August 29 – September 4, 2016: Poetry from M.J. Mellor and John Schulte

​M.J. Mellor and John Schulte

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​M.J. Mellor
m.j.mellor@hotmail.com

Bio (auto)

M.J. Mellor is a writer and poet who lives in London. His upbringing in Mid-Wales and struggles with his mental health influence much of his work, as does his quest to feed and fill an open mind. He writes to understand the human condition and to make sense of his own. He is currently working on his first collection of poetry and his first novel.

The following work is Copyright © 2016, and owned by ​M.J. Mellor and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Sonder

Thursday morning, 9.20am.
Hectares of cars –
metal in motion.
Streets lined with shoes.
Faces,
bodies,
all somewhere,
all something.
Roads meet, roads lead
we’ll never take.
Always somewhere,
always something.
Every sole glued to the earth,
all moving, knowing, being, doing.
Yet all nothing, all nowhere,
all no one to me and I will
always be no one.

 

 



John Schulte
johnschulte@me.com

Bio (auto)

John Schulte is a San Juan Capistrano, California writer and developer of animation, toys, books, and entertainment properties. He served on the development team for the wildly popular, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He studied poetry at the University of Oklahoma during the visiting professorships of Pulitzer Prize winner Maya Angelou and celebrated East Indian poet, Shiv K. Kumar. He is the author of the poetry collection Blue Muse Rising: Poetic Dust That Connects US. He also studied film writing with his Czech mentor, Arnost Lustig. Schulte co-wrote and co-produced a pilot for Garry Marshall, called Four Stars. He co-produced a teenage novel series with his brother, called Time Capsule Murders. Schulte also edited books by Edgar Award-winning authoress, Barbara Brooks Wallace. He is a member of the Authors Guild and a member of the Academy of American Poets. His poetic work has appeared in sundry anthologies, literary journals, and magazines. Visit John on the web here.

The following work is Copyright © 2016, and owned by John Schulte and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.


He was a Lenin Grad

In the Shostakovich of my mind
drab grey factory stacks
spew green mercury
into young lung sacs
while the red flag unfurls the star
reigning atop the hammer and sickle
revolting against the tsar

Grotesque Mahlerian marches
chromatically kicking against the Great Purge
surge into harmonies cacophonous
coarse contrapuntal chords
billow and bellow brazenly to stifle the venom
mocking hymns of victory play counterpoint
to a myriad of celluloid chintz and banality
bombastically blasting forth to over-score action

In the Shostakovich of my mind
a frustrating frenzy of fiery fretting
and soaring strenuous strains of duress
are caressed by tremulous timpani
as tumultuous storms parade
into the Kremlin — the Soviet cerebellum
the Shostakovich of my mind
where there is no rest in disingenuous triumph

The triumvirate of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt
could not cease the siege upon spirits
until finally a concert swelled out encircling the city,
bloated like starving bellies kept alive by boiled belts
once around their waists, now waifish and weathered
a ragtag band of performers, a skeleton orchestra
playing a calamitous composition of culture and courage
brash Brucknerian brassy and boisterous
a tumultuous testimony of terror
an inquisition for blood
an invasion of slow and ruthless torture
blaring from the bassoons
crying from the clarinets
singing from the strings
dying from the drums
a psychological Squall as shells shot
skyward then downward bombarding back the enemy
premature Nazis champagne-toasted at the Astoria
900 days ended with half a million burials
as six notes descended to resurrect a city’s soul

 



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