Maggs Vibo (aka Margaret Viboolsittiseri) a visual poet/artist who has had several art & poetry pieces included in Fevers of the Mind online & in print anthologies. Maggs also designed the Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview series logo, and the photo which is the cover art to my book “The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers” is from a photo that Maggs photographed.
Maggs is a veteran and recently had attended The Library of Congress Artist Showcase event (at the Thomas Jefferson building)as part of a group exhibition for artist. Her work with Fevers of the Mind and other poetry journals was included as a teaching aid at the Library. Here are some photos from this event and a podcast with Maggs “Leave No Veteran Behind”
Margaret Viboolsittiseri (aka Maggs Vibo) works in print, broadcast, special events, glitch media, and online. She is a contributor for Poem Atlas and has experimental art in the winnow magazine, Coven Poetry, Ice Floe Press, The Babel Tower Notice Board, ang(st), The Wombwell Rainbow. Recent anthologies include Poem Atlas ‘aww-struck’, Steel Incisors, Fevers of the Mind Press Presents the Poets of 2020 (January, 2021) and ‘My teeth don’t chew on shrapnel’: an anthology of poetry by military veterans (Oxford Brookes, 2020). She tweets @maggsvibo and her website is https://www.maggsvibo.com/
All American boys_meditation on memory_for Jerry Waldon
I watch it waving daily in the Ohio River Valley breeze
Across the street, at the confederate blue grey cinder
Block building, a tire shop
It protrudes out off the building on a rusted pole
Every roll of its cloth in the wind
The red white & blue
Of my childhood days of always being the
Miniature shadow of a veteran
Those days of growing when my mind was a better
Sponge
Soaking up the wisdom & knowledge
Of silence, war, and all American boys
Who traded their Pittsburgh pirate dreams
For an m1 & orders
A life time ago, his and mine too
Always bound by the road, mark twain
& hank sr, beer & Indiana nights
Bound by blood, by memories long gone
Lonesome blues lifetimes of mad
Knowledge DNA mingling with chemicals
Altered through war, readjustment to
Society; & a lingering ghost of youth
Digging out the skulls of mans gods
All American boy days, red white and blue
Covered in napalm & agent orange
Hony tonking, living fast busting loose
Madison Indiana out to the world
I remember going with him for tournaments
All over Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky
Any time he gave me money & I ate without him to save
My money I would leave the waitresses a poem
Just a teen & already scribing the road between
the seen & unseen
Its waving to the east, jutting out from the wall
Across west main st, looking out my window
Its' rolling form red white 7 BLUE
SOUTHERN INDIANA WIND BLOWS THROUGH ME
NOW
AS ROKY ERICKSON SINGS A DIRGE TO SWEET DREAM
& GRAND CHILDREN CONVERSE OVER A TABLET
I HEAR THE VOICE OF AMERICA
THE VOICE OF MY FATHER
ECHOING THROUGH THE YELLOWING
& RED LEAVES
I HEAR THE VOICE OF FREEDOM
AT THE EDGE OF THE OHIO
RUSHING DOWN TOWARDS THE MISSISSIPI
Oct. 13, 2020
The cool October day, sunny, hushed traffic busying by
Mind funk locked trunk cant look through dream junk
Hushed echoes of Ben Johnson, ancient Skalds,
Or Bards; the dreaming oracles of eternity
Grandchildren's brief voices in the kitchen
All adults off guard; they seek the sustenance
Of refrigerated cheese & play
My skin goose pimpled, I recite the constitution
I claim it As my balls to contemplate the age & sing
Madly the temporal odes of the decayed body
Of liberty
Its' ink made from the blood of millions
Its paper recycled broken treaties
All the roads lead where?
I laugh to myself, knowing the only quote
Like that says Rome.
I digress towards prosody now;
The hustling life of Scott county like back-
Ground music
The cool October day, sunny, hushed traffic busying by
Mind funk locked trunk cant look through dream junk
A POEM for A.C.M.
I dream of a belly dancer in a yellow sun dress, cheeks red
And full of the motion of bodies
Her twirling blond form, singing some kind of dirge
To invisible crows
Her skin glowing of a mid western sun
Eyes like orbiting satellites transmitting
the ecstatic hope of mothers & lovers
Everywhere
Voices in the dark, sje spins
Whispering her songs
To a lost star
POEM
Peeled back scars like gorilla tape revealing
The seeping of stars
Rushing water sounds
Polished stones of eternity
Madison-Milton bridge
The once Charlestown bridge
The Louisville bridges---
The sound of the furious water
Like static or white noise from a billion televisions
Glaciated currents of my childhood nightmares
& dreams
The mad coddling of the geo magnetic songs
Of the Ohio river valleys
Ectoplasmic oracles of genetic history
A mirror of madness & culture
The looking glass of mid Americas
Addiction to visual waves from
A flashing screen 6 feet from them
As they drowse in to pillows
Of LED light
Muddy waters, willows, spiral notebooks
& decades of revolution
Around the sun
The rushing water sounds
Good beautiful river vibrations of diadem
Perceptions
Eyelids itch with the blood of gods
Adventure time my whole life, woods
Hugging the Ohio River like a warm lady
Echoing the secrets of memory
The baptismal of mind labyrinths
Traced out in bones & history
POEM #2 (BUTTERFLIES)
Listening to the slowly fading out screams
Of butterflies
The machine gun beats of drums as fast
As artillery spewing forth
The music clings to ribs
To memory the soft parade files
Along
The stirring of something unseen
& powerful
Fingering the senses
I watch the vibrational ripples of air
Twirl like some kind of dervish
From the 13th century
Or like monks drunk on wine
Dancing through streets
As if the mad infinitesimal energy
Of our own divinities
Clasped tight to hand
Dragging our vision through
Town
“you got to meet you a few
Animals at the crossroads”
Their filming the scuffling figures
Scuddling down the sidewalk
At dawn
Following them to the ledge
High above them
In the brownstone next
To the liquor store
Their vibrations sing with the sun rise
The last poems of a drunken poet
Crying on the shoulder of his muse
Waiting for the unseen
To pull them from the ledge
The image is not new
The holy renaissance of senses
& star c(h)ords
The music lingers
Sinew, piss, and rivers
Undiluted spirit of youth clamors
“everything must be this way”
Cyclical waves of never ending
Impermanence
Ever see the lips of an ancient bard
Chapped & surrounded by hair
Weeping 3 stories in to the night
Calling to the dogs or the gods
Looking for the lack of gravity
“Tropic corridor
Tropic treasure
What brought this far to this mild equator”
Looking for something new
Like wine growing from the decomposing
Bodies of Aristophanes
& Jim Morrison
Listening to the slowly fading out screams
Of butterflies
POEM _ Meditation
i was thinking of a uniform
Uniforms. how skin could be
A uniform.
Thoughts like an invisibility cloak
Wearing it like being consumed
In napalm
Strange idols burning with blue flame
Lounge chair made of razor wire &
Mortar shells
History's caustic finger nail scratch
Across the bardic swirl
This quarantined year lazily slouching by
Looking for the absolution of freedom
All the cyclical lips & their gutter odes
Pouring from great speaker
With a milky way subwoofer
Permeating the rhythmic turbulences
Through the living
Organic microphones
The laughter of clowns & muses
Til their hips cant gyrate any further
Or their livers stand the test
Of the ambrosial significance
Of love
The slow embers of flesh in the throws
Of passion & mortality
The melting of beings in to singular
Forms
The tongues of unity flashing
Beyond becoming
Uniformed bodies of oneness
Uniforms of the living
Appearance
Like individual flags or
Syllables
Or bio waves of invisible
Waves that form whispering
Bodies like static through
Consciousness
In to images we seek our selves
Unrelatable to stars til we
Take off the uniforms of our lives
&
Float on
portrait by Ryan Heacock
Merritt Waldon. Born September 12, 1974 Madison, Indiana just few blocks from the Ohio river.
Born and raised by U.S. Air Force veteran of Viet Nam and his best friends sister. Merritt was almost named Stroh’s Waldon; after his dads favorite cheap beer after rotating back to world. As long as he has been able to hold a writing/drawing utensil he has dreamed of being a published writer. spending a lot of his late teens & early twenties traveling the united states & writing constantly, eventually returning to Indiana marrying having children divorcing marrying etc divorcing; still writing living . Has had work in Sun Poetic Times, Mojo Risin’, Beyond The Pale, One Hit, RoaDDawgz a magazine for the voice of the homeless ( under the pen name Ru mi), Smalltown Monthly, Crisis Chronicles, Cheap and Eazy Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Twizted Tungz, Fearless, Voices From The Fire, Bedroom Anatomy Lessons, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Black Shamrock, River Dog Magazine #1, Fevers of the Mind, Be About It #18, Americans & Others anthology, A Cooch Behar American poetry Anthology, Strange Gods From The Prairie: A Gasconade Review Anthology, The Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts: OMNIBUS vol 1., and Cajun Mutt Press Features. He has three books of poetry published; Oracles From A Strange Fire co-authored by National Beat Poet Laureate Ron Whitehead published by Cajun Mutt Press, then Pistol City Blues & Madison Street Screams and Smoke Break Poems published by Dead Man's Press Ink. 47, he lives and writes in Austin, Indiana.
https://tinyurl.com/ne6m3j73
Because if we experience loss what is there to gain?
Sure the magnitude of each occurrence
Quakes you to your earth’s core
Breaking the Richter scale of our sanity
We are left with memories
Feelings, emotions
A chain of events tying together how
Light can travel through the darkness
As in reality, we are left to wonder
We are all traveling through a book of blank pages
Writing line by line
Of a story that we hope to published in the archives of the sands of time
And hope that it doesn’t succumb to quicksand
We are in the seventh month of this year
Of this decade
That continues to remind me of how precious life is
I could care less about anything that doesn’t
Attribute to peace, prosperity
And the pursuit of happiness
Aligning myself more and more
As these losses we experience will continue to occur
Its inevitable
I dedicate this piece to each and everyone of you
That has experienced a loss of any magnitude
There no words to describe this feeling
This grief
This emotion
All I can say is to be strong
Reflect on the good
And as unbearable as it will be
Your life will continue
Be strong for them
I just know that they’ll be in my heart
On my mind
Right on time
All the time
“Loss (In My Heart, On My Mind)”
It’s been a rough couple days not going to lie. On Friday, one of my very first friends I made as a kid passed away at such a young age. Grade school to HS. Finding the words to say is not even an ounce of how I feel. #RIP Lucille.#spokenwordpic.twitter.com/4sN00lpxtM