wasn’t supposed to come down hard, but it did.....

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Flat Cola Bottles by Sean O’Callaghan
Category: Writing and Poetry

We used to get 5p back for empty
Bottles out the back of me grandma Boyle’s. At the side of
the coal house there’d always be about four to six empty stout
bottles; that was a cert,
and you’d clink them over the street to Tully’s shop
for a packet of salt and vinegar golden wonder and a can of coke.

But you just didn’t have enough for the can a coke so ye ended up with
one a those silly little plastic containers with the straw that just had like orange diluted muck in no fizz
but it was better than milk straight from the cow
and that stupid pineapple shite that was always left over from
the mineral man’s van the Thursday before.
Poison that pineapple shite was but ma kept on getting it anyway.

If you were really stuck for cola bottles or blackjacks...
(although I was never a fan of the blackjack chew it was liquorice see
that stuff rates low in my sweet preference
but flat lovely cola bottles them’s the shit
not those fucking fat ones with the sugar on them either
they can go fuck themselves they don’t deserve to be called cola bottles at all
they should just be called rubbish)

...so if you were hungry for sugar and no empty bottles anywhere
we’d climb over the back of our granny’s oul calf houses with the black slates
into Tully’s backyard and take the bottles that had been cashed in already
and bring ’em back to the shop again via granny’s back yard and feed our wee devious faces with sweets and crisps.

Then maybe 10 or 20p
in the illegal fruit machine that had its own room at the top
of the shop and my granny Boyle who used to clean Tully’s house when they worked at the shop would always be in there of an evening and let me press the big red and yellow buttons for her.

She still loves a punt granny Boyle.
She’s old and frail though
but has her once or twice a week trip down to Camlough
to Hughes’ goldmine shop no-one said would work 10 years ago,
for scratch cards that she takes home and has a ball scratching and moaning about
not winning.

She’s not really fit for the bingo any more either,
her an avid bingoer in her time.
I used to go when I was a wee lad to Mullabawn with her and me ma
and she’d be marking off two or three cards at a time and me struggling with
one,
my ma having to watch me as the numbers were called
"Number 10 Maggie’s den" and the crowd would boo loud they hated Thatcher in Mullabawn bingo hall.

I’d be looking at her thinking she was hot stuff doing shit like that
and the smoke in that place would a choked ye I’m not kidding.
But that was back in the days with Embassy Regal sponsored the World Snooker Championships and Alex Higgins was winning or Steve Davis

and Ray Reardon was a vampire

and Eddie Charlton wasn’t called ’The Grinder’ for nothing,

Kirk Stevens was cool,

Jimmy ’Whirlwind’ White the new thing

and Terry Griffiths was like watching paint dry a boring welsh muppet
pretending he wasn’t gay that’s for sure
and no one had a computer
and there was no mobile phones
and it wasn’t that long ago really but it
was a completely different world.

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Hammer & Keyboard by Rob Plath
Category: Writing and Poetry

i sit on the
old couch
near the drafty
fucking windows

i can feel death
beneath my cuticles
as i type on
the laptop
tonight

i look over
& a hammer is
on the bare desk

i left it there
after hanging the
van gogh painting

the hammer
& the keyboard
same shit, man

i bang the acb’s
like the heads
of nails

every time i want
to claw myself
apart i build something

i wish i had
a dollar for
every time
i contemplated
the noose

my poems are
replacements
for that fatal
knotted loop

each sentence
is an unraveled fiber
of the rope

each swearword
fingers untying
it

2:18 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Christbones by Brent Saner
Category: Writing and Poetry

it’s hard to block out harpies banshees sirens calling me to shipwreck and wendigo smiles go from symmetrical ear-to-ear gasping rasping raping ravenous insults because i wear dirty laundry in an attempt to break my spoiled flesh and cut out the rotten parts. eggshell catacombs cutting cattleprodly.

parents lead their children to the slaughtering schools hand-in-hand. and the children twist and scream and cry, and shout out please- " i don’t want to! please don’t make me go back! daddy! mommy!" but the parents’ patience is worn thin and their ears have grown cold and engorged. the children are shredded and reprocessed and spit out in a mass paste, post-haste. and the process continues until kids too full of wisdom for their age break down in college and are so motherfucking fed up that they skip classes for the day in lieu of a nervous breakdown and their lover is hundreds of miles away so they’ve only got a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of whiskey- mother’s milk- to lean on in their time of need- because the best that mommy dearest has to offer is "don’t worry, it’ll get better soon" and doesn’t see the machine she’s feeding her son to, so full of fangs and conveyor belts and injections and vacuum tubes and phosphorous women afraid of men so they fill it with hate, and bored husbands who assault their students with paper cuts and batter their wives with passive-aggressive stories about their day at work.

mothers and fathers killing their babies, one by one, single file, paying pied pipers to whistle and play their sons and daughters like rats down into the flames of alcoholism, of violent drug abuse, of selling the flesh, of corporate rot, and of the marriage between ignorance and numbness. mothers and fathers, i call you to look at your own hands, look at your own lives and answer me- are you happy? when you argue with your spouse every night over bills and groceries and bills and the new township policy and bills and bills and bills, are you happy? are you hopelessly happy arguing and going to bed on opposite sides of the bed, of the room, of the house, of the country? are you happy arguing about this and that? do you want your children, your second-flesh chance, to suffer the same fate?

mothers! fathers! sons! daughters! live your lives to the course of your hearts and not to the coarse of those who you love.

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Some Strange Being With A Face Like My Own...
Category: Writing and Poetry

...by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal


I was way past hungry.
I knew I had no money.
I ordered the simplest
thing on the menu,
spaghetti and meatballs.

I gave them my name and
my telephone number. I
promised I would come back
to pay the bill. I
only had a few bites.

I stopped eating because
something was crawling on
my arm. It crawled into
my private parts and
planted its seed inside me.

I am afraid I will
give birth to some strange being
not of this earth with a
face like my own. I
did not ask to have sex.

When am I getting out
of this place? Have you been in
touch with my mother? She
wants to control me.
She won’t give me money.

Something is crawling all
over my body. I
can’t see it because I
need glasses. No one
in this place will help me.

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: French Phrases by Matt Pecina
Category: Writing and Poetry

We laid in bed and I stared at the ceiling three feet away.

Andgoddamnitthequestionalways...

"What are you thinking about?"

You know you are not allowed to be somewhere else while in someone’s bed. I know that. But I was in different city, at a different time. Something was too familiar.

"I can tell you’re thinking about something."
"I am. But it doesn’t matter."

I was short. Because what I was thinking about had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with everything that is right now, and what used to be. I don’t think she knew what to say, so she stayed silent.

Out of kindness I replied "I was thinking about English. I feel like shit about not going... and I’m just - a little stressed, I guess."

She was looking at me. I mean - God she was looking at me. She was kind, and she tried to rub my shoulder and my chest but it only frustrated my thoughts more. After all, that’s not what you’re supposed to do.

I began: "When I was little, or even now really, whenever I was upset or stressed out, my mother would scratch my head. It’s the best."
"Like this?"
"Yes, like that."

And it did feel good. It made me think about the Mexican lady with the long red nails at Bambi’s who didn’t speak English. She gave me a taper fade and with her hands in my hair I fell asleep. I was twelve years old again.

And in that moment I felt better and worse. I knew this exact thing had happened before in different beds in a different state. I wondered if that was a bad thing, and decided no. I felt ok. I wondered if every bed after this one would have beautiful fingers and long nails.

This story isn’t mine though. I owe it to another. I mean, I didn’t realise this on my own you know. She figured this out. She watched me patiently at church, she saw my mother scratch my head and she saw my eyes close and my lips stretch. She saw and she remembered. And then one day as we lay, I felt her nails. God, I felt them. She knew me like I didn’t think anyone could and I loved her for it.

All this went through my head while I stared at the white ceiling. And I sat up. Here I was thinking about someone else. Someone I had been trying to not think about. She knew I was gone again. Maybe she knew I was in a different state at a different time with a different girl. She’s smart, after all.

Then in French, she said "At times, silence is best", however you say that in French. She translated it for me, and my eyes closed and my lips stretched and found hers. She was so true. And I didn’t feel bad anymore. It’s all ok. "Teach me French. I want to go there someday."

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Thank You, Kerouac by Brian Fanelli
Category: Writing and Poetry

I want to join the rucksack revolution,
strap a bag on my back,
hop a roaring freight train,
twisting, turning to new destinations
and snaking up fog-filled mountains,
towering over streams of city lights.
I want to climb Desolation Peak,
find Buddha, find truth,
shed tears over the beauty of a butterfly’s wings.
I want to park at the Pacific,
record the swooshing sounds
of the sea’s perennial tide,
waves rising, foamy crests cracking and crashing,
erupting into roaring white water.
Come night, I’ll pass out under ancient stars,
only to wake hungry, unsatisfied,
my big appetite to blame.

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: My Only Request by Lawrence Joseph Talc
Category: Writing and Poetry

In the ground lays his dead
body. He still wears his old
glasses. His head is bald.

But it is caved in.
His mouth agape
and teeth rotting.
His rib cage lays
exposed.

But it is
the worms,
the maggots,
and the dirty finger nails
that wake me from this nightmare.

I’m awake,
speechless,
almost whimpering.
but too afraid to cry out.

I calm down a bit.
I remember my father.
I remember he isn’t food.
I remember he is actually sprinkled
along an old football field in New Jersey.

So now I remind people
cremate me.

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Unquiet Desperation 1.20: Applauding The Neb by Ray Succre
Category: Writing and Poetry

He is boring and flaps with no sharp sound,
not so much as a peck.

The Neb orates spoken word, walking
as on teetering effects.

The Neb, a rich speaker, is a silly sultan,
eating circlets and first editions,
and feeding the grit from his eyes
to his sultanic wives;

they edit where the Neb sets his piece,
they listen and interview where he comes
to prove his scepter is still regarded.

He is old, now a puddle from the punctured
milk sack.  Pious kitties miaul at the edge, still,
but lift their ears on bullshit and the traipse
of comfort-public spells.

He is most modern, the Neb.  Breathing
in critical essays and league-shakes,
the centurion penman, sumping the plumage,
minutes to decades to a hush
where the comely blooms end in golden

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