The hours that we wasted...

Days in the park.

A glimpse at how my mind works:

Typing the word “pinks” in the post below, I free associated my way to Socialism, but also to Gay Pride and the Pinkerton Detective Agency—and from there to many other places, including memories of a series of photocopied comics I did years ago: the covers bore the spurious company name “Up All Night productions” over a reproduction of the Pinkerton logo—an unblinking eye with the motto We Never Sleep. Which led me to the Bird-That-Never-Sleeps, from a Native American myth that I know from the telling of Odds Bodkin... and there it ended, just before I’d have had to resort to a goddam flow-chart.

Did this happen overnight?

Sprays of forsythia trail Impressionist crome yellow thumb-smears across morning lawns: the poetry of half-remembered names from longago summers spent tall and tanned and spade-in-hand—rhodeys and pinks exploding, sweet woodruff, phlox and flaming Judas like fireworks in the eye. When did this happen? Have I been asleep?

Poetry Clinic: The May King

First of the month means two things here at the House of Fear—firstly, that the rent’s due; and secondly, that it’s time to check this month’s patient into the Poetry Clinic. You know the drill: each month I put a piece of writing from my notebooks both onto this blog and The Underground, and y’all come and tear it to shreds.

I’m never sure how much comment or background I should include with these things: somewhere in the back of my head I feel that the only worthwhile poem is one that explains itself on its own terms, that defines its context within the body of the poem itself, that doesn’t require a page of footnotes—but at the same time isn’t ham-handed and obvious. Writing poetry is like writing a mystery novel—you want the audience to feel intelligent, but not to patronize them; there’s a fine line between giving them fair clues and telegraphing the solution. Give ‘em something to figure out, some connections to make—but best if it’s something they can figure out, leastways without the aid of a fucking guidebook.

Anywez: May Day should be a time for political commentary, but I’m pretty disgusted with all sides of politics and protest lately: so, instead, this...

The May King

In cherry blossoms rapt and stinking of semen,
serenaded by spring peepers and by birds at last returned,
I am collecting in the grooves of my big boots
black mud to track into the kitchen;
King of the May in denim hung, a knife in my jeans
and the taste of rain-to-come in my nose and mouth.
The cool night wind stirs the hairs of my armpits
as I walk in grass once again green,
in lawns given over to thyme and mint and onions,
in proud unruly brambles, among splintered wreckage
of windblown evergreen; mangled erector-set skyscraper
brought down by April snows.

Ankle deep in fecund loam,
shaking the bowl that bears the garbage
into the microbial heat of the compost heap,

I am the drenching storm that drops
buckets out of nowhere,
the drowned worms on the sidewalk;
the fresh plantings in the graveyard;
the fat furry bee bumbling
through the open window, his flight
still slow and logy, the sleep of winter
still fogging his many-lobed eyes.

For a moment I leave
the lights of the house at my back
and let my shadow fall
forward across the Summer months to come.

The moment passes;
then, his passage lit by fireflies,
the May King turns
to embrace
the works of Man once more.

for Shannon Quinn

Join the conversation on the Underground, or e-mail me on poetry, politics, or anything else at all...

Jacknife Swan

Endless, blood-soaked dreams. When I awoke, exhausted from cutting throats all night, I could feel my wings, coiled and furled in the knotted muscles of my arms, squirming towards daylight.

[redacted]

[This post, a preview of the upcoming webcomic RUN, has been removed because linking the images from the artist's website was proving a logistical nightmare for him... and without the pretty pictures, well, there's not much point, is there...? Just keep watching Opi8—it'll be up soon enough...]

Allow me a brief shining moment of auto-hype:

I’ve had an e-mail from artist Brian LaFramboise, who I know from our days with Arch-Type Studios. Brian is currently drawing my five pages from the collaborative comics story “Run,” an exquisite corpse-style project that will appear later this Spring on Opi8.

I’m dying to see this—not least because I don’t know how it ends! I wrote the third section of a five-part story, which was a marvelous challenge—I had to start resolving and fleshing out some of the stuff from the setup, while threading in new mysteries and monkey-wrenches for the writers who got it next. I wanted to leave the subsequent writers with problems to solve, but in order to play fair, I had to make them soluble problems: thus I wrote them with solutions of my own in mind, solutions which almost certainly will not make it into the final story.

The funny thing is, my fellow writers and I have never discussed the story: it was forbidden, as part of the rules of the original game—but now that the script is written and with the artist, we’ve never spoken of it. Not for lack of opportunity—we’ve all got each other’s e-mail addresses, and most of us frequent Warren Ellis’s Delphi Forum (Chad Ward, who runs Opi8, is also webmaster for warrenellis.com)—but it’s almost like the game is still going on, and won’t be done until the final story is up on the Opi8 website. I’m sure we’ll discuss it then: but for now, it’s all delicious anticipation.

Dream Dairy [sic]

Damn you, Joe Zenith—you and your infectious malaise as well! With all the discussion of nightmares and how best to combat them, how deliciously ironic to see me, bad-aleck vaquero shaman nightmare-fighter papi that I am, lying awake at an ungodly hour, cold terror seeping from me even as the details of the dream (thankfully) fade.

And when dawn comes I realize that shortly before bed I did something I usually don’t: I ate a bowl of breakfast cereal with milk. And had a fucking nightmare.

Sigh. Score one for the electrochemical model of consciousness.

Notional Becomes Notation

Once upon a time, children, our Tom Coates had a vision: a vision less-known than that which led to the founding of The Bomb, or of the Barbelith Underground, but no less prophetic for being more obscure.

Tom’s vision was to be called Slutcore: and lo, it would be a website, built around a gallery of photographs of himself and some friends poncing about in a distinct music-magazine-photograph kind of way. And lo, it would be a website for a fictional band, the eponymous Slutcore, who would be a band in all senses except that they didn’t actually write songs, play music, record, or perform.

It was too much for me to get my poor head around at first, but once I “got it” it seemed to me to be pure genius. Sadly, nothing much ever came of it.

But it seems the zeitgeist has caught up. On the one hand there’s Gorillaz—a remarkable conceptual product of meatspace musicians doing, in essence, voice-work for a "band" of literal cartoons (but Damon Albarn et al are no more Gorillaz than, say, Nancy Cartwright is Bart Simpson: Bart has a life and a cultural presence that goes far beyond the parameters of Ms. Cartwright’s sterling performance), and artists who give the band an image—and image is literally everything, for Gorillaz. Then there’s young Ben Haggar’s project, an assemblage of conceptual bands with no music and no meatspace presence, whose members and music exist only in the fevered words of press releases.

Now I hear of Chicks On Speed, a project whose parameters originally fell the closest to the Slutcore paradigm. The initial purity of the concept was daffy genius. But Chicks On Speed have now taken the additional steps of actually recording some music, and of touring to promote it. Now Chicks On Speed are just another band, one of thousands.

Fucking sell-outs.

Still, I think The Archies were on to something.

Why am I not surprised?

I have at last burst a blood vessel—this in my right eye, leaving half of my squint thickly bloodshot. I had hoped for some of the scary asymmetrical-optic cool of a Thom Yorke, or a Bowie. I’d have settled for Gomez Addams. Or even for young Brian Warner, lead singer for that popular beat combo the young people seem to like so much—the Marillion Mansions, or somesuch (keep music evil, indeed...). (vide Rollo)

But instead, when I look in my mirror, I see Stark—the cell-block boss and bull lifer from Brian Azzarello’s “Hard Time” arc in Hellblazer, a big, sagging lump execrably rendered by Richard Corben.

I am an old man, and I read too many fucking comics.