Continuous Present, A Book Of Poems By John Michael Flynn

 

This collection comes from various notebooks kept across the span of about thirty-five years, a few of them dating back to the late 80s. Many examine a fleeting glimpse, a notion, a trick of light, or a mood. I tied them, as well, to my limited knowledge of Tai-Chi Chuan and what this ancient martial art engenders in me regarding flow, balance, adaptability and the mutable nature of existence.

This book is available as both an E-book and also as a paperback 

You can find it on Amazon and here at Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/continuous-present-john-michael-flynn/1145239310?ean=2940179564157

And on other platforms such as Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1545115

Table Of Contents

Expecting To Search

Pivoting On A Third Foot

Rowing, Listing And Turning

Strategizing Counter Offensives

Splicing Fault Lines

Flexing With A Maytime Stream

Raining Dosages

Digressing, Healing

Shipping Off My Vices

Fathering A Somewhere In You

Teaching English To Those Who Want It

Flying Small In Third Class

Bringing Yucca To Yucca Flats

Trending Fashions For The New Cold War

Gadding About Wonky

Steeping The Tea Of Empire

Bowling For Charity

Asking Why Not A Duck

Sliding Rule, Vanishing Trajectory

Appearing Patriotic

Rating Sharks On Algebra Farm

Waking Up Mid-Day During A Heatwave 

Skiing Asteroid Mountain

Staring Eyes Of Every Constellation

Noodling Media

Deconstructing Our Maudlin Bargain

Deriding A Lack Of Constancy

Completing Our Circle

Salting Pretzels, It’s A Living

Holding Open

Stewing Seaside Again

Seeping Into Ruin

Poring Over Deadlines

Failing Well

Growing Too Young

Fueling Rhythms

Looking There

Enduring Those Who Boast Of Their Afflictions

Catching The Children Who Catch Us

Giving More Than Attention

Moving In Harmony Again

Translating The Phrase Prenez Garde

Elsewhere A While, A Book Of Poems By John Michael Flynn

 

Conceived as a companion to the collection, It Must Be, many poems in Elsewhere A While were scribbled down in a fever and then polished later on. I've taken them from a mix of old notebooks accumulated over the decades. They reflect immediate impressions, and often address questions regarding motion and travel. The cover is from a photograph I shot in the city of Trabzon on the Black Sea in Turkey. It's from one wall of the Hagia Sophia there (not the one in Istanbul). Hagia Sophia, in English, means Holy Wisdom. This ancient structure was built as a Greek Orthodox church. In 1461,when Mehmed II conquered Trabzon, it was converted into a mosque. There aren't any poems in this collection about Turkey, per se. The geographic areas are Europe and North America, with one numbered translation of a Ghazal from the Farsi of the great Persian, Hafez.

Here's a link to some history of the Hagia Sophia in Trabzon. https://www.historyhit.com/locations/hagia-sophia-trabzon/

This book is available as an E-book or paperback. You can find it on Amazon or find it here at Overdrive: https://www.overdrive.com/publishers/flight-delay-books

Or at Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/elsewhere-a-while-john-michael-flynn/1145067122?ean=2940179599128

Table Of Contents

I.

Waputaki Cinnabar

With Teresa In Santa Fe

The Mission Bells Are Softly Ringing

Border Problem

The 10, The 5, The 405

Two For David Strohm

Interlude, Manzanar

Soaking Up Marconi Beach

Once Late Fall At Plum Island

First Baptist Church Of North Oxford Annual Rummage Sale

In Grafton Village

Six East Coast Rivers

The Dead Find Us In Mississippi

A Champagne Socialist, 2008

Detroit Vermont Cucamonga

II.

Ghazal 374

Dreamers Get Off At Dusseldorf

Alexanderplatz Chrysalis

Amsterdam Tailored

Mascara And Puritan

Toward Gravesend

Colors On The Fringe Of Galway Bay

Ambidextrous Asthmatic Cowboy

Driver, Passenger, Pedestrian

Time Is Both Burden And Salvation

Stars Speak In Quasi Haikus

Dishwasher Days

Animal, Vegetable, Irrational

Rumors Of Plummeting Space Junk

Here's one example. This is Ghazal 374 by Hafez, a translation that without the generous scholarship of Baha Sadr would not have been possible.

 Ghazal 374

translated from the Ghazaliyat of Hafez

by Baha Sadr and John Michael Flynn

Pull from the earth the petals of a flower

and pour out a glass full of dark red wine

Horizon wide open we will rent you asunder

and create in your stead a new master plan

If the armies of despair begin to riot

and slay each lover through the heart

then with all the lovers I will certainly join

and by every root take those armies down

One man among us sings vainly of his wisdom

another spins yarns about beauty and charm

but for truth in these tales and bold suppositions

let’s before them place a judge’s decision

Come with us, come to the wine cellar

if Paradise be the medicine you require

From the bottom of your dipper full of wine

spills each eternal drop of Paradise divine

Proper speech and the music of the cosmos

are what no one wants here in the city of Shiraz

Let us seek the wines of another land

where we can rise with the sun, enlightened

where we can rise with the sun, enlightened

There was a brief period when Baha Sadr and I travelled about giving readings together. I wrote short poems that I sometimes attempted to sing as a way to accompany his playing of the Persian setar, and various percussion instruments, including a rain stick. We enjoyed our experiment in the cross-pollination of cultures and, as I recall, those in attendance appeared to enjoy what we had to offer.

This photo below is of Baha circa 1988. 

Below are links to more informaiton 

This is about the great Persian poet Hafez: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hafez 

This is about the ghazal as both a cultural staple and a form of poetry: https://www.ipassio.com/blog/ghazal 

It Must Be, A Book Of Poems By John Michael Flynn

 

Conceived as a companion to the collection Elsewhere A While, the poems in It Must Be were compiled from an assemblage of notebooks started in my twenties. Sorting through them served as a way to look back at where and what I've been, who I am now, where I may be going. The title comes from  a quotation in a book about Beethoven. Translated from the German, it's a phrase he expressed, allegedly with exasperation, while working at his piano on one of his symphonies.

Muss es sein? Es muss sein! 

Must it be? It must be!

Ludwig Van Beethoven

You can order this title as an E-book or as a paperback. Find it here at Overdrive: https://www.overdrive.com/publishers/flight-delay-books

Or at Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/it-must-be-john-michael-flynn/1145041103?ean=2940179633884

The book is presented in four parts, one for each season of the year, each with approximately the same amount of poems.

Table Of Contents

I.

Someone Has Walked Again

A Round Theme Cages The Air

Mind The Gnomes

Please Don’t Park On My Ankles

A Toast To Toast

Expect And Fall

History Will Assist

My Jefferson Dreams

Refuge On The Highway

Baroque Aspirations

II.

Time-Ravaged Face

In Response To The Narrative

Whatever This Importance

Fine Air

Sky Greens

Forgot The Password

The Anteater

Tweet Monger

Have To Call In Sick

Long Drive 

Six-Fingered Glove

Election Year Anxiety

Possible Solutions

Abandoned Dreams

Inadmissible Evidence

Speaking As One Of A Couple

Fetching And Eccentric

III.

What Am I Missing?

Bog Standard

Virtue Common As Dirt

Irritable

First Day Of School

Brutal Compassion

Enough With Grime And Ridicule

Arid

The Sideman

Self-Deception

Not Born As Stone

Conviction

Fob On A Chain

Sick To Death Of The Race Hustle

Get Famous Inside Their Heads, Kid

Essential Needs

Faulty Spindle

Gutted

IV.

Only Rust Gives A Damn About Spengler

Elegy For John Woods

For Signore Primo

Such A Joust To Define Any Language

Three Questions

Judee Kutter Riot Grrrl

Fearless And Indestructible

Newly Wed

The Carmen Miranda Copacabana Banana

Perduto Significato

Keys

Psychoacoustic Reinvention

To My Angel This I Offer

Night Sweats And Death Mothers

Here's an example. 

Time-Ravaged Face

Beautiful because it speaks the truth.

And truth always reveals pain. 

It does not shame us.

I love a knife only if it will kill me.

I listen to neighbors whine about schedules. 

I understand their grief and urgency. 

When you’re in debt, the time is always now.

And we are all in debt.

Ruminations Over Iron City Beers, A Book Of Poems by John Michael Flynn

 

The poems in Ruminations Over Iron City Beers are dedicated to two dear friends, Mary Tomasso, and David Ely, both of whom are natives of Pittsburgh, home to Iron City Beer. The three of us, at different times over the past few decades, have spent more than a minute in various ruminations. 

Loyal to the spirit of those times, that commiseration and friendship, and as a way to honor them, I put together this collection of poems, many of which have been pubished in a variety of small magazines.

This book is available as a paperback or as an E-book. You can find it on Amazon or here at Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ruminations-over-iron-city-beers-john-michael-flynn/1144166832

Or at Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/ruminations-over-iron-city-beers/id6468666258

I shot the photo on the cover on a rooftop in Manhattan back in 2009. It was part of a larger art installation and this particular piece, Figures Walking, was created by the late Polish sculptor and fiber artist, Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz Kosmowska. 

Here is a sample poem from the book:

Lawns Mirror Rendered Sky Frescos 

Inside the green uranium glass of a suburb
though not optimistic 
about another set of volcanic possibilities

I sell myself to eternity 
while panting on pause
amidst identically mannered houses.

Stay open, allow shows of gratitude and piety. 
Row your skiff through the diurnal 
try to be better.

I resume jogging off the foam sweating down my calves,
shampoo’s lemony scent coming on 
released from my hair like it's an old opened purse. 

Having slaughtered many an ambition
arrangement and afterglow
I have come to realize there is no lawful one moment.

There are statements. Glimpses into epiphanies.
I must continue.
I will do so.

Five words in my head know me
only too well: 
Perhaps today will be different. 

Second Nature, Third Eye, Fifth Wheel, A Book Of Poems By John Michael Flynn

These poems are anchored in what Seamus Heaney described as poetry's need for a "sense of moving on, crossing something...into the dark...towards a destination and a transition."

The book is available as a paperback, or an E-book. You can find it on Amazon or here at Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/second-nature-third-eye-fifth-wheel-john-michael-flynn/1143203843?ean=2940167110809

At OverDrive: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9786786/second-nature-third-eye-fifth-wheel

or at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1377792

Table Of Contents

 

Second Nature

 

Love Is A Ballad, A Quartet

Responsorial Speech

Insert Big Mind Here

One Breath Enough

Ashore

Analogous To Amnesia

This Life As Mural

Time Feasts On Each Lonely Believer

Metro Retro

Itchy

Terrain Tour

Risk Mined

What To Do For Children

Sybarite

Shut Up Or Own It

Seek Ye Neither Culprits Nor Blame

Every Hazard Every Step

 

Third Eye

 

Wind Hawk Theatre Dream

On A Saturday Morning In The Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Six Reflections From A New York System Diner In The Rain At 3:30 A.M.

An Asseveration

Rehab

Tree Strength

Pain Is Not A French Word For Bread

Never Too Old To Play Simon Says

When The Neighborhood Stoop Was All

This Be Surrealism

Northwestern Air

Three Reflections On Bullying

In Near Sleep

In A Highway 7-11 West Of Ashtabula

For Mags

In Support Of Just Causes

Importunate Options

Regarding Words That Never Needed To Be Spoken

What I Won’t Bury In A Time Capsule

Ritual Virginia

What I Imagine As Colors

A Palliative Dynamic

At Truman Reservoir

Etching My Initials Into A Fencepost

Optics Versus Delusions

 

Fifth Wheel

 

Occasionally Complete Strangers Sending Flowers

If I Could Weep Beyond Rims Of Earth Dream

Girls, Girls, Girls

Again Nightmares Of Falling

Two Left Feet Or A Determined Woman Finds Her Way

Little Sister Is Now A Mom

I Find No Faults In The One I Love

Some Never Get Too Old For Each Other

Regrets In Grueling Times Need Rain

Obit Sent By A Friend

Annihilation, Reinvention

Roddy In Speaker’s Corner, 1980

Chill Silver Of London, 2004

Two For Dad From Adolescent Years

Connect Please I’ll Wait

This is a sample from the collection.

 Love Is A Ballad, A Quartet

 

                                                                          Eternals beheld his vast forests

                                                                          Age on ages he lay, clos’d, unknown.

                                                                                        William Blake

1.

 

Cut and paste here your fang

scars as I spin tales

about forgiveness defining

sanctimonious responsibilities.

 

You have me sawed-off, out of it

chewing soul because I can’t find magic

during each planned rendezvous

with a naked midnight.

 

Addled in the rinse of moonlight

I turn now to silver melting over grass

a town common, memories of legs

in your smile, each heroically elegiac.

 

2.

 

You coaxed me forward

into the undertow, our past.

 

Take them now these hard, coiling voices

set them free as angelic waves

so I’ll know again downward spirals

each fathom that once held us together.

 

I cannot stand myself any longer

recalling acts of violence I submitted to

and in response how I inflicted pain

to broker repentance.

 

Here on this beach remains of us wash up

shaped like a series of elasticized hooks

tied to ropes eroding in the shadows

a storm having thrashed our bones.

 

Witness me negotiating infinity’s edge

and please trust I won’t ever forget.

 

3.

 

While showing peach trees how to tremble in the rain

I follow urges to shape shawls of jackal light left neglected.

Patrolling truant impulses, I season my nights with blood petals.

 

If only I’d been more – I can’t imagine living now

without this hunger for you, for a common language.

What I accept is that beauty remains a sublime intelligence.

 

4.

 

Pawning the chipped hands of God Fortune

quoting ourselves as portrayed in a Netflix doc

about American ignorance we sing,

“If it’s not one springtime, it’s your mother.”

 

Inscrutable restorations. Perishable resolve.

Caviling degrees of incivility.

We watch tomorrow arrive

in the guise of dystopian genius.

 

Tension among ghosts, a lower-case epiphany

along avenues where garmentos fabricate

responses to our hand-blown glass threads.

A holding on? If so, how to respond?

 

Our fingers become a loom stitching

interstices into elegance.

We’re oafish in response.

The runs, the turns, the compensations.

Anglepoised With Aura, A Book Of Poems By John Michael Flynn

 

These prose poems wander to places both ancient and new. It's available in paperback or as an E-book. 

Find it on Amazon or find it here at Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/anglepoised-with-aura-john-michael-flynn/1143304858?ean=2940166883957

At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1373856

or at OverDrive: https://www.overdrive.com/media/9760900/anglepoised-with-aura

Unheard Scream, John Flynn's First Chapbook Of Poems

This first chapbook I ever published came out in 2003. Good luck finding a paper copy. I searched a long time before digging up this example to scan its cover image. I believe 50 copies were printed. In those days at readings, I often gave the little chap away. I was happy to do so.

Here's one from the collection that would later be accepted for publication in Interpoezia.  

authentick

 

in an aggressive urge to disappear

into mundane prosperity

your town now looks like all the other towns

and on thanksgiving day you drive your niece

to find deer along the old back roads

only to learn the fields of corn are now lawns

and the deer, like the lawn jockeys, are ceramic

 

what startles is your disappointment

you are gloomy and silent

in front of your innocent niece

and later as you watch your family sleep

away the excessive holiday meal

you suspect you’re not alone

doubting the audacity of change

Westbound Freight, A Pudding House Chapbook Of Poems By John Flynn

Westbound Freight, is the second chapbook that the late Jennifer Bosveld published at Pudding House out of Columbus, Ohio. The poems are linked as a journey through the Sierras and the central valley and mountain lands of rural California. In those days I didn't use my full name, or a pen name, but of course I was a much different person then.

A thank you to Melissa Guillet https://peoplepill.com/people/melissa-guillet/ for providing the artwork for the cover. 

I had the pleasure of sharing a public stage with Melissa, reading at the visitor's center at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, made famous by Henry David Thoreau.

Melissa's reading that day was incredible. An elegant poet and visual artist, as well as a teacher, and publisher of Sacred Fools Press, she was a very difficult act to follow. https://wiki-gateway.eudic.net/wikipedia_en/Melissa_Guillet.html

To finish, here is a sample from the collection.

Milk Tower At Pixley

 

Plank-built tap

barrel-round like Granny’s washtub

this communal breast

once inspired

market veal of doodingus days,

speculators in cravats

swearing passion

 is the oasis

blueprints will save us

manifest destiny

drives shadows.

Hinged

as we are to the unseen

sing the fences

of a wooden need

bibles that won’t fade

red rail sutures, fables

 in road dust fans.

Ashen monks

these almond tress

                        shade a ranch house on wheels

steel ladder of tower frozen mid-collapse

the clogged spout this town has become

                    boxcar coke fumes and pools of oil leakage

loner with a red bandanna toughing it out

barley-fertile air.

 

Wave And Metronome, A Pudding House Chapbook Of Poems By John Flynn

 

This was the third chapbook of poems I was fortunate to have published by Jennifer Bosveld at Pudding House, founded and based formerly in Columbus, Ohio. 

Here below is the Acknowledgments page, and a sample from the collection. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 “Thaw At Lake Quinsigamond” appeared in Vox Poetica.

“We Listened To The Baghdad Five-Day” appeared in Rive Gauche.

“Stylishly Exacting Executions Done Of Olden Times In Collaboration With Ye Of Faith”, “Color, Dolor, Urbane”, “Among Branches”, and “Emerald Moves Along The Blackstone” appeared in Sahara.

 “Of Grouse And Crow And Wild Turkey” appeared in Mothwing Arts.

 “Authentic” appeared in Interpoezia.

 “Rattling Into Compromise” appeared in Rockhurst Review.

“Mulcahey’s Pub Under The Merit Sigh”, and “What I Knows Best Is The Kenmore Dinah At 3:30 A.M.”, appeared in Street Sighns: An Anthology.

“In Praise Of Boston Aunts” appeared in Ibbetson Street Press.

“Sea Dog On A Backyard Bender” appeared in I-70 Review.

 “Average Leo, The River, And A Doughnut” appeared in PoetsUSA.

 “Rumors Of Blues” appeared in the Providence Journal.

 “Dink Pascuali Answers All Concerns Regarding The Rat Race Question” appeared in The Issue.

Here's one sample.

Stylishly Exacting Executions Done Of Olden Times In Collaboration With Ye Of Faith

                 10^th Ave. rooftop Chelsea, Manhattan, 9/25/01

          one gull

cataleptic and suspicious

wheels away to spear a puzzled mackerel

near the surface

                         *

knitting shadows linked become waves hissing

             dazed in the rain a gardener turns dried beetles in black loam

                         ants drag a spider across a thorn

                         *

our eyes keep the boat silent

            we allow each other

                        a fingertip of width

and when we get too close

            our eyes gauge

                        the line

                        where spontaneity

                                    meets lassitude

                         *

nowhere in America has Sister Helena found excess piety

she uses the feet of Christ to explain

this modern curse, this lack of moral conscience

manipulative when drive to extremes

always there like a leper by the door

    

the children listen and hug her legs in the schoolyard