Freeform Radio
Radio Free Nebraska is on the air and Psychedelic Rick
can read your mind. He flips your switch
and you are a cosmic cowboy, rocket man in rose-
colored giggles surfing your own sweet synapses,
goofy foot on the dizzy edge. You’re in tall cotton,
you see no weevil. Feeling feral, you expose the gore
that lurks in the heart of gorgeous, garbed
in garbage, a dumpster-diving, dayglo Hello Kitty,
any second thoughts vaporized into a cotton candy fog.
My heresies are hairier than your heresies,
your subwoofers growl, My sound is heavy, heavy,
holy, holy, your angels shattered into a thousand
tripping Whitmans deadheading their petunias
under stacks of Marshall amps. You’re in ecstasy,
XTC singing Dear God at the party in 1986,
skylarking the kiss that bridges old year to new.
The (Big) stars in her eyes are the stars in your eyes too,
and now thunder booms in both of you, big bang
heartthrob belting out Here Comes Your Man.
Pixie dust seasons the feast here at Psychedelicatessen,
so we ride the 13th floor elevator to the dark side
of the moon, where Keith still hammers his skins
and we all stand, Hubbled together under starlight
from the beginning of time, hand in hand in unison, singing
I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles. Oh yeah.
In memory of Richard “Psychedelic Rick” Shafrick (1962-2021)
Brent Terry is in lockdown in the forests of southern New England, where he recites poems and performs interpretive dances for tiny woodland creatures. His stories, essays, reviews and poems have appeared in dozens of journals, and he is the author of Four collections of poetry. The Body Electric, a novel, was published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press. Terry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, a PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry. He was the 2017 winner of the Connecticut Poetry Prize. He is an accomplished spoken word artist and has collaborated on work with visual artists, musicians and dancers. He teaches at Eastern Connecticut State University, but yearns to rescue a border collie and return to his ancestral homeland of the Rocky Mountain West. Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, artist, and editor from Toronto, Canada. Her small stories, usually about visual art, are widely published. Her award-winning mixed media paintings have collectors in thirty countries so far.