The Man Comes Around

     It rained that Tuesday. The gutters overloaded and filthy water washed up over the curbs. The club hadn't opened yet, and the few within were still, watching the rain. It streaked the one-way reflective front windows. A woman beneath a large black umbrella stopped and checked her hair in those windows. Once sure the rain hadn't mussed her hair too greatly, she hurried on.
     The piano player was oiling the dark wood of his instrument. Most of the lamps were off and the empty barroom was hung with grays and cool blues of wet light. From where Lou watched, the piano player, sleeve of his white shirt billowing at the garter, was almost silhouetted against the front windows. Lou liked the man, and his quiet dedication to his work.
     The piano player stood straight, cloth in his hand, and looked out the windows. “It's going to be strange” he said without turning.
     Lou wasn't sure what the man meant, “Strange?”
     “Without you running the place.”
     “Oh. Yeah, well. Who's surprised, eh?”
     “Oh, no one”, the piano players tone was coolly even, “but it will still be strange.”
     Silence hung in the room, and the rain rose then to fill the emptiness with its battering. Large drops shook the windows, maybe the whole building, with their force. The piano player gathered his materials and went into the back room.
     Lou started to make himself an old-fashioned. He called to the piano player, “You wan'a drink?”
     “I'm alright, Lou” the other man said from just behind him. Startled, Lou slopped the bourbon a little. The man moved so quietly.
     “What are your plans?”
     Lou sipped the drink, “I'm going down to the coast. My sister left me a place down there, and I've never really used it. Be good to now.”
     “They'll send the man around.”
     “They don't know about the place” he sipped more, and stood silent, rinsing the liquor across his tongue, for a long time, “but yeah. They'll send the man around.”
     The piano player nodded, “Ya know, Lou, while you've got the stuff out, I think I'll have that drink.”

     The dock was cold. To the south the water was tossed gray, capped with dingy white. The sky another layer of the same, muted gray across the expanse of ocean, below closer pale gray clouds. The piano player flexed his hands, enjoying the leather of his gloves on his knuckles. He felt good. The salt in the air teased his taste buds. The cool temperature was refreshing, and he enjoyed wearing the wool coat.
     “Do you travel much” the woman asked.
     “No. But I always enjoy it when I do” and he kissed her. She giggled and did feminine things with her eyelashes at him.

     Lou opened the door, and started to smile at the familiar face. The piano player waited until Lou's face had fallen before smiling back.
     “So, it's you.”
     The piano player stepped into the cottage, brushing past Lou, observing the emptiness.
     “It was always you?”
     “Yes. Always me, Lou.
     “You've known me a long time.”
     “I have. You were a good man, for a long time.”
     “Now I ain't?”
     “Now you're not.”
     Lou looked fat, and sullen, and old. He felt it too. The piano player killed him, quietly, and left. The breeze was still blowing in off the water, cold and salty.

Poem Published at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k)

I'm very pleased to note that one of my poems has now been published at Poor Mojo's Almanac(k): "Holiday Poem"

I've been reading Poor Mojo's for a few years now, and am delighted to now be a small part of that wonderful publication. I'm also quite pleased by the timing of this publication, being just prior to Christmas. The poem is drawn from an experience on Christmas thirteen years ago, was written around Christmas last year, and now has been published just prior to Christmas. Great, great, timing all around.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Penitent Distance

She wasn't able to find the last shell casing, lying silent and glimmerless in the shadows of the tall grass. A panic set in that they would catch her now. She swallowed it, with the bile and let joy rise in its place. In this joy she ran.

The motel smelled of cigarettes and water leaks. Thin curtains barely hid her from the light, and she slept restlessly beside the pistol. Her joy came and went, another part of ragged dreams making for fitful sleep. In the moments she slept her long fingers arose, with wills of their own, and caressed the pistol. In waking, she held it close and smelled the steel and gunoil. As the night wore on to day, she knew what had to be done. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fought for hope of another option, but with the dawn breaking came certainty.

It was worse than the killing. The pieces of her friend, stripped to bare components in a bread sack, turned her stomach. She felt an awful emptiness as its familiar weight was reduced to parts jostling and dangling in the cheap plastic. The riverbank stretched before her, and through her grief she saw that the water flowed. Bird songs fought against her, but their joy was winning out.
She dropped pieces of him as she went. Small ones first, into the mud and flowing brown water. She took her time, and felt like she walked some great penitent distance between each lonely, and hopeful, splash and plop. As the sun drew low in the sky, setting the river ablaze in reflection, she emptied the bag and dropped it. This was the last of him, the barrel. Her fingers ached from the loneliness of each piece she'd dropped before, and ached more to feel his cold metal so long a friend. She kissed this last of him, and found it cold and rank with oil against her lips. With a cry she flung his finality into the deep water, and stood watching the ripples become overwhelmed in the flow.

Link Musings

I've been debating starting to do regular link posts... I might. If I do, they may be in the form of thought-streams from my day, or a few days (if some sort of topical, or at least related, lumpet emerges from my reading/thinking/writing for more than a day). This may also be another random post, never to be repeated, in a blog full of them.

Digital Ecology? - This musing from Jacquet is pretty interesting, and reaches beyond the immediate field in which her musings occur. I keep returning to “This is a different type of ecology, one facilitated by the digital universe”, and wondering if there isn't more there. The idea that the digital universe has its own ecology whispers beneath the surface. Not that that is a new idea...just a compelling one.

50 Posts About Cyborgs - This is interesting for the topic/material, but also for the format. I'm increasingly interested in the variety allowed by “blog form” publishing. I like the idea that a stand-alone, non-continuous, digital object can be created as a blog – Particularly in the simple interface delivered by Tumblr. Although I'm not sure I need more inspiration to start new blog projects, as I'm sitting at... half a dozen blogs now, including this one. Most of them I have no idea what to do with... other than I wanted to write about, or create something about, a topic that didn't fit in well on a blog I'd already established. That said, I have some writing/thought projects that would make interesting non-updating blog-form works.
On the Cyborg topic:

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented. We have used our minds to manufacture our selves and thus we humans today are the first cyborgs. We have invented ourselves. And we are not done yet. Kevin Kelly

I like a lot of this (the whole piece), although some of it is just distressing. Distressing in that it gives me visions of fat, iDevicePadObject plugged in, and tuned out, humans; Evolved with our technology, gone slow, dumpy and soft. Slow, soft, dumpy things are food to my mind. Obligate button pushers are a terrifying concept. They are not spear throwers, or rifle shooters; Those dangerous creatures of beautiful and lethal form. I refuse to be a button pusher. I'll go wild, and raise other wild things, if I must.

Newspaper Extinction Timeline- Interesting in the whole new publishing vs. old publishing way. I wonder how true this is for local papers in more remote places? The nearest towns to me are small, and isolated by miles and miles without urban sprawl; They are also not technologically contemporary communities, nor (most importantly) are there electronic media sources to supply them. What of the small town local paper in the Western US, and similar areas of geographic isolation, low population and low support from electronic media? Local media is different when you're in San Francisco, Ca. and San Francisco, NM.

I got notification of an acceptance the other day (on my birthday actually), and it should be getting published soon... If so, you'll get more soon. If not, perhaps more weeks of silence. This is my blogination-machine, and I'll use it as I see fit, after all.

Two Fingers

     “Bourbon.”
     She always ordered two fingers. Held up, slightly apart, although never a sign of peace or victory. The first times, I'd reached for the well and she'd shaken her head. Slowly, as if moving faster might be damaging to her fine, articulate, neck. Her long neck which pulsed as she swallowed her bourbon. Sometimes I saw her stroking it, her long fingers tightening around its ivory shaft. Her eyes would meet mine, turn hard and then look to her cigarette in the other hand. Those nights she came in, that is how it was. I poured her good bourbon, she smoked her expensive cigarettes and my stomach rumbled. Hungry on low pay, and an emptiness other than food.

     In later years, with a fuller stomach, it was her neck by which I judged all others. Measuring them as they drank beer, and Jack Daniels by the gallon, smoking Camels. Their hands limp and numb, moving roughly. Thick fingers strangling the joy from anything they touched. Their eyes all too soft and wanton.

Sleeping, Snorting, Fucking.

This is a bit delayed, as I was waiting for the last of them to run, but I've recently had three pieces published in the lovely journal Sleep.Snort.Fuck.
You may find all three of them here: Morgan Atwood, at Sleep, Snort, Fuck

Or, in order of publication:

Magnum

Measure of Ecstasy

Taste

Hopefully needless to say, given the name of the journal, some content may be considered Not Safe For Work (/Wife/Children).

I feel spoiled to, yet again, have somewhere I really like publish my work.

(These publications also mark an interesting point for me as a poet. I once said all my poetry was non-fiction and this is no longer true. These mark the first success I've had, both in personal feelings about them and publication, with fictional poetry. I say that not to disown the themes or any unpleasantness, but more because I find the revelation of my own process a wonderful ongoing mystery.)

Rules for Writing

The more I write, interact with other writers, and attempt to get published, the more observations I have on my craft. I have begun keeping a running list of some of my observations that have become personal rules (albeit flippant) for my writing. At some point this will be a longer list, and worth putting out in its entirety. For now, however, my first five rules will have to suffice. Will add more over time.

1. Turn token and poetry pay into beer. (Turn no pay into beer; Look in the couch cushions for money.)

2. Turn every six pack into poetry, every bottle into a story.

3. Earn acceptances that make all your rejections turn to regret in the pit of the rejecting editors stomach.

4. Get back in the saddle. Now.

5. Commit to the shape of things, and embrace the "attitude of the knife"; When editing is finalized, divorce yourself from any desire for the work, cut it off, say “now it's complete, because it's ended here", and send it in.

Publishing for Kindle

I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Okay, your money where my mouth is.
Rum and Donuts is now available to Kindle users, for a small subscription fee.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002T9TU1U

It's still available right here for free, and will remain so. Those who feel its worth some nickels to read on their Kindle, can shell out those nickels. The rest of you, as you were - You're still my favorites.

It's just something different I want to try. I doubt it'll make a significant difference in anything. I just want to see the process from the inside. It might go away.

Making Our Own Justice (A Riff on "Virtual CrowdSurfing")

The other day Steve Bodio commented on one of my entries, and noted that “...in a just world you'd be paid for this.”
I agreed, even though it wasn't my best writing (the re-write the computer ate was much better), but was dismissive too. I said, and it's true, that I'm just happy to put something into the world that will either resonate with another human being, or elucidate, inform or excite.
I come from what I've begun to describe as a lonely culture – It's sparsely populated, but it is a culture in whole - I'm proud of it and think we're all very interesting. I'm always glad to strike a chord with others who identify. And I'm thrilled if something from my culture sparks or rekindles something in someone else. That's deeply satisfying for me. At the end of the day, I write to fulfill and satisfy myself, and I'd lie if I said I didn't draw part of my satisfaction from being read. The creation is fundamental, and it drives on regardless, but it's satisfying to have a cry in the darkness answered. As a reader I've always felt I was participating in the writers finished art, rather than just receiving it – As a writer, I seek to participate with my readers not simply produce product.
But in a just world, if the participation is good, if the work is good, I should get paid shouldn't I? Of course I should. In a just world.
I'm not sure I believe the world is just. I believe the world is neutral though, and that it is up to us to make our own... whatever, really. Including justice. I believe this is true, on many fronts. As artists, we have to make a lot of things for ourselves, so what's stopping us from making our own justice? Okay, maybe not make entirely, but enable.
We can't necessarily force people to pay for our art - If we limit its availability only to those who pay we may be limiting ourselves right out of existence – But we can enable our audience, our fans and collectors, to pay us if they want to, can't we?

There are already writers with “Donate” or “Support” buttons on their blogs. They produce a lot of content, or a body of work, that is easily accessible and typically for free. No demand is placed on the audience to pay for it, but they are enabled to do so if they think its worth it.
We're also seeing novels, chapbooks and other publications, as well as music in a variety of forms, offered using a “Pay what you feel it is worth” model.
I'm finding this idea more and more attractive – Because I'd like to do this for a living, or at least part of my living. Or at least for beer money. To be able to devote more of the time and energy to writing and the rest of my art, that I end up spending on wage earning (or trying to at least).

So what's it worth to you?
Nothing? Cool. Keep reading. I'm slowly stealing your soul and corrupting your heart the more of my ideas you entertain, so it's all good. Seriously, it is all good.
You'll buy my book once I have one? Bring it around for coffee, I'll sign it.
Not a lot, but sometimes you'd pay for reading me? Awesome, thanks.
You want to be my sugar mama, support me financially and * ahem * otherwise, all for keeping up my writing? Please email at least three clear photos that aren't extreme close ups, and show you clearly in good lighting from different angles, and a list of references.
I'm being flippant here, but that is (minus the creepy uberfan sugar mama AKA Kathy Bates in Misery psycho-fan) the gist of the enabling I'm talking about.

This isn't something I'm going to implement now. Most of you don't know me, and I'm not producing content at a rate that is really befitting suggesting recompense for it. For me, now is not the time to roll this out – Just the time to start thinking about it. Mapping out how I'd like to try putting it to work.
As a writer, it's pretty easy to map.
As a blacksmith, and artist metalsmith? Not so much.
Tangible, physical, art is hard to transition into the virtual realm – Those physical materials cannot be emailed. How can I, how can my fellows, as a materials artist work with what Amanda Palmer dubs “Virtual Crowdsurfing”? That's trickier. I have several ideas, some of which I'm going to keep to myself for awhile. But, among those ideas is one of knowledge and experience sharing.
There are a lot of people who are not, and don't want to be, artists who remain intensely interested in the processes of art. There are those who want to learn about an art other than their own. Still others want to learn how to do a type of art. As artists, we can be educators about our art. Coming from the blacksmithing world, most blacksmiths are also teachers or at least have taught occasionally. I think, as with other forms of art, we aren't limited strictly to that art, in what we can teach. You can teach a great deal with art.
Couldn't a metal artist (or a wood worker, fabric artist, glass worker, etc. etc.) put out “process content”, demonstrations, tutorials, videos of the art being made (which opens up possibilities of cross-media video art), in a public fashion, and stick a donations button on their website/blog? You could take it out of the virtual world as well: A free public demo with a tip-jar set out. If I show up at an event, and forge an iron hat, won't there be someone to drop money in it? I'd like to think so.
I think this cross over into the really-real world is extremely necessary for building a fan base, and one that is rich with the actual human touch. Musicians have this made, because live shows are damn near guaranteed – They will happen, they have to. Writers can do readings, or perform poetry. Other artists have to innovate in how they reach their audience, if they want to try out the “virtual crowdsurfing” thing. Without the fan base, the people to catch you when you dive off, you'll get nowhere. (Yeah, I'm riffing on AFP here. She's right on, see my last entry and go check out her blog.)

This is an area, a realm of possibility, that I am truly excited about and actively exploring. Woe unto my other projects, I've found something else time consuming.

Update:
Some models/ideas of “virtual crowd surfing” as a writer that I think support my own:

Nathan Tyree is hard at work on a novel project titled “Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski Fistfight in Hell”, and has auctioned a fairly prominent role as a character in his novel via eBay. The move, apparently, has generated him some measure of buzz in addition to the immediate monetary advantage. Also apparently a burned thumb. http://waitsandbukowski.wordpress.com/

Jeremy C. Shipp is selling subscriptions to his short story writing as Bizarro Bytes, http://jeremycshipp.com/bizarrobytes.htm.
He offers multiple levels of subscription, for those wanting to offer further support, and has some interesting incentives for those who do.

Stephen Elliot, for his memoir The Adderall Diaries, used advance copies originally destined for media outlets to create a “lending library” for fans, http://therumpus.net/2009/09/about-that-lending-library-notes-on-book-publishing-in-a-socially-networked-world/
The only requirement was that the copy had to be forwarded to the next person on the list once read. His thoughts on the idea are pretty interesting. The idea has a lot of merit. Just another example of working the crowd in new and innovative ways. He's also supporting the book with a tour and getting out there, another essential element.

Regarding Short Fiction

Not much substance, of my own, here but two things I'd like to note:

Back in April, the NY Times ran a piece from A.O. Scott on the value of short fiction in American letters. The things he has to say sync nicely with my ideas in the previous post about the direction in fiction: Brevity's Pull: In Praise of the American Short Story
The quote:

"The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?

The death of the novel is yesterday’s news. The death of print may be tomorrow’s headline. But the great American short story is still being written, and awaits its readers."

I still say the novels will come. They may be different, but we'll get to them - We need the long immersion in characters, place and narrative ecstasy that novels provide.

Secondly: Nanoism, which I linked previously, is running a contest for fiction that will fit into a Tweet, 140 characters. They're looking for five piece serials, which will form a more complete work. You can learn more here: http://nanoism.net/meta/december-serial-contest/
A very interesting idea, and proof that even the shortest form can go the distance. I intend to submit, but either way look forward to seeing the end result. The work they have up already as stand-alone stories is all quite impressive.

What's Happened to Fiction?

I grew up among books and writers. The word, and the next one and all the pages full have been elements of my life as long as I can remember. I don't want to say I took this for granted, but I have. In doing so, it seems that I missed something. Or a few somethings. Among them, the following:

• Men don't read good fiction.
• Novels are dead.

These assertions aren't mine, they're things I've come across recently in different places recently.

The first is an issue raised by BULL: Mens Fiction, via Fictionaut. Men buy around 30% of the fiction sold, primarily thrillers and crime fiction. Which leaves literary fiction to the women. I hadn't given this any thought prior to hearing about it, but find it very disquieting.
I don't really mean to say that there is no “good” fiction in the thriller and crime fiction fields. I read a lot of drek, almost anything not religious or romantic, and actually enjoy plenty of that type of fiction. However, on those shelves remain the Dan Brown's and David Morrel's and countless other fairly bad writers. Writers who use one crutch and cliché after another, and who will never be a Steven King, much less a Maclean or a Hemingway.
If men aren't reading good fiction, then it stands to reason that men's fiction isn't getting published. We end up with a chicken, or egg, sort of question. Is it not being published because it won't be read, or is it not being read because it's not being published?
My view of writing and authors is very male centric. I like plenty of female writers, and their work, but the influences on my enjoyment of writing, and being a writer, are primarily male. My father who taught me about poetry. My fifth grade teacher who showed me that poetry was written by real people having real experiences, not recounting mad charges and death in far off lands. Writers I met as a kid, like Steve Bodio, and Joel Bernstein. Writers whose work motivated, changed, or challenged me in my audacious youth when I read far outside my age group, McCarthy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and even the baser Heinlein. And whose work does that today, Palahniuk, Frederick Busch, and the above as well. Writers whose work and experiences resonate with my own life, McMurtry in particular at this point. All these influences are masculine. It's something of a shocking wake-up to see that masculinity in good fiction may have suffered a downturn.
It raises a lot of questions. Primarily about the nature of male reading. Why do men read, or perhaps better, why don't men read anything worth a damn? In wondering at the why of this, I have to ask myself why I read. Am I a reader because I write? I've always thought I was a writer because I read, but maybe that's not correct. My own perspective is suspect here, as I'm not just part of the audience.
Part of it is entertainment. I read to be entertained, like I imagine most people do. Some will argue that reading for entertainment alone precludes reading for intellectual stimulation, but I disagree. I am entertained by mental calisthenics and deep thoughts and discoveries and seek it out in music, movies, television and writing of all types. I'm also pretty confident that I'm not unique in this, even among men. Women are not the only people on the planet who want to think deep thoughts and engage in mental stretching. On the opposite side of the coin, I also read as a form of mental escapism – I want to be involved in something very not my immediate life, and let my mind relax. This is where, for me, reading “garbage” comes in. But one type of writing is not exclusive to the other – I do both, and again am pretty sure I'm not alone in at least the right motivations and interests
So, why do men still primarily read non-challenging, unintellectual, formulaic and cliched garbage? The place I feel left to turn to in answer, is society at large. Somewhere the American culture has told men that its not okay to be literary. It's knitting and tatting, not logging and grilling, and just not something that men do. But why?
It's a damn shame. It convicts me even more of the importance of masculine voices in writing. I'd realized it was a needed element when I first found BULL, before I ever planned to submit anything even. There exists western, eastern, southern, GBLT, and woman's writing and writers, but who identifies as a “male writer” or a writer of “mens fiction”? No one who's selling, apparently. And even the distinctly masculine voices in contemporary literature are being co-opted by feminine movements. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one of the most distinctly masculine novels I think I've read, was brought to the attention of America at large by being placed on Oprah's book list.
There's nothing wrong with women, southerners or GBLT folks, but there is something goddamned wrong with this.

The second among literary issues I missed is the supposed death of the novel. I read this on Tom Russell's blog, and actually called bullshit in the comments. I don't think the novel is dead. I'm seriously out of touch with current novels though, particularly anything highbrow. The most recent literature I've read has been The Road and a Palahniuk or two. I've been rather caught up in the literary past. But, I see a lot of novels that look good being published, and quite a few that I hear are good to read too. I can't really swallow the idea of the novel being dead.
However, the thought nags. Maybe it actually is. If I, as a reader, have been visiting the literary past of ghosts like Maclean, Cheever, Hemingway, and grand old men like McCarthy, for my diet of novels then what does that say about the current state of the things? Without a doubt, 80% of my literary fiction diet comes from short fiction journals, both online and in print. Perhaps a result of this, most of my writing is not on my novel, but on flash, short fiction and poetry. And I don't seem to be alone. I see a lot of good, fundamentally good, fiction being written in the form of flash and short stories. I am even seeing powerfully good poetry out there. It's accessible, it's at the tip of the finger, at the end of the hand placed on the mouse or touchpad.
I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the shape and form of popular internet media and communications. The majority of America is online, and our creative engagement with words and communication in this medium is short. Blog posts are short. Facebook status updates are short. Tweets are short.
Twitter is the perfect example. One hundred and forty characters, to communicate effectively. And, really, we've gotten good at it. It's become entertaining, effective and, finally, important. Friends bitch and share and plan inside the limits of a Tweet. Businesses advertise, share updates and network. Revolutions, or the attempts there-of, are documented - The best information coming from Iran in recent troubles has been in one hundred and forty character bursts. That is what finally convinced me that Twitter had some actual value. And now, there are literary efforts, such as Nanoism, focused on extremely short fiction that will fit into a Tweet.
The modern face of textual communication is short. Why should anyone be surprised that written art would follow that? Even some of the more successful novels and memoirs of recent years have begun as blogs.
So, maybe I am wrong and the novel is dead. Or I'm half wrong, and the novel is elderly and graying. If that's the case though, it's not because culture is dead. It's not because we've lost something. Exactly the opposite in fact. We've found a way to retain our literary culture, our artistic use of language, in the modern era. There's been no death – Merely a refinement. If anything, it forces writers to be better.
Narrative Magazine recently had a small contest asking for people to contribute six word stories, in the tradition of the supposed original flash fiction piece by Hemingway. Hemingway's six word story, the product of a ten dollar bar bet, was the essence of succinct and powerful fiction: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”
If the internet influenced literary culture is cultivating a standard of writers who can do as much with as little as Hemingway, then we'll be just fine. The novels will happen, and when they do, they'll be magnificent.

Now, if we can just make it okay for men to read them. Maybe the internet will help that as well. If the publishers, and their often female staff focusing on the female 70% of the market, aren't delivering then the internet will.
Let's not lament what's happened to fiction, its still here – Rather lets ask “What's Happening to Fiction”, and what can we as readers and writers contribute.

Short Story Published

I'm pleased to announce that BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men has published my short-story, "Four, in the Morning".

It's a real pleasure to see it up over there, as I'm a big fan of what BULL is doing. The idea, and quality of the work published, is stellar. I'm honored to be keeping such company.

Check out "Four, in the Morning", and then take a look at the rest of the work!

An Important Comment on the Way We (Bloggers) Write

I normally don't repeatedly link to the same source, at least so close together, but I feel this has to be done.
Steven Pressfield has expanded his blog, and as well as commentary on the war in Afghanistan, he's instituted a "Writing Wednesdays" post, on writing (of course). His first entry, this past ... (wait for it) ... Wednesday, was one of the best things I've read on any type of writing, but particularly for us bloggers.
You should read it.

"Writing Wednesdays": An Experiment

Pressfield's has quickly become one of my favorite blogs, and I'm watching what he has to say closely as, so far, I think he's been very much on point. I promise, however, that I will stop fan-boying with this entry.

As someone who writes both Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction, and uses his blog as a venue for those pieces, as well as observation and opinion pieces, I have fallen very much into the trap of ego that Pressfield describes in that entry.
Not only do my readers have a hard time separating my truth from my lies, but I have trouble separating myself from my bullshit, which hampers my bullshit. I seek to create really good bullshit - Well turned bits of phrase and narrative that compel, interest and expand the mind of my readers. I was aware of several other things hampering this (such as my continual difficulties in being able to proof read and edit, yet rushing to post), but my ego was in the way of seeing my ego.
A valuable lesson.

A New Tag

I avoid "administrative" blogging to a large extent, but am adding a new "Post Label"/Tag to clear some things up.
I post both fiction and non-fiction on this blog. Starting now (and retroactively as of tonight) all fiction entries will have a "Fiction" tag.
All creative non-fiction entries will remain untagged as such, though they will continue to bear the tag "Experience".

Doing this had made me consider two things:
First... the amount of fiction I've posted here is rather slight. I think a few readers may be surprised at what didn't pick up a Fiction tag. Or maybe not.
Secondly... None of the poetry posted here is fictional. And that is true for the majority (I can only think of a single piece that's fiction). It's an interesting rumination on the nature of poetry.

The Broken, Holy

It isn’t the rain chasing us off the mountain, so much as the lightning. The old mine complex is full of metal. Roofs, walls, random steel poles and fixtures sunk into the earth in cement. The whole affair already quasi-mystical in its abstruse purposefulness. An industrial henge to confound the archaeologists of the future. Such steel mysteries tend to bring lightning strikes, however, so we cut short our exploration.
Hard-faced nylon jackets pulled up under our chins, hoods over baseball caps, we rustle as we walk. The road, or what had once been, glistens and glitters. Broken glass, bits of pyrite and galena, chunks of dishes long ago shattered. The scattered remains of a century of mining that ended half again as many years ago. These bits come up through the soil, only to be washed and kicked back under again. Archaeologists won’t understand them. The soft, ornate roses networked around the rim of a broken china plate must’ve had some deep religious significance. Beautiful women, not haggard dust ruined miners, must’ve held them cupped to their breasts. Dancing naked around the steel winches atop the hill, feet cut and bleeding on the ore rich ground.
We walk on back to the car. We wonder, maybe worry, someone has taken notice of the bright red station wagon parked outside the gate. Its warrantless, the locals are frightened of rain. It melts adobes and cuts arroyos across perfectly good pasture. Rain is ruin, in the desert. No one goes out in the rain. Looking down the slope, the town is small far below, rain clouds reaching down to it. I can see people, behind their windows, hiding from the outstretched limbs of the sky.
Outside the car, where someone had parked before, is an empty Codeine cough syrup bottle. More mystical refuse. Some strange and complex love rite, consecrated in the passing of the amber plastic vessel from one set of lips to another. Greedy, choking down the foul contents, washing it out with beer. I kick it and point so my buddy will see. We shake our heads.

Neither of us wants to go home. On the drive down we’re looking out at the grey sky, wisps of rain and dry, desperate, earth. Seeking something other than the discomfiting surrounds of a trailer house by the railroad tracks. We want to earn the cold beer that’s sitting in the fridge.
He slows and pulls off the highway, bumping onto a dirt road in a little valley. Framing the east boundary, are small red hills with darker rock upthrusts. To the west, even heavier basalt ridges rose. On our right, the western ridges are full of climbing spots, with names like Spook and Wallflower, the quirkiness of those who would identify and first trump the rock’s challenging paths. Between us, sits a small private burial, fenced with a small structure covering the grave. About the size of a dog house, with a cross on top, it looks like a long forgotten Rocky Mountain Baptist church, alone in some great expanse, seen from miles away.
I look over it, looking up the slope to Wallflower. There are no ropes set, no climbers on the face, none gathered below. Driven away by the fear of rain, getting stuck in the awful exposed clay. I am disappointed.
We drive on, finally stopping at some weathered board corrals and leaving the car behind. We walk east at first, and I am bored with this. The overhanging cave we want to investigate proves to be full of Catholic santos and prayer candles. The black soot of the candles covers the walls and ceiling, one new layer in generations of them. Mirrored glass Christmas balls hang from this same ceiling. I reholster the pistol I’d drawn as we approached, on the off chance of habitation, and we turn toward the big climbing walls.
We cross down to the road and walk up it a ways. A small sedan passes us, bumping roughly on the washboards. The driver gives us a slightly panicked look, but we all press on. Leaving the road, my buddy and I move up the bank of a shallow gully. He’s talking about the erosion patterns, and says something about making one of his own. I leave him to piss and keep walking.
The dry soil crunches under my shoes. Hard grazed grass exists in sparse, grey, clumps that crackle and rasp just to be looked at. Moving silently is impossible I find. I look from the ground to the rock rising in front of me. I walk faster, stepping harder, moving further from my buddy.
I walk towards Wallflower like I will see her there. The face I remember, and have been disappointed not to see. The little Hispanic girl we’d been climbing with one day. Small, muscular and thin, dark hair and green eyes in an angular, pretty face. Wide smile and good bright teeth. A beauty mark. She exists as more of an idea, ghosting from my memory of that day. My mind has wandered, leaving my feet to drive me towards where I know she isn’t. The archeology of memory may be the most troublesome yet, with its desire for reverence. It’s far too easy to make broken things holy in hindsight.
Before long my buddy catches up, and we see another overhanging cave down the ridge. South of where I want to be. We strike out for it. I know it’s better for me than indulging the ghosts. The rock ahead looks darker in the late, overcast, afternoon. Pistol shots ring out, echoing back off the wall ahead of us. We stop, crouching, our hands going to our own guns. We listen, turn outward toward the valley. It takes minutes for more shots to ring out. I point, whisper the direction of the sound is on the other side of the little hill we’ve rounded. Back where the car is at. A slim rock spine runs up the side of the hill, I point, suggest we go up that, look over the top. See if its just target shooters or what. My buddy nods, mutters agreement. Focused, I don’t look over my shoulder as we begin to move away from the climbing faces. The breeze in the grass, coming in ahead of a light rain, pulls scents into the air, and for just a moment I smell her. Her hair and sweat, her breath while speaking, the way she smelled that day rock climbing.

Playground

Rain washes and pools across the tarmac
beyond the café windows that reflect everything
Staring into the sodium phosphor dark
lights and reflections indistinct against my own thoughts
Behind and outside a car moves, reflecting on the window
a mirage of itself - A ghost through which rain falls
and light shines as it rolls and disappears
the reflection unmade by angles and movement
The water slick, reflecting, blackness remains
constant in the wake of the ghost
I cannot help but think that this must be the playground
of the dead, their ghosts whispering
I look for someone, another ghost
among what is bound to become a crowd
and finding them to remain unseen
I turn, unsatisfied and mourning, back to the table
and the living

Poems from Young Lovers

They were written by candlelight
and emailed across the darkness of fiber-optic wilderness
Received miles from their origin or anything similar
Love poems of a youth barely conceived of love
A conservatism of inexperience and morals
shaped by word, but not by living
loosened by the promise of new touches
Each line on edge, delicately balanced to fall
to the abandon of lust, or illusion of temperament
Hungry mouths shaping each word in the writing
and in the reading, in absence of forming to one another
Pictures accompanying the poems, printed out and bound
for a trip away from their only contact
Inexperienced love demanding the reassurance of paper
carried in place of what couldn’t be carried in the heart
Now to read them, to make a study of her face
lit by candlelight and shaped by mouthed words
is to see a great dam of inexperience across the river of living
The raw youth in the cock of her hip, the set of her mouth
a confusion of movie star emulation and desire
I see what it was to be young, and all the tripping places
For she is my mirror, and now stands a perfect image, a loving line
a museum of what I dreamed to be
when I painted in the dark of things I’d never seen
These poems were written of love with the inexperience of short years
In the flickering false light of candles
before the day, and the harsher light of having to grow up
We exposed love, broke it upon the rocks of our young selves
and finding beneath the husk a bitter meat, left it to rot
A hand bound, marker illustrated, chapbook of youth
and two strong wills, crystalline intellects, striving
against one another
for something that could only be had with age
Our love poems are written to others now
an older, polished, love of adults who’ve attained a knowing
to support the desiring
Mouths hungering for what we now know is as old as the stones
but once thought we’d invented solely between ourselves
and once thought we’d solely destroyed
Until in the good harsh light of day, it was rediscovered

City Lighted Rain

There is a certain magic to Albuquerque after the sun goes down and the gentle rain begins to fall. The people on the streets, dashing from cars to shop doors beneath newspapers. The girl in Knob Hill who stands unprotected in her leather jacket staring up into the drops. Lights playing in the warm water, as the streets are slicked and washed. That smell of a rained on city rises through the open car windows, as the windshield wipers batter the rivulets for dominance of the glass. The car rushes past. Everything is standing still in the rain, and moving, dirty and washed clean. Nothing on those streets is captive, it is alive and rich with temporality.
Exposed by darkness what is hidden by reflection in day, everything is lost in the revelation nightfall. Every secret exposed is in turn cleaned by the rain. Where the wheels touch the street, they are washed clean, as the asphalt of the cars passing. Each footstep is amnesia. The calls and cries of a city whipping by the windows to become lost in the rain, laughter that cannot be hoarded.

In the cold and the dry, years later, I will wish for this. I will finally realize how much it meant to me. The absence of place and self, irrelevance of care. Bathed in the city lights and washed clean by rain, my own simplicity was a contrast and compliment to those moments of strangers laughter and rain washed shrieking.
But now, I drive and am washed away. If only the sun would set deeper and harder, and the warm summer rain would never stop. If only that, then the road would go on forever, in the laughter of women bathed in city lighted rain.

Where does the living go?

Layover, by Charles Bukowski

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men- poor folks-
work.
That moment- to this. . .
may be years in the way they measure,
but it's only one sentence back in my mind-
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.

Bukowski is amazing... maybe more later. I feel another poet post coming on.

A Warrior Falls

Like every day before, the officer wasn't late for duty. He sat in the Squad room, paying attention when he needed to, joking with his fellows when he didn't. He climbed into the seat of the car, and settled in for the morning patrol.
Sometime after breakfast, (coffee and a McMuffin for his partner, just a McMuffin for him,) and before lunch (he will wonder, later and only once, if it might have been good), the call comes in. Man with a gun, wife and children in the house. His partner flips an otherwise illegal U-turn he calls flipping a bitch, and puts the V8 Interceptor to work.
The scene is the chaos that finds its home in the heart of every warrior, its meaning and pattern apparent only in his mind. Shots are fired out the window. Tear gas is fired back in. The wife and kids come out. The gunman doesn't. The officer wonders how people can be so cruel to one another at times, doing that to their women, and their little ones. He thinks maybe he'd like to have a pup or two of his own someday, but doesn't have time for deeper contemplation. They're lining up, going in, he's got to go - All thoughts are on the door, the monster behind it, the monster with the gun.
They put flash-bangs through the windows as the great big man in-front slams the backdoor into a thousand splinters, a million motes of dust - Each one lit up for an instant by the flash of the 'bangs.
They're in, dust and smoke clouding the already hazy unlit room. The gunfire comes from within that haze, muzzle flashes - A cheap nine-millimeter, something that any other time might not have even fired. Call it fate, call it irony, call it tragedy, call it life. Gunfire in response, the solider, more reliable, fire of forty-five's and five-point-five-sixes, all well made, well maintained, as ready for action as he. But he's not acting anymore, he doesn't hear the return gunfire - One round, just the wrong side of the edge on his vest, has torn through flesh and bone and gone deep inside.
The Earth trembles when he falls.
He hurts when he breathes, but knows he must keep trying. He doesn't know where his partner is. Where the bad man is. He fights - To breath, to be loyal, to serve. It hurts, deep inside where it hasn't hurt since his heart broke once, when he was young, the last time he saw his mother.
His partner is there then, looking down at him, saying soft, soothing things, calling him "buddy". He likes it when his partner does that. The bad man is there too, but he's not standing up, or fighting. The officer relaxes a little now, but its still so hard to breathe and he has to breathe to make sure there are no more badmen.
His vision falters, he's going to sleep. Somewhere out in the growing blackness what might be a green field, and old friends, are visible. He blinks. The dust is settling in the room, but its all light and shadow.
They take his vest off, he feels them placing something over the wound. A needle sticks him between the ribs. Its easier to breathe now, but he's still so tired. He cant fight sleep anymore. He hears his friends calling him into the soft grass of the field.

I see him as they bring him out of the ambulance. One paramedic just picks him up off the gurney, and steps out into the harsh midday light. His blood runs down the front of the 'medics white uniform shirt, but that's okay. He's one of them, a compatriot, a force against the destruction they all feel chasing them - Chasing the world - a brother, a Warrior.
The other paramedic is holding the door open. Right of the door there is wall of his fellow warriors folding in behind the one carrying him as they go through the door. Tears are in their eyes. I can feel the reverberations in the Earth now, as I see them disappear within, and the Veterinary clinic doors close behind them.