E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Inaugural Occasional Poem: The White House Casting Couch Is Visited By Zeus as Golden Rain BY THE AMERICAN POET AND SATIRIST ERIC SIGLER   I   I thought I saw a smoke screen or a cloud descend through spears that rallied at the sky, and railed against the theme - four years beneath a shroud- until I woke to see that, in my eye, I could not emancipate the dream  from shackles chained to starlight - a strident stalker wading through the night, an endless specter searching for a theme....   II   But then I saw sun's gilded feet retreat -  high-heeled hopes broken by the darkness, love that lies alone on mirrored splinters, shattered by the monuments of defeat, that thrust into the eyes the vile success  of tyrants who elect to be successors - their statutory statutes on the plaques - marble mountains moved on others' backs - destroyers in the mantles of the victors......

On A Prodigious Philanthropist’s Ghastly Second Death   after Bernie Taupin Goodbye your shiny tracksuits, though I never saw one unzipped. They had the grace to hide your bits; while those around you fawned; made you Knight Bachelor - for charitable services. Then had your granite headstone goodness gracious dismantled and sent to landfill near Skipton. And it seems to me you lived your life as it happens giving love to children, you picked up in various hospitals, in the back of your silver Rolls Royce. Never knowing when Mary Whitehouse might give you an award for services to family friendly TV, and you’d be forced to wind the window down to accept it. And I would have liked to know you but I was just a kid. Your cigar burnt out long before I ever got to smoke it. Their jealousy towards you odious. Not everyone can be a crony of both Margaret Thatcher and Cardinal Basil Hume. The University of Leeds gave you how’...

Ben Mazer is always an Eyewear favourite and here the Boston poet of flamboyant brilliance offers us a new poem: Orphans The splintered gutter’s cool refreshing pools of mud’s perspective shatter shadowed noon, having rejected all philosophy, its one objective downward to the sea; the poet’s pants in tatters, and a flower in bramble coat of mould, deflect who see in crossing, but the radiant queen bestows her museship on the violent seer; these orphans drink their vodka and they gleam to be descending further than the fold, past every trinket of the common household, where tufts of marigolds gleam in the wind, that signify the sea; quick steps rescind the future and the present, but the past, at last familiar, asserts its precedence where clotted loss builds out of a mixed tense, the secret intimacy orphans clasp to one another, to propagate a myth. There’s no way back from what they carry with. new poem by Ben Mazer; copyright 2013....

Rough for Lou (in 3:2 time) i.m. Lou Reed     I It’s good that you didn’t make us wait, Like you had to, for your man. We awaited our storm in trickled streets. We waited on Sunday morning’s time-dazed stare, Unaware that our Freeport baby was gone – The end of his gig, his very last song. Stiletto Venus in her pink Leather hair now ministers to you where You paint the Lower East Side again, While we curve blindly backwards, Tattooed to the wheels Of the ‘A’ train on its final bend. You stood your ground against the heat Trying to bust you, the shrink Morons blowing your bulbs with ECT And the rock n’ roll stations That banned you. White light, dark beat, They failed to piss your mind. II Now your electric guitar plays on From screech taut steel fire To the sweet velvet of your voice, Plangent, wrapped in vellum. Some kinds of love Are like that – seamless. You bloomed suddenly from the Bizarre To the T...

Eyewear is very glad to publish online a new poem by our sometime music critic, Lydia Bowden ; the poem's youthful amourous theme very much suits the summer as it sort of develops, here, in London, from overcast and muggy to some sun poking through.  Bowden eating Boyfriends Girlfriends Aaron turned me into gold and Tom made me look tall but double in height was the other Tom. Nick wrote the best love letters, was more of a fling than any real thing like Daniella and I, I wonder where she went to, until I fell for Adam, lasting all of nine hand-holding, no-kissing months until it all ended with a run from a crowded room. The feelings reappeared for Alice, so I jumped into the bear arms of Will, well, that’s the end of that story. Liam ignited a fire inside of my tight fitting vest tops where video games loomed in a dark room, like a grave, so across the stree...