Writers On Steroids

“Ok,” I said to the Senate Committee investigating Writers On Steroids in Room 2143 of the grand facade off Bluejay Way. They stared at me with jaundiced eyes. They shuffled paper. An old tottering fool of a Grand Inquisitor pounded his gavel.

I remembered him from the McCarthy Era and feared the worst.

“You are accused of taking steroids to enhance your writing performance. We have evidence from editors, hacks and wan-ta-na-bees that you and perhaps thousands of your ilk slaving away like drones in the dungeons of mediocrity, dreams, illusions and journalistic heaven on word machines have boosted your word output through the use of banned, I repeat, banned substances. Say it isn’t so, say it’s all a lie, a misconception, hearsay. What say you?”

I took a drink of pure spring water from mysterious unfiltered Alaskan lakes. A naked trout started dancing on the table in front of me and I laughed.

“Ha, you're joking aren't you?” I stuttered, spitting water all over the microphone. It shorted out and I was forced to use my voice minus amplification.

“Of course I sue steroids, why, in fact, in truth of fact and fiction I sear the meat on your grill with my defamatory remarks. The pills are beautiful and come in a variety of colors, like rainbows. They open doors of perception with wonder, shock and awe. I have irrefutable evidence that your committee grooved the approval of these pharmaceutical delights thanks to the huge financial contribution by multinational drug companies to keep you in office. It's well known this country, let alone sports heroes have been programmed to ingest chemicals.”

I jumped on the table with the naked trout and started yelling. “We are ALL filled with chemicals you idiots. It's the American way of life. It's the new mantra, Run, Read, Write with Greater Efficiency and Prose the Poem with diligence and fortitude using Elements of Style. It’s the style baby, the demolition charge under your hat, Jack.”

“Order, order,” yelled a bailiff approaching me with caution, mace and industrial strength handcuffs. “Down boy!” They shackled me. The Grand Inquisitor handed down my sentence. It had a noun, verb and object.

“Take the prisoner to Cuba and give him an orange jump suit. Interrogate him and deprive him of his writes.”

I screamed in anguish as they dragged me past a pharmacy filled with promise, hope and salvation.

“You haven’t heard the last word from me. Where’s my trout?”

Hanoi Poem

Humans need less suffering and more love.

Little Man's voice releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. 

He is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet off substandard cold molten gray interior monologue of Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall?

His life is one long cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.
He knows the echo because he made the WALLS.

He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire creating a work of realist art

lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his

gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tiled floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost

desperate mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations,

palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland with a double bladed axe singing in a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with piano concertos.

Everyone’s being played.

Grow Your Soul

Grow Your Soul, a new book of poems and esoteric magic is now on Amazon.

Paperback and Kindle editions. Transcribed from a journal Sept 2016- August 2017.

Live broadly, write boldly.

Enjoy the ride. You're on it once. 

Cambodia

Writing Is Adventure

“’I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally memory gives way.” - Nietzsche.

“The interpreter” in the left brain strings experiences into narratives. A novelist in our heads. A novelist called memory ceaselessly redrafting the short story we call “My Life.”

"Writing and telling a story is all about detail and realising the significance of the insignificant." 

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public." -Goethe

...In both Irish and Welsh myth and saga, the art of foretelling the future is an essential part of the story. More often then not, it is to escape their fate, prophesied by the Druid, that leads the protagonists into adventures which inevitably lead them to the fate they seek to avoid. 

...At one point, the narrator irreverently criticizes the author and the book, saying: "You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend- like nonsense of your own, and are calling it fiction!" -Soul Mountain by Gao

"I want to know one thing. What is color?" - Picasso

The Language Company 

Shoes For Sale

Hello 2019

Here are two quotes for your philosophical diet in 2019.

"What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high."

"I have sought, I am searching, and I will search for what I call the Total Phenomenon, that is the Totality of conscience, relations, conditions, possibilities and impossibilities." - Paul Valery

*

We recently passed a woman working at a sewing machine. Her fingers bled a red color into life's fabric. A nearby sign read, "Plenty of work, no shoes."

Around life's corner, down a street, across a rope bridge, up a steep trail, through a green meadow, over a treacherous mountain and behind a sprawling desert at an oasis near a stream of life rested a young internally displaced boy. A nearby sign read, "No work, $150 shoes."