Fascinated by the decadence of pre-war Germany, a frantic epoch frought with passions of social, political and artistic focus, I wrote this poem after watching several old German films. The poem is posted at Tulpendiebe on tumblr, a site created by Jürgen Fauth, the co-founder of the writer’s site, Fictionaut. He has also written a novel, titled “Kino.” My poem, titled, “I see a sea of cinema faces, black and white, black and white, black and white” is my poor attempt to capture something of the decadence and the tone of the era. You can read it at:
The tumblr site also has a link to Fauth’s book and in Tulpindiebe, you will find an odd, curious, fascinating collection of works, prose, poems, art, photos that are marvelously tuned to the epoch and to the period in which Fauth’s novel is placed. It’s a fascinating period.
One of the most memorable film clips from any period is the beer garden scene from Cabaret. I could describe it, but here’s the link.
A charity anthology that puts together the work of authors from around the Globe, New Sun Rising is a perfect example of literary activism. The project was developed by volunteers in response to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. Due to the generous, voluntary efforts of the editors and other people involved with this project, 100% of the proceeds raised by selling this anthology will be directed to The Red Cross in Japan. Launch is set for June 2012 through Kindle. Hard copies may be available in September 2012 through Amazon, but look here for updates on availability.
The anthology includes my short story, “On the Train to Otsu Station,” which tells the tale of a wounded US Marine leaving Japan and returning to the war in Vietnam after a long convalescence. While in Japan, he met a woman and wonders if he’ll ever see her again. An old story with a different perspective.
Here is a trailer developed in anticipation of the upcoming publication of this book. The hauntingly beautiful music and the song, New Sun Rising, comes from Nashville recording artist Daniel Christian. Well worth the time to hear it:
A man who should know once told me, “Before you can write poetry, you must become a poet.” I made note of his words and the fact that he was a published poet and even had a slim collection of poems under his name, so he probably knew what he was talking about. I’ve written close to a thousand poems, but never tried to have one published before. I wrote the poem referenced above in December, took a chance, sent it out to an online literary magazine that is edited by people I trust… trust that is, in this sense: that if I sent them something that was not characteristic of the work I normally send out, they wouldn’t laugh at me for being pretentious.
I write prose and have published a lot of short fiction in literary journals online and in print. I also write novels.
Poems are different. I don’t know if I really understand poems, don’t know if I ever could. I don’t mock poems or poetry, but if I did not like them, I might. Does that make sense? That I like poems, but don’t really understand what they are? Maybe that’s normal… I mean, I can love the beauty of the Southern Cross and the Milky Way, and I did so love to see them, was awed by their beauty in the southern skies as viewed from the stern of a ship in the South Pacific. But when I saw them, I did not think or care about the fact that constellations and galaxies are three dimensional. I did not know or care that they only appeared as I saw them when viewed from the exact point where I was located. I did not really understand them, did not know or ever imagine that if I was transported to a point in the universe light years away from where I was, for instance, that the constellation of the Southern Cross, the configuration of the stars that are in it would change and the abstract perfection of its visual symbolism would seek to exist.
I love poems. But today, although I am, by the loose definition, a published poet, I remain ignorant of what a poem really is or should be. And so, I relegate the concept into a magical context. And maybe that’s a good thing. Either way, I will not change my CV just yet.
Author’s Note: A short, relatively minor scene from a novel about the beginings of the Cold War. Set in the 1950′s, in the USA and Central America, it’s a fiction that relates several true incidents that only recently came to light as CIA and FBI documents became declassified. History relates that in 1950, Pedro Albizu Campos was imprisoned for a perceived role in an assassination attempt upon President Harry Truman. In late 1953, he was pardoned by the same President Truman. On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican Nationalists stood in the balcony above the House of Representatives and fired thirty shots into the assembled Congress, hitting five Representatives. On March 3, as leader of the Nationalists, Pedro Albizu was interviewed for a local paper and, probably due to the ‘inflammatory remarks’ in the interview, or an assumption of guilt in complicity with the shooters, the Governor of Puerto Rico rescinded his pardon and Albizu Campos was arrested on March 6th. He remained in prison until shortly before his death in 1965. This excerpt is one of many asides taken out of context with the traditional style of the rest of the novel. I’m using them, these asides, as a pause in a story filled with dialogue and action, political intrigue and violence. I don’t know if these asides will survive an editor’s incisive need for speed, for streamlined prose, but I think they have value on a literary scale as a kind of ‘moral snapshot.’ I would really appreciate feedback… comments. Thanks.
The reporters from El Imparcial came knocking on his door, pounding, calling out his name, “Pedro, Pedro Albizu… Please let us in.”
Breathlessly they spilled details in the vaguest reveries, assuming he must already know.
“Five representatives… Five Congressmen shot… Four shooters… Nationalists… Three men and Lolita Lebrón.” They repeated her name at every opportunity, enamored with the words… Lolita Lebrón, Lolita Lebrón, Lolita Lebrón, enamored of the sound of her name, the possibilities.
What could he do, but tell them what they came to hear, to call the shootings ’an act of sublime heroism,’ to softly sing his own incriminating ballad in prose, the song of the condemned. Sublime heroism. Viva Puerto Rico. Viva…
When they left, he marveled at the silence.
When they left, he heard the sound of birds, the shouts of children in the street below, the sound of peace that belied the times.
When they left, he sat in a soft chair.
When they left, he sat in a soft chair and waited.
When they left, he sat in a soft chair and waited for the sound of boots on the sidewalk, the stairs, for the sound of hands upon the door, for the sounds of impassioned policemen, for the sound of their shouts, for the feel of their fists and their spittle, for the sound of their condemnations as they carried him away, cuffed and bleeding, silent, away.
Oh, they would come.
Be it minutes, hours or days, they would come.
He smiled, thought in Spanish, Come, then, and seal my fate.
He smiled, said aloud in English, “They also serve who only languish in prison.” We also serve.
There is no sadness
in the whited shades
of a storm so pure,
so silent in the morning,
so covering, secure.
You watch and listen
as life uncovers dawn,
rolls back the secrets
of what exists here,
diamonds in the dust of
every drift, smoke
rising from the chimneys
of Christmas, squirrels
in shimmering fur and
uncertain grace, moving
like ballerinas in
waistcoats, leaping
and fluid on icy
crusts that crunch
beneath your boots
as you listen
and remember.
Life
brought you here.
Dreams
brought you here.
Inside, the quiet breathing
of a woman waits awakening.
So you smile and climb
the stairs.
It may be a mood brought on by realization that life is suddenly connected to finite time in new and shuddering ways. Old friends die, contemporaries with famous names pass away, first into obscurity, then into the shadow realm. Not one to read obituaries, in the internet age, it’s impossible to escape the connections imposed by others, the well meaning organizers of class reunions or veterans looking for former comrades.
Nothing new. I mean, coming to grips with the fact that we will each of us die is not a foreign concept to anyone who’s been close enough to the edge at one time or another.
I’ve been there a few times, but lately there are some subtle nudges, reminders. No matter how young the self image, someone’s always there to let you know that, no, you’re not young anymore, not realy, not connected to the pulse of the culture, art, music, style… something’s there to remind you that your epoch has achieved historical status, that your contemporaries are dropping off the planet like flies trapped in the window pane of mortality.
You get a feeling, a sense of the inevitable.
Maybe it’s not so subtle.
Maybe it’s affecting everybody, everywhere, this sense of… what?
You feel it?
Whatever it is.
Maybe it’s the phenomenon of the end times the preachers always talk about…
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…
Acts 2:17
A pervading sense of something in the air.
Do you feel it too?
Or, maybe it’s just me.
Whatever it is, I can feel a connection to the times that transcends my age or my cultural vision, a connection that stirs and troubles me at times. It’s a feeling I can neither shake nor dismiss.
A feeling.
I say that something’s wrong instinctively. There is no evidence that rings out the message of alarm, no indication that the times are any worse than other times in history. I can’t descend into the iconic pool and emerge with a sign that I can point to as the evidence of what I feel. Feelings are irrational and… God knows, in my lifetime I’ve heard many older people talk about their increasingly dissonant environs as though they represented some new and impossibly horrific age.
No. There have been worse times. Men have always been violent. Times of peace are rare. There have always been cycles of trouble and economic hard times, wars, rumors thereof. Wild kids are perennial. Rampant corruption? Read the history books. Isolation and societal angst? Nothing new.
Every time you can think of some horrific contemporary event, like the killings in Syria… an honest search of history can always produce something worse. How about Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, the history of the indigenous American population from the time of Columbus onward.
Nothing new under the sun, eh?
Because I understand this and unlike my grandparents, I can’t sit back and blame the times, can’t hang it on the zeitgeist because the zeitgeist is really the same old guy in different costumes. The zeitgeist is us. He’s them. He’s everyone that ever lived and pretty much the same today as that guy in the folded linen breechcloth, walking behind an ox pulling a crude plow and planting corn in Mesopotamia in the year umpteeump BC… Or BCE… Or whatever dating system you care to apply. Long time ago, either way you count it. He’s not so different from us. Same guy, really, same fears, same sense of mortality, same questioning frustration about the origin of all things, the purpose of existence… Only difference between us and them? There were no cell phones, no tweets, no worry about someone plowing while texting.
And the Sumerians had nothing equivalent to a Starbucks, no baristas.
But they had an awful lot of questions they couldn’t answer.
And for all of our advanced technological acumen?
For all of our amazing theoretical knowledge?
For all of our scientific advances?
For all our exploration…
All our discovery?
So do we.
All boils down to the one big question… What’s it all about?
I dunno. But I’d like to. Wouldn’t you?
Well. That was productive.
Let’s do this again, shall we?
We’ll have lunch.
Call me.
The story goes like this: Molly Bloom was brilliant, disaffected, the prototypical wild child of 21st century American womanhood, the James Dean of her gender in the epoch. She died at the age of 24, a beautiful blondie, a blue-eyed angel in the world of letters, consumed with love for the squalor of her world and the victim of her own passion for me, the man who killed her.
It’s not really like that. More like: Molly Bloom was flat-out crazy sometimes. The reason we slammed that truck on my Harley was that she put her hands over my eyes. I survived because of my helmet. She’d whipped off her own helmet and tossed it to the street about two blocks back. I didn’t know, or I’d have stopped, gone back to get it. People. Trust me. It was suicide and more like attempted murder where it concerned me. She loved that whole desolation angel scene. I think she was ready to die. God knows, after the damn funeral every Molly wannabe in America bought her novel, ‘The Soliloquy.” It was already big before she died, but it got hot, sat on the top of the New York Times bestseller list forever. Then they made that damn movie. Put the accident at the end of it, which wasn’t even in the book. The guy who played me was playing to the band with all that macho bullshit, hammed it, jammed it to the hilt. Got an Oscar out of making me look really bad. Me? I’m alone and pretty much friendless, suffering from the stigma, not unlike the Kurt Cobain/Courtney Love thing, but where Molly Bloom’s got the Kurt role, a damned unresurrected genius/saint/bodhisattva/zeitgeist and I’m the killer slut. A reversal of roles in gender, but a sign of the times, I guess. So I got a haircut. Moved out of the apartment in Chicago. Went down to Corpus Christi and got a job in a refinery. I work nights. Nobody knows me. Yesterday, though, some woman tracked me down, stopped me in the early morning as I walked out the main gate. Said she wanted to write a book about me. Said I was the hot topic. Not a hot topic. The hot topic. Hot fucking topic. “The man who killed Molly Bloom.” Now, I have to move again. This time? I’m going to learn French and move to Montreal. The truth? I loved Molly more than I ever loved myself. Should’ve been me that died that day. Maybe it was. It was.
This remarkable magazine, LOST IN THOUGHT, is published in Canada and is a stunning mix of visual art, poetry and fiction. One of the finest magazines I’ve ever seen, I am proud to be included in the collection. Each illustrated story and poem pairs a writer with either a photographer or an illustrator. The result is singularly arresting and represents a new class of magazine, one that rivals any that you’ve seen before.
I’m also happy to say that my story, On the train to Otsu Station will be included in an upcoming charity anthology, New Sun Rising. Proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to charities providing earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan. The anthology was sidetracked for a while, but is now in gear and I’ll post a link for purchase when it’s available.
In the meantime, here is a link to information on the ongoing effort to publish:
As for the rumors, I will have a poem published in Blue Fifth Review sometime in May and my story, Waiting for the Wolf will appear in print sometime soon in the Canadian journal, Lost in Thought. In the meantime, I’m working on two novels, one of which should be finished in November of this year.
Cormac McCarthy has transcended the ordinary boundaries of genre and become his own and magnificent category. "Blood Meridian," with its brilliant characterizations, harsh metaphor and rich language may be the finest American novel written to date.
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