Friday, January 23, 2015

After Reading a Review of “The Sacrifice” by Joyce Carol Oates

Out here in the undiscovered dark,
I hear the voice of a phantom.
(Or is it the voice of a lost relative
calling out from the other side
of an invisible hill?)

Across town, cameras flash
as a minister holds a press conference
in the vestibule of a church.
He drinks from the poisoned water of his own ego.
His finger points away from himself.

More children are dying every day.
Bombs continue to fall
while the world sleeps.
No one controls this cloud we ride on.
No one knows how to get off.








Wednesday, January 21, 2015

We Lost the Sun (We Lost the Moon)


We lost the sun.
We lost the moon.
We forgot the words.
We forgot the tune.
Out here in the cold
We do what we’re told
We were two lemons on a train.
I followed her out into the rain.
She would laugh and say,
'Have you heard the latest news?
China is sending rockets to the moon.'
There are clouds of dust on Mars.
There are mountains on the moon.
We forgot the words.
We forgot the tune.
Out here in the cold
We do what we’re told
We were two lemons on a train.
I followed her out into the rain.
She would laugh and say,
'Have you heard the latest news?
China is sending rockets to the moon.'
She would laugh and say,
'Have you heard the latest news?
China is sending rockets to the moon.'

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

The Pinball Wizard of Las Vegas



The Pinball Wizard of
Las Vegas 

(for Larry) 

I walked around in a kind of bubble. 
I could look out but no one could look in. 
I took only shallow breaths, the air was thin, 
the oxygen limited. 
No one knew 
about the dark thing that held me captive. 
In Las Vegas, my favorite cousin 
mangled his hand between the whirring blades of a machine. 
All that remained was a partial palm. 
I was ten; he was sixteen. 
Soon he arrived at my grandmother’s house 
and I had to face the horror 
of what he had lost. 
His palm was bandaged, 
hidden from view, 
wrapped up like a miniature mummy. 
He held a white, plastic ball and tossed it to me. 
I tossed it back; he caught it 

by pulling on the bottom of his shirt, 
using it as a kind of glove 
for the ball to softly land. 
My fears of facing him vanished. 
I was free. 
How did he know how 
I had suffered? 
Later the Las Vegas Sun 
wrote an article about him 
and his prowess at pinball 
(using just one hand and a palm). 
He would often sit 
in front of his house, drinking beer, 
watching over his muscle car; 
and when a can 
was thrown at his metallic prize, 
he would be off to the Vegas Strip, 
chasing after the perpetrator. 

Still later, he worked 
for the Department of Defense 
at the Nevada Test Site. 
He held the highest of security clearances. 
He married. But he knew the dark side 
of man’s inventiveness, of man’s machines. 
He knew that they could bite, 
that accidents happen. So he quit his job. 
His wife took pills and he drank. 
The money ran out, there were fights. 
It ended with the suicide of his bride. 
He became emaciated and depressed. 
His bones poked through his skin. 
Somehow he seemed to hover above us all. 
Then the convulsions began and he fell 
through the clouds, a diver, 
free falling, tumbling, without wings, 
without a chute. 

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Z World (Stories)


Buy the Book

Z WORLD — The old ones had grand and glorious machines. They could fly across oceans. Their sailing vessels filled the skies. They inhabited glittering cities of light. They mapped the stars and sent men into space—but they went mad and destroyed themselves. We are their offspring. Z World is so named as it stands at the end of that old world, faint traces of which can still be seen in our world, in ruins and refuse not yet been reclaimed by nature—its rolling hills, farms, forests and streams. We do not know what lies beyond our shores. Our seafaring vessels are not capable of traversing the globe. Over many generations our people have engaged in battles but nothing like the great wars of the past. We live a peaceful existence. We feel blessed. We share a common language with the old world, with our ancestors; even so, many of their words seem foreign to us and are difficult to decipher. The old ones were capable of great magic. They were able to record and transmit images of themselves across great distances. This art has now been lost. We do have transcripts of these talking pictures along with faded photographs, ragged books and other deteriorating volumes archived in makeshift libraries. Sadly the largest of these libraries recently burned. This is why we have decided to compile and distill from the existing archives a few stories that moved us. We are thinking of future generations, that there will be a record not just of sacred texts, of poets and philosophers (of that we have already made abundant copies), but we wish to produce (using the archives and literary techniques discovered in the books of the old ones) a record of the final months before death and the whirlwind overtook them. 



WHITE NIGHTS (NOVELLA) — Robert Rouan is a kind of Don Quixote with a heroin habit. Strung out and desperate for drugs, Rouan stabs a drug dealer in a scuffle in the North of Paris. He is then locked up in the Santé, an old prison. After rumors spread that Rouan is a spy, he is brutally beaten and falls into a deep coma. Decades later, Rouan awakens to an altered and damaged world, marred by wars and the collapse of the U.S. Government. What is left of America is under quarantine: where life is controlled by monolithic corporations and its inhabitants live in misery. 

"During the day prayer rugs were set down. Over half the inmates in the Santé were Muslims originally coming from Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria, West Africa and Morocco, in the last generation or two. Prayers were said throughout Block C five times daily. Many of the inmates studied the Quran. Most of this activity was clandestine; it was not approved of by the prison authorities; catholic chaplains were made available but very few imams were officially sanctioned and made available to the prison population. Located just south of the Sorbonne on the Left Bank, the poets Paul Verlaine and Apollinaire had once been incarcerated behind its towering walls as had members of the French resistance during the second World War. It now housed the assassin, Carlos the Jackal, and an assortment of thugs, petty thieves, murderers, rapists, psychopaths and even transvestites. This was not what Rouan's fellow countryman in the United States imagined when they thought of visiting Paris. It would be hard for them to picture what life was like in that graying fortress, built in the nineteenth century and designed more like a castle than a prison with its turrets and oval passageways..." 




PETER PAN, UFOs & THE MARLBORO MAN (SHORT STORY)