Wednesday, December 19, 2018

IGNORANCE VS MALEVOLENCE


New one at Rebelle Society.  Got a little butchered in moving it from  Word to the internet page, so I've included the whole thing here...…


http://www.rebellesociety.com/2018/12/18/johnsweet-years/




my last five years spent living in the shadow of the palace of futility





in the half light of our last good days, in the

quietest room of the burning house



      couldn’t get warm and

we couldn’t stay lost and when

your father showed up he

said the baby was his



wanted money and he wanted

a different life



wanted another drink and and i

forget where he was finally buried



i forget why your mother hated me

but not that she did



held onto her rage liker some

precious holy relic

and so i became her god



i became her faith but

what about the burning house?



were we ever actually there?



25 years later and all of the ashes

have been consumed



we have stayed hungry



we have grown old



have wasted our lives speaking of hope

in the kingdom of nil



either no one listens

          or

          no one hears



can you see the difference?



ignorance vs malevolence and

in the end its

not the size of the war that matters but

the quality of pain inflicted on

those who survive



but do you believe this?



a world where

suffering is deemed holy



an empire built not on wealth but

on the idea the wealth is all that matters and

                                               was it suicide?



did he drink himself to death?



saw him for the last time in some

rat-trp one-room apartment on the north side,

said $200 would get him through the month



said the baby was his

but that we could keep it



said $400 was all he’d need and then he

started peeling the skin from

his face but

failed to become someone else



failed to be anyone we knew



1990?  ’91?



somewhere in there, dead grey sky of

late winter and all you wanted was

to let me know that you loved me and

all i wanted was your sister’s number



charlotte st, other side of the river in the

last weeks of the war, said her

boyfriend would be coming home soon



said the bruises were almost healed and i

joked that it was your mother’s fault



had this savior complex but none of us

ever found salvation



christ was either

a lie or a junkie



a house on fire in the upstate desert

but we couldn’t get warm

  

had enough pills to

get uis through the day and we

had this baby but

not its name



not its father



a pile of anonymous bones at the

                                edge of town

and your mother considered it

                                  a victory



built her house from them and

what i saw when we met

was the day you would leave



what i believe in are lesser forms

of grace and hope



my enemies consumed by

disease and despair and

were we stoned that entire summer?



was victory declared while we

slept on the bathroom floor?



i wanted to ask your sister

but she wasn’t

answering her phone



wanted to buy you a gift but

you’d already left for the coast



we’d buried your father and

given the baby to your mother and

they were both growing fat

                           on poison



they were both erasing me

from the future



woke up alone on

the morning it finally arrived and

knew myself to be

                       lost






Sunday, December 09, 2018

THIS WILL BE OUR LAST GOODBYE



Word is, Bill will be drastically altering KSE next year to focus on his own kick-ass work.  As it stands, HEATHEN TONGUE will be the last handmade chapbook published by him under this imprint.  Who are you to pass up this chance to own a piece of history?  Limited amounts available, so get a copy before everyone you know laughs at you and 
calls you a fool...…











Sunday, December 02, 2018

PEELING OFF THE THIN SKIN



An actual non-form rejection letter I got this week.  Valid, maybe, but a little snarky.  Personally, I stand by my work as entirely unique.  Needless to say, I had to snark back.  Good fun!!  

Among the more annoying things about this episode was that this particular editor's website was filled with multiple examples of fairly generic milquetoast poetry.  In my response-snark, I told him (?) that I thought these poems were cries for help on the publisher's part, and not artistic statements.  

Oh, the cleverness of me......


Actually, I was stunned to get a personalized rejection letter, so it took a while for the contents of it to actually sink in, and to realize I was being smacked down.  This must be why poets kill themselves....





"lol! this must be #100 of the same set of poems this week. is there a master computer program somewhere spitting this stuff out? Probably a web app. must be free of cost, there's just too many ramblings like these. 


What I want from you is : "a poem he should but won’t write"


That's the one that will be different than everyone else's."

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