morphrog 31, with poetry and prose by twenty new and established writers and photographs by Peter Stewart, is now live at www.morphrog.com
morphrog, now in its 16th year, originally focussed on ‘poetry in the extreme’ but has recently expanded its field of interest to include translations, short prose fiction, photographs and other visual images, narratives of reminiscence, dream and memory, and other creative media. morphrog is a bi-annual publication, appearing in July and January.
Here is a taste of the latest edition:
James Piatt
All The Lonely People
Harvard University researchers…
discovered that loneliness is as
deadly as smoking. (8/24/2016)
And 51% of adults worldwide feel lonely
Meta-Gallup Survey (10/24/2023)
All the lonely people, with
forlorn memories screaming
inside their minds filled with
an unquenchable sadness,
stagger against the
turbulent winds that blow
the bitterness of today’s
images of misery into their
lives.
Dark images awakened by
voices of shadow people,
cause their torn emotions of
despair to fall into the
turbulence of a melancholy
absurdity.
As hopelessness soars in the
sky’s vastness, all the lonely
people try to stifle the
darkness of the smoldering
shadows laced with cold
contradictions. Their gloom
filled minds resist the
soothing symphony of
fiddling crickets playing in
the ebony hours of the
night.
An old man senses pulses of
darkness trapped inside
dust and old memories,
soaring in the coarseness of
merciless time.
He wanders aimlessly during
the empty hours of the
night’s savage time, trying
to escape the metallic air
embedded with invisible nails
being hammered into his
rusted memories. Like all
the other lonely
people, he senses, his
memories are knifing their
way into anguish.
His happy times are
unraveling threads of
reality, and he finds his
sliver of memories, like
shreds of bleached bones,
are staggering over illusions
veiled in a painful and
dismal unreality.
Like all the lonely people,
his memories are emerging
with the sharp bitterness of
lingering tears, and his
mind, like theirs, is walking
through whispers of fear
puncturing his sad thoughts
with world sorrows.
James Piatt is a nonagenarian poet and novelist. He lives in California in a replica 1900s eastern farmhouse with his wife Sandy, and dog Scout.