Heath Brougher attended Temple University. He is the poetry editor of Five 2 One Magazine and co-poetry editor of Into the Void Magazine. He has published two chapbooks, A Curmudgeon Is Born (Yellow Chair Press 2016) and Digging for Fire (Stay Weird and Keep Writing Publishing Co. 2016) with another one titled Your Noisy Eyes due out in 2017. His poem “Curriculums” received a Best of the Net Nomination and his work has been translated into Albanian and been published in over 25 countries. He was the judge of Into the Void Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Competition and edited the anthology “Luminous Echoes,” the sales of which will be donated to help with suicide prevention. His work has appeared or is due to be published in Of/with, Chiron Review, BlazeVOX, Main Street Rag, Crack the Spine, Cruel Garters, MiPOesias, The Blue Mountain Review, Third Wednesday, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, Gloom Cupboard, X-Peri, W.I.S.H., Gold Dust, eFiction India, Tipton Poetry Journal, Lakeview, Van Gogh’s Ear, *82 Review, and elsewhere. When not writing, he helps with the charity Paws Soup Kitchen which gives out free dog/cat food to low income families with pets.
Brougher: Yes, many of my poems are concerned with the search for Truth. My new chapbook Digging for Fire is about that search but in a much more metaphysical way. In general, though, I believe the search for Truth means taking in all the information you see and hear and letting it swirl around in your head, trying to look at it from every possible vantage point. This way, through your own Epiphanies, you are able to find the “actual Truth.” I believe in the cultivation of the Intellect. I consider Intellect to be a component of knowledge. If more people would begin to actually cultivate their Intellect instead of just blindly believing everything they are told there would be a lot more acceptance of Individuality in this world. Every person would have their own personal ideas about the Truth (which the majority of the time would hopefully synch up with others who have cultivated their Intellect) and be much more tolerant of people who didn’t believe exactly what they did. When people are introduced to someone new the first words out of their mouth are usually, “So what do you do?” As if what a person does for a living defines them. I dream of a day when people ask instead, “So what have you been thinking lately?” I know that may sound silly, but only if you’re a mindless robot. There is, however, one big problem with the whole “searching for Truth” thing and that is that the brain is easily tricked by what it sees. So searching for metaphysical Truths may actually be easier than searching for the Truth before your very eyes. Human beings tend to mirror their environment, whether consciously or subconsciously, and that is why I think it is important for people to disconnect themselves from what I call “the Mainstream Thought” and begin to sincerely view this world through their own eyes. As far as Truth in politics goes, forget it. There’s not one ounce of Truth in what is spouted from the mouths of these disgusting egomaniacal politicians.
Brougher: Yes. That one will always be my “baby.” I thank Sarah Frances Moran for choosing it for publication. The book is about disconnecting from the “Mainstream Thought” as I call it. There are so many mysteries to our lives and our origins and most people end up with these things never crossing their minds as they just fall right into the safety basket their given culture has placed there for them. They are born into a world of previously arranged “Manmade Realities” and immediately their minds are attacked as they quickly turn into mindless members of that given society. What they see as reality is what they’ve been told their whole lives is reality while they haven’t given it a second thought. I wanted to try to shake at least a few people out of that “daily grind” mindset and get them to “cultivate their Intellect” by having the poems in this chapbook, both stylistically and thematically, spiral outward instead. I wanted it to screech against the endless loops that encompass most people’s lives. It’s a form of slow motion evolution if you follow the beaten path of endless cycles but if you sync up to a spiral mentality then there is room for endless growth. The line in the book that I always go back to is “circular paths are false for the Truth lives within the Spiral.” That line itself kind of encompasses the book. Digital Veins (originally published in Otoliths)
Caliginous monstrosity clogation
of cognition unhumbled robotic caligony
fills the air beats upon the eardrums
its metallic taste of wobbling noise
we endorphinlessly morph by the day
as we further depend on these mechanical monsters
to run amuck in our lives and willingly allow it so much so
these robotic beasts are infiltrating and controlling
as they slowly tempt us with their bright screams of screens
of contagious connectivity evolution spun metallic
soon to spring and spoil the soil [soul]
as Mankind sticks its perfectly uncut human perceptions
heads and hands directly into the mouths of these monstrous computer
screens swimming with waning viscera in a pixilated pool
of pathetic predetermined angles of standpoints.
Misperception (originally published in Eunoia Review)
That oak tree
is not really an oak tree.
That oak tree
is only an oak tree
because you call it an oak tree.
Maybe you should stop lying to yourself.
String of Thought
The thread of thoughts thinkings
the threat of thoughts thinkings, leaking
hate into the head
brinking
into sayings
the slither of said sayings
the slaughter of said sayings, sinking
into the viscera or invading by osmosis the brain.
ears hear arsonist songs sung by anarchist loaves
of Nothingnessism. F(r)u(i)tility.
Boxing for Airtime (originally published in The Curly Mind)
So strutteral and rambunctational.
Meanwhile your swagger is so thickend outwhirled
that otherwise people have been snapshot-talking about
you behind your earlobes. I never did understandify why
you carry so much about the weight of what other flesheden automatonians
thought about your emenatious animationness inny[buttonbelly]way.
Just ferment about them and leave your lifeing to your self.
Youar’ much bedder off this way. I don’t care
about the idiocity they associalate with you.
Nuclear Baby (originally published in SLAB)
My mother breathed contaminated air
while I was floating in the amniotic swimming pool of her belly.
My mother was pregnant with me during the Three Mile Island crisis.
She living only a forty minute drive from the power plant,
nuclear air swept into her lungs and spread to my tiny alien body.
Her umbilical cord, a soft hypodermic needle injecting radiated air,
atomic nutrients, straight into my buttonless belly.
I was born into a world of nuclear waste. Nuclear skies and
clouds pouring acid rain. Nuclear particles whisking along the toxic breeze.
I came nascent and pink into this world gasping for my first breath
among the atomic poison that blew cold and mutagenic
along the air-paths of my hometown.
It was a great honor to be named the 2016 Poet of the Year by Michael Lee Johnson for his Contemporary Poets group. A number of my friends are included among the 10,000 members of the group, and the inspiration I regularly receive from their work helps keep me on-point, so I consider it all to be a synchronized reciprocal process. But I’m also wont to look at life like that most of the time, in general, as it were, anyway. It sort of makes me who I am.
About the Author
