Last Full Day

The taste of last night's beer lingered this morning.

Three in the morning, I can't sleep. That voice

in my head, the one that's been telling me

This is not your home woke me

thumping like a timpani drum. The cats

are calm. The walls are thin

and, even with the plastic on the windows

lets the arctic weather in. Ice glazed

like thousand year old donuts

covering everything. Small tectonic glaciers

in the shape of tire tread and work boots

gray from the grating of the plow

and car exhaust line the streets. The voice,

it tells me, Wild birds know when to fly.

It's the caged ones that die. It's too early

for riddled wisdom, and I'm out of coffee.

Cold feet, bad TV, the memory of another

December fresh like the snow was

two days ago casts long shadows in fast dreams

in which the faces belong to strangers

and they all have something to tell me,

something I must remember,

something that is the piece to a puzzle

with the picture worn off. All that remains

is a sense memory and the voice in my head

No feeling lasts, it says. So it's better to feel it all.

Two Days Past (Winter 2012)

The streets have been cleared

and the previous night's freeze

packed the last snow fall,

eliminating the drifts covering

Illinois 64 that are impossible

to plan for and more dangerous

even, than the ice that may

or may be underneath.

The wind is blowing,

but the sun is shining

and people are out

and about because no one

expects it to last. Shopkeepers

keep the windows clear,

spruce up last month's goods,

because they know

another sunny day

may not come again

and it's the early bird

who gets the worm –

so said the preacher on Sunday.

Or was it that self help book on the bed side table?

The sidewalks are cleared –

except for in front of the houses

where the grandchildren

are too preoccupied to endure

10 minutes of the tundra.

Piles of the white stuff

around the bottom of street signs

and at cross walk corners

are there to remind us –

as if the arctic chill

and frozen snot weren't enough –

more winter is coming.

Wind Down Wind Up: Travel Plan Update

This one's for Dave Cuckler and Jim Beaudry.


So my plans -- in as much as I've made them, such as they are -- are set. I'm leaving Mount Carroll Friday Morning and riding back into Chicago with Melissa's Timber Lake Playhouse co-conspirator, Jim "The Glam Man" Beaudry.  Once I get into the city, it's another hop skip and a jump and I'm on a 12:15 pm bus on Saturday from the Harrison Street station that will put me in the Nasty Nati around 7:05 pm that night. Pretty sweet, these express routes.

I can't take credit for discovering them, though. Melissa found out about them first. And since it would cost me more than $15 to drive to Cincinnati, I consider it a pretty good deal. Also, it'll be on one of the newer buses... they smell less like dirty ass, month old sweat,  and bus rape.

The first leg of the trip with be a nice refresher through past places, visiting family and friends I haven't seen in entirely too many years. A few days in Cincinnati, hoping to hoist a few beers and take in the city that I have, off and on over the years, called home. I have one actual task to accomplish while I'm there -- emptying out the storage unit we've been paying $50 a month to rent since we moved to Phoenix. That will be an odd and (probably) blog worthy experience.

This leaving will be one of the most difficult, in recent memory. I've said that before, but I've trying to figure out why. I'm not much of a sentimentalist. I've made friends here, friends I will miss; but I also know I'll see them again. Whenever I move I always just assume I'll see my friends again. Somewhere. Sometime.

I've always believed that. And while some might consider that an aberrant version of sentimentality, it's not. Anyone who knows me knows I'm lousy at keeping in touch. It's not that I don't try. But I think it's important to try and live life where you are, in the now. That doesn't mean I don't often think about friends I haven't seen; I do. Everyone I love, friends and family, are in my thoughts constantly.

And that's really sort of the point, isn't it? When you've been fortunate enough to find people who you consider friends and who honor you by thinking of you as a friend, they have a permanent impact on your life. I've moved around enough and had enough leavings that I'm used to taking my friends with me, calling when I can, trying to see them in the future if at all possible. (Which is why the first part of my trip will be to revisit old places and old friends... because I never say good-bye. I only say "See you later." or "Later" when I'm into the whole brevity thing...)

Leaving Phoenix was difficult, but not really. I had friends there. I still consider them my friends. I assume I will see them again, and maybe I will on my extended jaunt.

But the leaving Mount Carroll is a different experience. First of all, this is the first place I've lived in several years where I actually invested something. I decided to care about the place.

I was sitting around, hating it here... not re-adapting all that well to small town life. I hadn't really invested much of myself while we were living in Phoenix. I was teaching, and I was invested in my students. I was even invested -- early on, anyway -- in my professional life. But when you live in a city like Phoenix/Tempe, you don't need to invest in the same way that need to when you live in small town; especially one on the verge of change like Mount Carroll is. I decided to care.

And I don't regret it. Not one bit. I like to think I've had some kind of positive influence on the place.  I've met some amazing people who reminded me that talent exists in places you wouldn't expect. Living here has helped me to remember that I shouldn't take anyplace or anyone for granted, and that people can still be good (and snarky, and back biting, and hypocrites, and power mongers. But they're everywhere, and most of them have political aspirations.)

I was drinking Monday night with my friend, Dave Cuckler -- one of those talented people I previously eluded to. We were drinking at the bowling alley -- the place that has, over the last year or so, become my regular haunt -- and watching the Monday night men's league, which I used to be a part of, finish up. I was telling him about the mixed sensation of leaving. Dave pointed out that not only have I invested myself in my life here, but that the town -- or at least certain segments of it -- accepted me.

Which is, of course, why this leaving has been so strange. I haven't felt this level of acceptance since graduate school, maybe. Before that, never. After that, maybe some in Cincinnati. But not the same. And even though I have railed against local and county leaders in the press, even though I despise the winters here, and even though I had to let people down by quitting the bowling league... which, considering my average, is no loss to anyone... I will take the warmth of that acceptance with me when I go.

Day After Snow, 2012

Snow covers all our petty arguments

silences our numerous indiscretions

and turns our thoughts, once again,

towards warmth. Overcast morning

the color of gray slush on the streets,

and the rumble of the village trucks

scraping what remains off the street outside

shakes the entire house.

[I am the only one awake to notice this.

Even the cats have learned to ignore

the intrusion. And I have learned

to pay it little mind.]

The ground shakes all the time, now.

Trucks or now trucks.

News channel talking heads dismiss

the phenomenon, focus instead

on election year gaffs and movie start cleavage.

(They learned their lesson in Vietnam. Had they sent

strippers with the reporters, we could've won the war.)

[I don't watch the news, anymore

before three cups of coffee, a smoke

and a good healthy shit.]

Forecast calls for partly sunny skies

bone cracking arthritic cold. Those bits

of remaining pristine snow will glisten

and the slush will shine gray

and the footprints will stick

until Spring erases all immediate traces;

there will be no path to follow

and there will be no proof

that anyone was ever here.

Rosetta Stone Autopsy

Two days ago it was warm enough to wake the flies. Now

it's snowing, light dusting like powdered sugar

over the gray and brown post-harvest landscape.

A spoonful of sugar, or so they say, though

as the barometer drops there's not enough sweetness

to go around. The blood slows, thickens, settles

into the veins …

                              geologic sediment

that will, in the later years after my death,

be excavated when the explanations

(eventually) become important. There will be rings

in the bones – evidence of warmth and cold that,

over the years spread to the vital organs:

the heart,

                     the liver,

                                              the spleen.

The story spun by inexperienced necrophiliac historians

will be one in which they are heroes

and in which the corpse on the slab

is nothing more than an anonymous preamble

to an inevitable greatness they will copiously describe

using strip mine style explanations,

and retrofitted possibilities limited by statistical models

that are inadequate to the taxonomic task

of reconstructing a memory...

because they lack the hieroglyphic key

they themselves destroyed when, 

upon finding flies the belly,

they slaughtered them without a second thought.

Update: Of Leavings And What Remains

My bus ticket to Cincinnati arrived in the mail this past Saturday. I'm leaving from Chicago on Saturday January 21st and taking an express route, which will put me in the Nasty Nati on the same day I pull out of the Harrison Avenue Station.

The ticket cost $15. It would have cost me $10, but I waited a couple of days before I purchased it.

Leavings are strange things. Who to say goodbye to. Who to tell what. Loose ends to tie up. I told my editor at the paper last week about my plans, and suggested that he find someone else to cover my regular beat. Tom's a good guy and he's always treated me fairly, so I sort felt... well... behooved... to give him decent notice. I'm getting prepared... in my head... for what comes next.

"You really need to go." Melissa on my travels. She's horribly worried that I'm going to write about her, with good reason, I suppose. She's never been comfortable being inspiration/fodder for my writing; I'm sure that there are more writers' spouses who feel like her than not. That she ends up looking better in the end seems to make little difference. I can't fault her for her feelings. She's an honest and extraordinary person who needs and deserves stability. And I'm the kind of person who feels most alive when I'm writing and on the move.

Leavings are strange things. And I always feel like I'm in the process of a leaving. These lines from James Merrill's poem "The Will" keep echoing in my mind:

In growing puzzlement I've felt things losing
Their grip on me.

That's sort of what it feels like. I'm not letting go of things. But they are letting go of me. I say I never feel really alive unless I'm on the move, and I guess that's true. But memory is a funny thing. And by funny I mean absurd and ironic. Memory is absurd and ironic because even though things are letting go of me, I am eyeball deep in the process of etching it all in my mind... these things I will take will me as I begin. I am always ready to go. But I never want to forget where I've been. I want to keep the people I love close to my heart.

But it seems I can only do that when I go away.

Scratching the Itchy Foot

The first part of the trip will be to go visit my daughter, Stella. It's been a couple of years since I've seen her and I want to make sure she's not taller than me. Stella is 17, focused on getting out of high school alive as well as intellectually and psychologically intact. She's also starting to look at colleges and is looking for a job.


That used to be an easier thing: finding a job. When I was a kid, all you had to do was go fill out a McDonald's application and you could have a job. There was poverty, there was unemployment -- but a kid who wanted to earn money and begin that lifelong love and hate relationship with the IRS had a reasonable shot at finding some sort of demeaning, dignity impugning, soul killing job that paid very little and left none of  the feelings of satisfaction often talked about in pre-employment literature.


Right now in America, there's 4 people for every available job. And that doesn't include the 15% unemployment rate for veterans returning from the wars they fought to keep Halliburton in business. Unemployment benefits are stretched, and there are those -- we call those sons of bitches REPUBLICANS -- who would cut off unemployment insurance and let people starve. We also have some folks -- we call those assholes DEMOCRATS -- that are going along because their mommies keep their balls in a silk bag in the back of an armoire. Right now we're living in a country where we have The Haves and The Have-Nots. Right now we're living in a country run by politicians who are signing away our freedoms. Right now, the banks and corporations have taken over.


Right now, it's only getting started.


And right now, there are stories to be told. Someday, we'll have historians explaining to our grandchildren what all this recession bullshit was really about and what the long term impact of shrinking civil rights and banks on the national tit was. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll have talking heads and history memes on social networks, lost in the shuffle between the Two Girls, One Cup video and the latest free social networking game that eats up computer speed and distracts people from seeing the world for what it is.


Re:visionary is my way of trying to tell the real story in real time. There are stories to be told, songs to be sung, poetry to be written. Re:visionary means,  for one, revision. Life, like a poem draft, often  requires revision.


For another, it means Re(garding) Vision. How I envision my self, the country, other people, the world. 


And I'm hoping you like what you read.

Buk Notes: John Fante

It's not necessary to read John Fante in order to understand what Bukowski was shooting for; one of the nice things about Buk is that even if you don't really get it – and most people don't – there's still something to enjoy. Readers of Bukowski who dream of being writers have tried – without success – to repeat what he did; generally, they begin with the notion, not without reason, that in order to write like Bukowski one has to live like Bukowski. The first mistake comes, however, in thinking that any form of emulation is the same as art. The second mistake is in looking at his body of work and seeing only “a drinker with a writing problem” as a writerly friend of mine once proclaimed him to be.

Although he openly balks at influence in his later work, Charles Bukowski does give one writer credit. And no, it wasn't Hemingway. And no it wasn't any of the Beats, with whom Bukowski is often mistakenly categorized. The writer that he credits the most – beyond the French writer Céline – is John Fante.

Fante is the author of Ask the Dust, Dago Red, West of Rome, The Road to Los Angeles, Brotherhood of the Grape, and others. In the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust, there's a short preface by – you guessed, Charles Bukowski – in which he claims that Fante's work was the only work he found in the library that seemed like it was written for him.  Fante wrote about growing up in a poor blue collar family in Colorado, about being Italian-American, about being Catholic, about being a writer, about being a writer and selling out to write movies, about his troubles at home, about his combative relationship with his children (including the writer Dan Fante), and about his own feelings of inadequacy. Fante was one more in a slew of West Coast writers – that include Nathanael West and John Steinbeck – who had trouble making it in the East Coast / New Yorker style controlled world of literary publishing.

When you read Fante, you begin to hear the echo that drew Bukowski in and that echoed in his work as well. As a matter of fact, you hear the same thing when you read Céline, or Steinbeck, for that matter, though they are as stylistically removed from Fante and Bukowski as Mahler is from Metallica. You see more of Buk's style in Fante – but of course, it's not the same, either, any more than Hemingway wrote like Sherwood Anderson. Fante's sense of hyper-drama is different from Bukowski. With Bukowski, the tone is more acerbic, and even at his raunchiest, more judgmental. Fante's hyper-drama is comically inflated:

“So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your flash-in-the-pan genius, your one-story-writer: a thief. I held my head in my hands and rocked back and forth. Mother of God. Headlines in the papers, promising writer caught stealing milk, famous protégé of J.C. Hackmuth haled into court on petty thief charge, reporters swarming around me, flashlights popping, give us a statement.”

Ask the Dust is about getting published... the hunger, the failure, and even in face of potential success, the inevitable failure. Fante's world is one in which there is always moral balance: something good must be accompanied with something bad. The protagonist, Arturo Bandini, is a young writer living on nothing but good will and stolen oranges in Depression-Era downtown LA. His one credit is a short story, “The Little Dog Laughed” published in a magazine edited by J.C. Hackmuth, his literary hero. He carries copies of the magazine around, passing autographed copies to people who aren't really impressed. And as if the comic hubris and ego-crushing wasn't enough, Bandini then meets Camilla, a waitress, and falls in love with her. But she's in love with the bartender Sam, and Sam despises her. The only way Bandini will win Camilla over, Sam tells him, is to treat her badly.

The book is poignant in it's descriptions day to day living, love and loss and failure, Catholic guilt, and the self-doubt every writer experiences. Camilla is impressed with him at first, but only comes around when he's abusive. She spends time in an asylum, goes back and for the between Arturo and Sam. She ends up throwing Bandini over for Sam, who wants to be a writer – he writes westerns – and who is also dying of cancer. Bandini ends up dedicating a copy of his book – which he finally writes and is finally published by J.C. Hackmuth – to Camilla and throwing into the desert.

In the messy business that fiction writing has become – or maybe, that it's always been – there's always been the question as to whether what a writer writes in fiction bears any resemblance to real life. And with a pop culture that has both hyper-reality television and fantasy laden tomes, both of which serve as escape hatches rather than magnifying glasses of contemporary life, there's even more suspicion of writers who want to write something real. Fante was roundly criticized for this in his non-screenplay work. Bukowski was critisized for it too, though mostly by academic critics who didn't acknowledge anything after the Modernists.

The art in Bukowski is something you have to read with a knowing eye to catch. He had no intention of pointing it out, because he believed (I think correctly) that it wasn't his job to spoon feed infantile readers.

The art in Fante is a lot like that. It's easy to dismiss it as masked autobiography, or – the gods help us all – “creative non-fiction” (the bane of literary trends over the past 20 years). The point isn't whether the story is about a struggling young writer or a struggling young wizard. Literature isn't meant to be an escape... though it often can be. Literature – especially fiction – is a lens that brings life into hyper-focus. Fante accomplishes this in a grand tradition that he picked up from writers like Knut Hamsun, and which can also be seen in Eurpoean writers like French writer Céline, Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, and German writer Günter Grass. For that matter, the mantle was also picked up by writers like Stephen Crane and Nelson Algren. And maybe part of the true art is that while most readers look at Fante and see a Catholic writing about Catholic guilt – and at Bukowski and see a drunk writing about drinking – there's something else happening that you only see if you bother to pay attention.

[This was written, primarily to continue a discussion that Kaplowitz and I have had on Grindbone Radio, as well as off air. I also wrote it because, well, I wanted to add my thoughts to his well written piece here.]

The Rose Tattoo (Or, Sketch of One of God's Little Left Overs)

Strictly speaking, Simpson was not a complicated person. He woke up each day ten minutes before his alarm clock sounded. He showered quickly and efficiently and shaved whether he really needed to or not. He liked his coffee black, but not too strong and his white toast lightly buttered with a minuscule dusting of cinnamon and sugar. Simpson left his home every workday at precisely 7:01 a.m. and arrived at Meladon Ficus and Associates, his place of employment for the past 10 years, exactly 45 minutes later. (Sometimes there was an accident or delay on the interstate that caused him to be late by five or ten minutes; but he was so punctual otherwise that everyone assumed he possessed some preternatural sense of traffic patterns and was in his corner cubicle by ten minutes until eight – whether he actually was or not.)

While at work he was focused and professional. His job was not a complicated one and it was not one that provided him with much power, affluence, or notice from his superiors. Fifty or sixty years ago, he would have been called a paper pusher. Now there's very little paper and most of what he does is transfer files from one folder on the server to another folder on the same server so that someone else can look at it after he goes over it. His job is to make sure that the person who saved the document in the file Simpson pulled it from didn't make any mistakes. The person who looked at it after him made sure that Simpson didn't miss anything. Eventually the files made their way to the Executive Board, where they were glanced over as visuals for a presentation that someone else – who had no part in putting the documents together – was giving. And it was that person who would get the credit for the hard work of all the invisible people who touched up document along the way. Simpson didn't mind this; losing out on the credit also meant that he lost out on the blame, too. And this was primarily where he drew satisfaction from his job.

On Wednesdays – which happened to be this particular day – Simpson ate his lunch at half past 12 instead of at noon. No one cared. Not even the the office manager Delores Filtcher. Delores spent most of her days fawning over the young delivery boy who brought FEDEX packages to the 15^thfloor office and talking to the small circle of women she drank with after work. Simpson knew the only reason she sexually harassed the FEDEX delivery man was because she didn't want it to get out that she and her was having an affair with one of the other telephone service specialists, a meek little mouse of a woman named Mildred.

Simpson also thought that maybe Delores was a little scared of him – though he couldn't really understand why.

He sat and ate his lunch – usually a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread (with the crusts cut off, the way his mom used to give them to him when he was bedridden and ill as a child), an apple, and a bottle of lemon flavored iced tea from the vending machine (Simpson didn't like the tarty flavor of real lemon, but he liked the saccharine taste of fake lemon flavoring. ) He said very little to anyone beyond vague pleasantries.

Wednesday was the day he allowed himself to watch Penelope. Penelope had the same job he had, but in another department. On Wednesdays she always wore her back in a pony tail. And while Penelope was a beautiful woman every other day of the week, long auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a well cared for physique. Simpson imaged by the sculpted curvature of her rear and the flatness of her stomach that she worked out at least two to three times a week. (Simpson himself did not.) And while that was an especially pleasant bonus, it wasn't those things about her that attracted his attention.

It was the tattoo.

A small rose tattoo, to be exact, just below her hair line on the back of her neck. It was small, ornate. Against her pale winter skin it looked like etching on fine porcelain. There was no indication that there were tattoos anywhere else on her body; Simpson had seen her in a variety of sleeveless, short, and long-sleeved professional outfits and there was nothing on her arms. She sometimes wore a skirt when the weather was warm and there was no ink marring her perfectly shaped legs. He supposed she could have tattoos other places; but he didn't like to think of her abdomen being marred with ink... or anywhere else, either.

No, it was just a small, single tattoo. He liked to sit and imagine the story of it as he ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crusts cut off. He liked to imagine it was some brief bout of college indiscretion; in his more imaginative moments, he imagined that it wasn't a tattoo at all, but a rare birthmark. Something that made her precious. Rare. Distinct. But maybe she was unaware of what it really meant, and maybe she had always wanted to know... that thing that only he could tell her because it was knowledge that he was born with, something he had known his entire, dull existence, without even knowing WHY he knew it. But it had been there. Waiting. Waiting for the moment when the two of them would occupy the same space at the same time. Waiting so that he could tell her his secret knowledge... and in the knowing, together they would both be free.

He timed eating his sandwich to coincide with her finishing her egg salad croissant and stood so that he would reach the door before she did. He did this every Wednesday, so it required almost no thought. When they met together at the door, each and every Wednesday, Simpson thought that might be the moment he could tell her the meaning of the rose tattoo and free them both. He imagined the moment over and over again: the expression on her face as he mouthed the words that she had been needing to hear her entire life – words that she was unaware of, except for the great emptiness of their absence. He imagined her smiling, maybe touching the rose lightly, and a slight tear rolling down her otherwise perfect face. “Thank you,” she would say. “I always hoped it would be you.”

As he approached her, reaching for the door in order to open it, he prepared. The words, he knew were on his lips. He had only to speak. Then he opened the door, and she looked up at him and smiled a glorious smile.

Then her cell phone rang.

“Oh!” she said, hurrying through the open door and answering her phone. “Thanks, Simmons,” she hissed quickly over her shoulder.

Simpson stood there for a moment, then walked through himself. He didn't follow her down the hall. Instead he went back to his office and went about the rest of his day, wondering whether Penelope was aware of the company policy regarding cell phone usage during work hours.

The Transfiguration of Rufus Skeen I: Rufus Recalls His First Baptism

Rufus recalled his baptism. He had been 9 years old.

It felt like the right thing to do – to stand up in front of his father, his mother, his sister Selma, and the entire congregation to proclaim that he believed and that he wished to be saved.

He had watched people go through the ceremony before; the petitioner stood during the Call, which usually came after the sermon. Mr. Lancette, the preacher, stood in front of the alter, leading the congregation in the call hymn. Behind him on the alter, the communion service sat, shining gold and glimmering in the sunlight that shone through the stained glass windows. The whole of the sanctuary was washed in this light, and the gold plating of the communion service glowed like a new sun, infinite, ethereal, and eternal.

When Rufus was 9, he believed in God because his father told him that God existed, that Jesus lived, died, and rose again. Rufus could never imagine what God looked like, or sounded like, so he imagined that God looked and sounded like his Dad. Rufus couldn't imagine heaven, either, despite all the talk about houses with many rooms and streets paved in gold with pearl gates and jewel encrusted walls; he had never seen gold, except for the communion service, and the only thing he knew about pearls was that they were found in oysters, deep in the ocean. He learned that in school. Since he couldn't imagine heaven, he imagined that God – the God who looked and talked like his dad – lived in the space above the sanctuary. Heaven was a crawl space. He knew about crawl spaces because his house had a crawl space where his mother kept all the Christmas decorations, boxes full of old pictures that were too fragile to hang on the walls, and miscellaneous junk no one wanted to throw away. To Rufus, Heaven was that place people put things they didn't need very often or didn't know what to do with, and God was the guy on the ladder who brought the decorations down the day after Thanksgiving.

What Rufus did know, and did understand, and didn't need to visualize, was how his father felt about religion. The only thing his father read besides the newspaper was the family bible. When Rufus was small and learning to read, his mother read to him from the Old Testament. Genesis. Joseph and the coat of many colors; David and Goliath. He didn't understand how God could be a burning bush, a column of fire, and a column of smoke, but he understood that his father would be proud of him if he decided to be baptized, to be saved, to take Jesus into his heart.

Rufus did it without warning. He made sure he sat on the end of the pew before church started, so he wouldn't have to ask permission to get by anybody. When the Call came, Rufus closed his hymnal and, while his sister, mother, and father looked on, shocked, he walked with what he thought was determination and maturity up to the front of the sanctuary, where Mr. Lancette was bellowing out the first verse of He Walks with Me. Everyone was surprised to see him up there, people muttered and pointed. Rufus didn't look back to see the look on his dad's face, but he imagined that his father was smiling the smile he generally reserved for when Selma did something cute, or when she acted in the Christmas pageant, or when she got good grades, which she always did.

After the call, the preacher took Rufus's hand and shook it. It was a hearty, adult handshake. Then, like all the people who had come before him, like he had seen countless times, Rufus was asked to confirm what he believed.

"I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

The congregation collectively intoned, "Amen!"

Then two women, wives of two of the elders, came up to take Rufus in the back, to show him where to prepare for baptism. One of the women led him by the shoulders, behind the organ, back into the hallway behind the sanctuary. There were stalls there, like the ones in department stores to try on clothes in. The women showed him where the white baptismal gowns were, and picked one out that would fit him fine. They also showed him where to put his church clothes, where the underwear was, (so the petitioner wouldn't get their own underwear wet; Rufus thought this was a particularly well thought out idea) and where to put the wet underwear after it was over. He changed into the gown the women gave him; it was long and white, like the ones angels wore in the pictures he had seen in Sunday School. After he changed, one of the women, smiling, proud, told him where to stand.

The communion service was over. The curtains in front of the baptismal pool were drawn. The familiar organ music began, and he saw the preacher come around the other side wearing on along white coat and wading boots like his father used for fly fishing. He went up the steps on the right side of the pool while Rufus waited on the left side. He wasn't thinking about anything. Time was agonizingly slow.

Finally, it was his turn. One of the church wives helped him up the first step, then disappeared – probably to go back around and watch with the rest of congregation and his family.

The pool was nothing more than an extra large bathtub. The floor and sides were covered with small square tiles – the kind found in locker room showers and public restrooms. The water in the baptismal pool was clear and smelled like chlorine. It was also was warm – warm like spit, or urine.

He took the minister's hand, and waited for him to finish talking. "Rufus Aloysius Skeen, in as much as you have confirmed your belief, and in as much as you seek the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and the redemption of your sins, I now baptize you…"

Rufus was underwater for only an instant, and when Mr. Lancette brought him back up, the water left a weird film all over him. The congregation started singing a hymn of praise, and the preacher led Rufus out of the water. As he started up the stairs, Rufus looked out to where his father sat, expecting to see him smiling, see him proud.

Instead, his father sat stone-faced and silent as everyone else sang.

By and By

I wish I believed.

I know the songs

the ones that sound

so so wrong

when I sing them.

How great thou love lifted

me in the garden by

and by. Drinking

another cup of coffee

staring into the blackness –

communion with a bean –

which is as close to god

as I feel most days,

not being a farmer

or a builder of mighty things

The book it says

Jesus was a carpenter

and Peter was a fisherman,

and I find myself wondering

whether the apostles drank

import or domestic beer

while they threw out their nets

the way I did

when I first believed.

I wish the stories spoke

the same way silence does

first thing in the morning

or late into the night

when insomnia or bad dreams

strike. God, I suppose, exists

between the tick tocks

of a grandfather clock.

The ghost of the old man

who shuffles on the porch

smoking his restless pipe

knows this and together

we commune between

the sweeping of the second hand

pacing the same creaky floorboards

and scratching pen to paper

lines and endless groans

and poems no one will hear

and no one will read.

Daguerreotypes

I.

Neighborhood kids shooting off fireworks

illuminating the tired smiling faces of distracted elders

casting long shadows that pop, sparkle and fizzle.

Dull fire. Vast dreams. The colors fade like

old flag fabric – the flag of our fathers' forefathers,

buried a top their sons and daughters.

In the humid, moonless, starless night,

blood shines black

like obsessively polished dress shoes.

Huddling 'round the campfire,

drinking beer as warm as tears,

old men and women recount stories of their America:

the one fed to us in digestible textbook morsels

long amputated from the The Long Memory. Stories

cast off like moldy bread on forgotten trails that have

long since been widened, flattened and paved over

in the name of progress.

                                      These narratives

are not told in video games

or on standardized tests; not mentioned

in hyper-real 3D movies

meant to titillate and to tax and to strangle

the imagination, to erase the collective unconscious.

They are not found in the long shadows

and short light of sparklers,

nor in the ghosts living the cellars

and sleeping porches of houses

older than the dirt under a

gravedigger's fingernails.

When the beer is gone and the stories 

are finished and the sparklers

are spent abandoned sticks in the neighbor's lawn

we will not remember them and will not be aware

that something sacred, something soul-tied

has been stolen and forever lost.

The Beans, Bread, and Beer Fund: An Explanation

Making it as a writer is rough, no matter how you go about it. Mostly people get some kind of pointless day job, or they become college instructors. Either way, you're more or less screwed out of valuable work time. A tedious day job saps your strength, your soul, and your imagination. Teaching on the college level isn't much better, except that you're expected to jockey for position, scramble your way up the ladder by stepping on the backs of your friends and colleagues, chasing that mirage once called tenure.

The other option -- go at it alone, try to come up with some other equation. And unless you get "discovered" or picked up by some eye tooth licking salivating agent or a big house publisher that wants to own your work into the next century, you do, more or less, go it alone. That's just the way it is, and, like Bukowski wrote, "isolation is the gift."

But life, even an inexpensive one, isn't exactly cheap.

I've learned a lot over the last year about hawking my own stuff and hustling to get writing work as well as exposure. While that oft dreamed of dream of writers to get picked up, get a major contract, and skyrocket into literary fame still pecks at me, I have learned to stop hoping for it. I still have my need to write, though, and I am still dedicated to the Art and the Craft of it. I write, in some fashion, nearly everyday. And I will continue unabated.

The Beans, Bread, and Beer Fund was something I started and posted on my blog as a sort of joke. Okay, half a joke. If I can't get The New Yorker or Playboy to pay me, maybe I can find people who wander across my blog, like what they see, and are willing to help. It's the digital equivalent to singing on a street corner with my hat on the sidewalk. But I haven't pushed it or explained it.

Until now.

I can't tell you your contribution will be tax deductible. It won't. I'm not a non-profit 501(c) 3 organization. Whatever you contribute will go towards what the name suggests – food, shelter, and some beer (I'm just being honest.)

If I can get enough money in this fund, it's my intention to put that money toward a limited run of print chapbooks, in addition to my Dead Machine E/Ditions.

I have two chapbook length manuscripts of poems: Boomtown Holiday and Love and The Baboon that I intend to release as E/Ditions within the next six months or so. If you are so kind as to give, depending on how much you give, you could end up on the dedication page.

Here's how it works:

$1- $12.99:	your name will appear on a dedication page in one of the upcoming E/Ditions, and you'll get a free copy of one.
$13 - $29.99:	your name will appear on a dedication page in both the E/Dition and one of the limited edition print chapbook. If you leave me your address, I'll send you a signed copy of the chapbook of your choice.
$30 + :	all of the above. Plus, I'll list your name on a permanent page on deadmachinefictions.com as a  motherfuckin' god send. Really.

The link on the right sidebar will take you to PayPal, where your personal information is secure. I will not have access to your card numbers, and you can use any credit or debit card, or your own PayPal account. The link below will also take to the same place.

Thanks in advance for your goodwill and your support. I won't forget it. Ever.

By the way:

I'm also thinking about putting together The Beans, Bread, and Beer Tour.

I'll come to your venue and read from any number of my works and teach workshops on fiction, poetry, and independent publishing. Base cost is the cost of a bus ticket to wherever you are, a cot or couch in a reasonably warm place, and a flat fee to be discussed, depending on whether you're looking for a reading, a workshop, or both. If you're interested email me at mickp@deadmachinefictions.com.

Essay: Intractable, Part 1

I grew out of a narrow tradition; as a writer, my education began with The Great Books on the dusty top shelf of the reference section in the library. I read Descartes, Spinoza, Aristotle, Plato. But that was later, when I was in high school. The first book of any literary consequence I ever read was George Orwell's 1984. I was ten. The magnetic weight of that book struck me, even though I didn't understand it thoroughly until I had read it many more times. And even though I didn't understand it all that well, I did begin to understand one thing: I began to understand that if I was going to write – which, by that time, I had already begun – that my goal was to write something that had that same kind of magnetic weight.

Naturally, I had no idea what an impossible standard it was that I set for myself. I had no idea that most writers are NOT artists and that by deciding that I WOULD BE an artist was more or less assigning myself to more trial, misery, glory, pain, and epiphany than anybody would choose if they had any sense.

If Orwell was the book that made me want to be an artist, then it was James Thurber's story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, that made me an English major. He's a writer that's generally ignored by both the academics and the outsiders; academics ignore Thurber because he wrote primarily to entertain, sometimes to poke fun, but never to tear down the upper middle class readership of the then young and frenetic New Yorker. He was no Sinclair Lewis. Outsiders ignore him because the New Yorker has become everything that's wrong with contemporary American writing and the intelligentsia; it's insipid, snobbish, lacking in balls or editorial integrity, and is completely isolated from a large segment of writing in America, and has been since Steinbeck. When I read Thurber now, I see him as one in a lineage of American writers that began with Mark Twain; like Mark Twain, Thurber is often pigeon-holed based on his early work. But that's not the only thing they have in common. Twain and Thurber were successful as artists because they showed a clear sense of the absurd. Thurber understood that Mitty, in his day dreaming, had more to do with what America was becoming than the wide-shouldered, straight-backed version that played out in the movies and popular literature. America was, in Thurber's time, a land of desperate, spineless dreamers. And in that realization, there is brilliance that still shines even though we have changed from desperate dreamers to just plain desperate.

But I loved books, and I was developing a love for literature; so I did what seemed to make sense. I threw myself into academia, into the canon. Some of them I loved; most of them I didn't. A few of those have warmed up to me over the years... not because I've developed a greater understanding of their place in the canon but because I'm hitting an age where their words speak to me instead of at me. Robert Frost is one. Dickens is another... though I limit myself to Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop. Whitman spoke to me at an early age; but then so did Chaucer and Milton. Milton is one I have always appreciated because his humane treatment of the devil in Paradise Lost remains a literary achievement that few have come close to. I don't agree with his intent or his final statement on the matter of humanity, the devil, and what it all means; but he was a Puritan's Puritan. He put protest in Protestant. So I overlook my glaring disagreements because … well... he was kind of an asshole. And even when I disagree with other assholes – because I have often been accused of being one myself – I at least like them. Just a little bit.

But even though I loved academia, I was struck with how dogmatic it could be. All institutions are dogmatic, whether they're academic, religious, or political. So I sought out other voices: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Corso. On The Road and Coney Island of the Mind stick out to me as significant influences on my development. Development, not style. I discovered literary rebellion. And it was wonderful. But to really appreciate and understand it, I had to move outside of academia; which began a long series of bouncing from job to job, in and out of academia. Getting divorced had something to do with that, as well. But I see that less a cause and more part of the effect of how I was developing, what I was becoming.