The go-to place for all things on the poetic literary fringe.
Author: James D. Casey IV
James D. Casey IV is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry: Metaphorically Esoteric, Dark Days Inside the Light While Drunk on Wine, Tin Foil Hats & Hadacol Coins, Owls in Hot Rods with Pink Elephants and Dead Bats, Isomorphic, Death & Love/Love & Death, and Unwritten Words That Slide Down The Wall. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Cajun Mutt Press. James is a southern poet with roots in Louisiana & Mississippi, currently residing in Illinois with his beautiful Muse, their retarded dog, and two black cats. Mr. Casey's poetry touches on a wide range of topics including personal experiences, love, hate, religion, politics, dreams, addiction, sex, parallel dimensions, and many more. His work has been published in print and online by several literary magazines and small press venues including Triadæ Magazine, Medusa's Kitchen, The Rye Whiskey Review, Under The Bleachers, Alien Buddha Press, The Abyss, Midnight Magazine, Boozehound Reviews, Dope Fiend Daily, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Ariel Chart, Piker Press, Madness Muse Press, Runcible Spoon, Expat Press, Walking Is Still Honest(W.I.S.H.)Press, Degenerate Literature, Gathering Stories, Constellate Literary Journal, IT-International Times, Visual Verse, The Blue Nib, Pink Litter, In Between Hangovers, Indiana Voice Journal, Poetry Breakfast, Beatnik Cowboy, Dissident Voice, Scarlet Leaf Review, Horror Sleaze Trash, Mad Swirl, Zombie Logic Review, Whispers, Your One Phone Call, I am not a Silent Poet, Tuck Magazine, Terror House Magazine, Outlaw Poetry, Inquietudes Literary Journal, Duane's PoeTree, High On Poems, Synchronized Chaos, Love Booklet, The Wombwell Rainbow, Bottom Shelf Whiskey, Story Mirror, Stanzaic Stylings, Spillwords Press, The Micropoets Society, Leaves of Ink, PPP Ezine, Poetry Life & Times, Realistic Poetry International, Writing Nights Press, Eber & Wein, and several others. James spends most of his time writing, but also enjoys practicing magick, creating artwork, and cooking Cajun cuisine.
August, the tail end of summer’s flame. Just before fall brings out death’s beautiful colors and the icy winter creeps in. These next few months are my favorite time of the year. Plus, they get bonus points for being so close to Halloween.
Speaking of Halloween, I was thinking of doing a little CMP zine experiment for October. The minimum page count for KDP is 24 pages so I’d need around 30 poems. Keep it small, and around $5 or so. I was even thinking 5×8 instead of 6×9. I think that would look cool. Anyone interested can shoot an email including one short poem and bio to cajunmuttpress@gmail.com with Halloween Zine as the subject. It doesn’t HAVE to be ABOUT the holiday, just something creepy in general will do. I’d prefer if it didn’t rhyme. If I get enough submissions I’ll put something together for y’all and make a post about it with all the details later.
If you’d like to submit for a regular weekly featured writer spot, CMP is always open for submissions. Send 1-3 poems along with a bio and author photo to the same email address as above. I have one spot left to fill in October, then I’ll be reading for November.
Manuscript submissions are CLOSED but will reopen in 2022. Keep your eyes peeled for our next book release to be announced soon. In the meantime, you can grab a copy of our three 2021 releases by following the links below. I’ve also included a link to all of our available titles.
Below you’ll find this month’s kick-ass lineup. And as always, enormous thanks to the writers and readers. Without you, Cajun Mutt Press wouldn’t exist. Love y’all.
Drew Campbell is a creator from Southern California. Together with his partner he runs VLASINDA PRODUCTIONS, which produces art in multiple mediums, including short films and zines. In recent years they have developed a focus on organizing events to showcase other artists, and to help build a more connected creative community. For more information you can visit VLASINDA on Instagram @vlasinda_stormdrain and YouTube.com/vlaSINda
I met a guy in the park who claimed to have a transient anus. I said what’s that? He said I can form an anus on any part of my body, wherever I choose, whenever I want. In fact, I can form multiple anuses at once. All over. So, to be clear, I said, you don’t just have one transient anus. You have the potential for many transient anuses, depending upon your needs and desires. Correct, he said. Bullshit, I said. I’ll show you, he said. He rolled up his sleeve, and an anus appeared on his arm. He made a fist, stretched out his arm, and fertilized the flowers along the path. Oh, my god, I said. That’s nothing, he said. He bowed forward. A huge anus appeared on his forehead and took a gigantic dump on my shoe. Words failed me. He offered me a bag from a device on his belt to place the shit in, and a wet-wipe for my shoe. He wiped his forehead and told me a story. The earth, he began, has an infinite capacity to produce transient anuses. With these anuses, she spreads food and wisdom to all her creatures. Wisdom, I said. How do anuses spread wisdom? Join me, and I’ll show you, he said. Who are you? I said. I, good sir, am a priest of the Church of Transient Anuses. The Earth speaks to her children through the flatulence and defecation of ministers such as myself and you, should you choose to join me. He held out a brochure. I declined, as politely as I could. As I walked away, the man called out to me, Have a shitty day, my friend! I considered, a moment, before responding appropriately: Same to you, you walking asshole!
Damian Ward Hey has had poetry published in several places, including Poetry Pacific, Truck, and Cricket Online Review. More recently, his work has appeared in Madness Muse Press, and will appear in the upcoming anthology, Poets with Masks On. He lives on Long Island and is a professor of literature and theory at Molloy College.
So now the beat was out on the streets again Darkness hears the soul’s tears burning within Finding home wearing the sadness coat Fighting a love affair with a knife wielding holy ghost My beautiful girl is at rest, wasting away She is staring into the darkness – Of this evening’s shade The horror calls from across the halls, They were deafening, my silence proved too late So now I know, how the death bell tolls I seek revenge, I fuel myself with scorn and hate To take apart, the crooked heart Who severed my soul, magician of greed and loath? Reincarnate myself into the heroin, the addiction The power rose, the mighty lion, the sorcerer, The dictator, the cult king The need to be disillusioned The creation was to be crazy, To break apart with newly found powerful hands, That used to be so gentle. So fragile and weak, When I used to touch her cheek The morning like a celestial daydream, The haze of fog Sipped her tears, When she began to cry The dryness, Like a desert for sad brown eyes This germ will not run, cannot hide Cannot mutate, I know that I can design The perfect plan, the perfect kill Alas, I may become dirt on the way Dear God, knowing however His bones are already chilled Spirits have cried, they dry, they fly They live in my heart, for my love That was taken by the evil in a wild heart.
The Bible Belt Bachelor Prison Speech
Hello,
To all that have been captured We are breathing the same chipped paint walls, Yellow urine stained floors, pneumonia air.
The air of a criminal Locked up, prison guards whistling our death tune. Death will be coming soon.
We’re already dead in a sense. Nature is outside, designed for the free man On a warm sun-lit sand. The touch of lovers, the natural consumption of lust. In my cell asleep with the poetry – I felt when I was one with the free When I wasn’t practicing bullets Setting fire to Mother Nature and to faith. When blizzard walks exuded freedom. Through the snow chills devouring my feet With numbing, cutting skin The pain of past freedom My name is Dante Moricelli Her name was Nadine Angelis You might have read about me In your wrinkled newspapers, Slippery phlegm gazettes
The glossy excitement of a Time Magazine. The mortality sonnet depicting the surrealism in a slippery dream. Nadine Angelis was my love as the tender years began to fade. Young, careless, we were the storybook tale of the unsaved. I will tell you more about my love, If your ears are tuned to listen “Must we have a heart, we never listened before?” “Must we have ears, To be attentive to your listless self-loathing?” “Must our maniacal spirit be all and sundry To your hopeless prophecy?” “Are we peasants to your pulpit?” “You, bleeding your cold love propaganda in our troglodytic tomb” “Interrupting the carving of our minds with a fever That comes from watching roaches scurry down prison floors, Spiders climbing up our shirts, flies and decay consuming our food” “Marking x’s on our calendars with our life force fluid, The countdown to our demise: the foregone conclusion” But I am a human heartbeat I was a 5-year bachelor that fell on hard times, The loss of reasonable thinking, And a self-confessed stalker of love So, if what i’m about to tell you – Were the opening of a movie The song “Let There Be More Light” Would be resonant, magnetic to the ears Illuminating, flashing of lights from psychedelic trips of torture The horrified manic looks, As we drive erratically down a desert road. Passing cacti and breathing in dry arid air The sun setting down to a dark orange/bright red hell. The flashes of a nearly perfect capture lay –
In the trunk of a Pontiac Sunbird. The music, the music like soundwaves to our mind. We can see the sound We have become the sound We have become the light Passing by leather skinned lizards with masochistic claws, Wanting to give you one more bite in the jugular before – The eternal damnation of our soul’s ease. The serpents black flickering tongue – Spreads over the heavens With a Hallelujah Chrysalis of poisoned tears. We, looking for an escape to find peace again But, knowing the only written word of our future is that of a Eulogy. A eulogy given by family members who didn’t know us well enough to care before.
All because of espionage and jealousy. And the loss of love that wasn’t understood quickly enough. The burning of a desert, The scarring on the face of Mona Lisa The victim that lay in his own bloodletting on torn towels – and shredded t-shirts. With the rips, that remind us The struggle it was The determination in us that caused our perfect lunacy to this near perfect kill. His false hopes of spiritual happiness And wellbeing are exposed by his crooked cross on a cut chest.
Even though i’m terrified by the outcome. As sheriffs, detectives, specialists all pace faster and faster behind our car of forlorn sin.
The electricity already beginning to pop in our veins! The multiple trips are scary, long, and all indicative That we had almost masterminded the perfect crime.
So, now the collapsing rollercoaster ride has ended. The song has ended. Let me tell you how we came to this plunge into ridicule and reverie. I’m Dante Moricelli “the Bible Belt Bachelor” The name they stamped on me, I’ve lost all identity and dignity now I’m just a title, less of a man. Because I erased a man from existence Who deserved to die. He took away the root to my soul, My dear Nadine Angelis She made my heart feel, She made my blood pump And he twisted my mind into only one way of thinking, Left me with the confusion
Much like after an aneurysm The pounding, splitting shards of glass as well shakes to the wild howls of coyotes.
Releasing small increments of mania.
THE NEWS STAND SERIES: MEMORIES OF BRADLEY WESTLAKE
Intro :
Seconds are becoming minutes
Minutes become hours for most of us
However, life is one long second For a warped mind such as that of Bradley Westlake An anxious, delusional, drug induced rebellious kid His visions can be beautiful, strange, horrific, maybe
even spiritual His mind reads that of a newspaper, Or so he says So now we will enter the realm A walk, a journey into the soul of Bradley Westlake
We begin at 618 NW Murphy Street Where I’ve been told there is this News Stand.
News Stand #1 :
From the 6 A.m. Murphy Street News Stand
I read about you and that famous gun Shhh!! The secret is out. Hush Cries! Hush Cries! The Secret was a plot I need the drug, where is the drug? I need the drug, I’m a whore to the drug The secret was a blot on my life, like fingerprints For the captured, I will rust like a weak magnet And all I could hear is the rushed hush Of a police siren, a flash of a fire truck squealing A cramp in my stomach, a haemorrhage around my skull Standing on my malicious balcony with false hands Lies that brand, hair fumes with sand Runes that have cast me banned My name has become a crooked dangerous bend The ink smears on newspaper print My mind was slightly poisoned No memory of childhood baby dolls My sanity is a frenzy, not any love for many years Mescaline Hydrochloride 300 mg My mind becomes Power for the next few hours
News stand #2 :
Today we will be introduced to comets
Galaxies of aliens will kiss our skies
The universe will be magical Once again there will be the sharing of that electric shock The mirrors will become not only a reflection, a vision We will know our true selves Milky-white skinned dynamos that flood with blood That were treasured with memories and loving souls We are fuel supplied by ego That spat us out into the flies Our seeds become superstars and murderers Our visions have become doubts and galactic greed
In my hand I hold a copy of the Gazette The front page reads of Half-truths and universal mayhem We are just inches away from – the burn, scorn, torn, forlorn
That black hole emptiness Or that magical moistening and birthing of freedom
News Stand #3 :
Ok now, I’m a smooth mellow rapture I’m crushed with love, gelled in sunshine Congealed in power The newspaper headline reads: God has Escaped!
My feet have become afloat, the energy inside a jolt
My tears now remote I’m a septic bird, I smell of trash I fly as if I’m a new-born saviour Believe, believe, believe The moon has been cuffed by priests Taped their mouths and let me speak I’m speaking for once So alive, bloody eyes, my veins are the prize I’m cryptic, a paraplegic, but I Sail into mighty storms and escape the world as my thorn
Unite the allegiance I’ll dream as a coma Murphy Street will be claustrophobic
With angels and spirits tonight God has escaped!
News Stand #4:
Are we real? Not real? We are not real
We are hoods, unreal hobos
Peasants, descendants of the pathetic Suicide soldiers, phenomenal depressing mind burns We are coughing our flesh, our hair Our bones, our blood, our ectoplasm Did you read the paper today? It said the boy is invisible
News Stand #5 :
Then it became vulgar The girls that shook with energy, the clitoris like a windmill Boys that held within a bruising release Rough trade that walk by with a newspaper in hand “Our eyes have seen the sex, on every street
our sex has become fair game” I denote my curvature into a slur Become crippled in sex Ecstasy was freedom Feeling free by the morning, long nights of our blood uniting
A shame, a prayer, looking
into the eyes of a storm that is breathing
News Stand #6:
The dandies are comatose
Coffin man lives with me I’m shattered, a paranormal prince I wear my face of milky white death Just years after my glory lobotomy I’ve become fish food for hungered virgins My severance have been applauded Laughed at by the wealthy United the pig stench Today’s headline reads “the dead overdoses on the normal only to become strange”
News Stand #7:
Oh, my heavens! Lollipops rain down
In my red storm sunshine Clouds, rain, mist and moons Starlight barfight, June bugs to mysterious magical mind balloons Exploding outside my rhapsody I’ve shown the tears, the years of fears
Now I show my excellence Enthusiasm, visions of grandeur, eccentric beauty Angels fly by with the Golden Ticket And I smile
Milkshakes found in trashcans, I smile
A sub headline drenched in spit reads “He winks, he blinks to those who stink”
News Stand #8:
Today I awoke to Sasquatch eyes
Crying, ref fire flames hiding
Behind my cave walls Cobra spit hiding in earthly splits Jasmine crevices on my cheek Then without warning, I become clear when I show signs of – Being a diamond mine again Read here! Read here! “The Earth has malignancy spreading like wildfire” The News Stand burned to the ground later that day
David L O’Nan is a poet, writer, and an editor. He has curated up to now 5 Poetry Anthologies including Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art Digest Issue 1, Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest 2,3, Fevers of the Mind Press Presents the Poets of 2020 & Avalanches in Poetry Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen. He has released 6 self-published books, which he will soon be re-doing to add more pictures & polishing up old pieces. The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers, Our Fears in Tunnels, Taking Pictures in the Dark, Lost Reflections, The Cartoon Diaries, & New Disease Streets. He is working on a favorites collection which will also include recent publishings from litmags he was accepted in His Poetic Last Whispers. He is working on new pieces to eventually be shopped around to be published outside of the Fevers of the Mind Press. There will be new anthologies the rest of the year including Fevers of the Mind 5 & Fevers of the Mind 6, and a 5 year memorial issue follow up to the Leonard Cohen Anthology. New pieces, a few favorites from the first book, revised versions of his poetry, and artwork by Geoffrey Wren.
