Alien Buddha Press Celebrates Pride Month 2022 with poetry, fiction, and art from some of our LGBTQ+ authors

Alien Buddha Press

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A Yuletide Carol by Chris Courtney Martin

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The “pagan-demonic” mishegoss is OLD HAT!
Older than that white man with white hair
And even whiter politics around home security
And guest etiquette

It’s cold enough
Or not cold enough
Depending on which coast happens to be depressing you
Around the time the Salvation Army starts
Ringing those DAMNED BELLS
Pleading that we feed the poor and hate the gays

Metallic sounds, metallic-paper-covered boxes
It’s abrasive enough
Or not abrasive enough
Depending on how long it’s been since your
Problematic Auntie™ cracked into the Kraken
And how ready you have been to
Peace-On-Earth OUT of this shitshow

Doesn’t lying on Christ’s (belated) birthday feel even a little bit shameful?
Anybody?
Especially to children who are confused enough by pre-roadkill Frank the Rabbit on His
Happy UnDeath Day

Yes.
I am EXACTLY this fun at parties.
And at church.

So, while you ALL-CAPS

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SPOTLIGHT: “A Heavenly Way To Die” by Louise M Hart from the book “A Pocketful of Weird”

My short story from my latest book, A Pocketful of Weird published by Alien Buddha Press.

Alien Buddha Press

amazon.com/dp/B09JBRQVHQ

A Heavenly Way to Die

On a warm summer night my lover, Gabriel and I walked towards the bus stop. I moved with ease, lost in the pleasantries of an evening, where I had felt whole and at one with a consciousness that frequently threatened to cut me into small pieces, like a sharp pair of scissors. Then, I remembered that it was 11.10 and the journey home would take another hour.

A long, lingering hour spent alone with my desultory mind. Dread entered my head and landed in my stomach. In the wake of a micro-second, I transformed from happy-go-lucky lover into a fucked-up, should be imprisoned in a lock-up hater of all humankind. I screamed but my mouth emitted only smoke from the cigarette that perched between my lips.

It had been a joyful evening, beer and lingering kisses characterised it. But now it was time to…

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Mary-Jane?

What became of Mary-Jane?

She took drugs to ease the pain

But it wasn’t the drugs

That damaged her brain

It was life

That drove her insane

BY

Louise M Hart

Performance Anxiety

By

Louise M. Hart

It’s the not knowing that does me in

Should I let the head shrinkers work on my symptoms

or uncover my original sin?

Like a spider clinging to the bottom of a web

will I secure my fall

or climb up until I am 6 feet tall?

Hanging with the other arachnoids and tall men

who look down their legs at the littleun

projecting a too, too solid pain in the arse

Of a middle name

The use of the initial M

elevates me above all common women

and men

Caught in the moment

between now and then and then and now

when each breath signifies silence’s

mass history of sublimated violence

and a handshake a final bow

I am too far up to let myself die

Aloof from the crowd

like the poet sitting at the back of the room

wearing a silly hat and a perpetual frown

My spidery web breaks

and I fall to the ground

My suffering finally ends

I think I think

Therefore I am

not

I think I’m not

In Two Minds (Schizophrenia)

Knots of thought

Strike and bite like teeth

My beleaguered psyche

Tearing it in two

Two voices for every thought

Two thoughts for every voice

Like shredded strands

They fray at the edges

With me

Psychically, in the middle

Adrift on waves of suffering

A piggy in a middle boat

Without an oar

A bore paddling

Towards shifting sands

I stammer along

For I am distresses daughter

I never rest

But am nevertheless

True to my selves

Feelings fall

Like cripples

In a nameless street

Of no affect or interest

Then a ripple of knowledge

Arises

And I realise why

I read R. D. Laing at college

By

Louise M. Hart

Coventry Blood, Brummy Heart

Coventry blood, Brummy heart
You have made me
There is no one on earth who can save me
And no State machine will enslave me

The train brought me here
Poetry and beer
Made me freer
Birmingham you are as queer
As the poem I once wrote

About all the girls I have never loved

Before…

When I was a childe
I walked as a childe
(Harold died for Maude
I live to die)
Around the City Centre
The bright lights called me

The shops, the shops, the shops
Enticed me through their doors
Adorning fleshy architecture
I tried not to bore
With my prosaic presence
Brummy women and men
Who were so much prettier
Their conversation far wittier
Than her indoors, aka, Cov(en)tary

Coventry blood, Brummy heart
You have untamed me
But no one can persuade me
That I am amazing

So I amazed me
And read my bloody awful poetry
In pubs and cafes for free
Whilst the audiences shouted for Jasmine Gardosi

Elegy to my Mother

By

Louise M. Hart

Your body betrays you

It is a ghost of its former self

A crumpled hand

Caresses a toiled brow

 

Not long now

Not long now

 

But, you are a warrior

The bearer of two

You have watched men

Come and go

 

Infants and oafs, in skin

Thinner than the curve of your lips

Narrower and shallower lives

Than the hips that bore me well

 

Mother, I love you so

 

I am joyous in your presence

I laugh and cry in equal measures

In bursts of simultaneous ebbs and flows of emotion

That sooth and reveal how I feel about you

 

You fill my days with thoughts

Rich and deep

Invade my dreams

Whilst in the froes of sleep

 

Mother, you made me

So, now, I shall make you

Immortal

In words that rhyme eternal, wondrous and true

 

Everyone is Psychotic

I am the madwoman’s attic

My walls are lined with abandonment

And static

My Insides are wood and glass pain

 

Everyone is psychotic

Quixotic psychotropic drugs

Blight our lives

 

In the haze of our smoke substitutes

We choke on the ash

Of our fragrant decay

And smell of fear

And replacement nicotine milieu

 

Unclean in the rear of our heads

We rub the behinds of our scalps minds

Until they bleed plumes of rosebud red

 

The universe speaks with the voice of unreason

Sanity is so last season

But is positively appealing

To those who are psychotically unreal

And believe that existence is but a delusional idea

That we are all free to think, act

And feel

 

I am sanity’s self-lover

I masturbate undercover of logic’s single sheet of belief

 

Everyone is psychotic

Except me-

Who am too, too sane

To be real

Louise M. Hart (2017)

Big Bren gets Shaved, 8th July 2017

We watched the Big Man being shaved

My pocket containing ten pounds

And Michelle

With her illusory beard

But I bought 2 drinks, anyway

“It’s a beautiful thing,” I thought

“Sacrificing your hair for charity”

And the lamb remained in stillness

Like a 21st century Buddha

Whilst anxiety gripped me

Like a gynaecologist’s fist

From the bottom of my empty pocket

To the nicotine tips of my conscience

My Mother and I had argued, you see

Before I left home

So I fooled myself that I wasn’t all bad-

Pneuma in a cage of beer and cigarette smoke

But smiled, like Satan’s symbiotic sister

Until Patrick walked me to the bus

And my smiles became tears, I didn’t shed

For a Man

Women make better friends, they said

Nails bite like incisors into soft, warm flesh

Women are fluid

 

Then I took

A man with big hands and enormous feet

Whose hair tickles parts of me

About which my Mother didn’t tell

Fingers that sing tricky tunes of love

The bee’s sting of desire

 

I know women

But I love a man

 

I am not a traitor to my sisters’ cause

Punching my fist in the face of ideological rejection

I am the projection of

Purity

Love

Truth

Merely human

 

Louise M. Hart