A excerpt from my second novel in progress, Hermit Kingdom. This section is called “The Lover’s Nest.”
Polish sailor pubs. Rustic jazz clubs. Vibrating Pineal glands.
Self-branding, love and companionship,
monsters, MILFS, and satanic energy drinks
Nomadic journeys from Katowice to Madrid to North Carolina with beer butt chicken and pimento cheese sandwiches.
How to expand with it.
“A part wants to break away from the other part. The part that wants to break away claims a different culture. How many cultures make the whole. Who are the true people from the part that wants to break away and the true people from the part that believes in the whole.| My flash fiction, Jitters, at Litro today. Chosen for Flash Fiction Friday.
(image: Frank Moth)
When Milo opened the window more students poured in. Not long after, there were 40 of them, in a room built for 20. Don’t be a lazy bird. When the lightning struck, the computer was fried, the projector was intact, but there was nothing to project. End of lesson. No more Animal Farm. Here, said Jonathan, take your shoes off. They found a damp towel together. But it was too late, his shoes were already submerged. It would take two days to dry them.When your feet are wet it’s hard to warm your body. If the river has overflown its banks, it is best to wade barefoot. If you climb on the fence it brings the lightning closer. The lightning hit the tree and then there was fire.
The bus stop was dark and street was dark but now and again a car would shine the lights and it was less dark, but still relatively dark. Don Whiskers wondered if the bus would arrive, and if so when. It was the eternal question. His toes were wrinkling inside his wet shoes. The faces in the holes were egg shaped. At the busstop a strappling young woman, with garters and a snake. They make eye contact, briefly, then back to looking down the street for the bus. The bus stop makes everyone anxious, storm or no storm. Will it come and when and if. Suddenly the sky opened into an egg yolk.
An excerpt from my novel in progress, Hermit Kingdom, is up today at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Hermit Kingdom is interconnecting flash fictions, prose poetry, hybrids.
International Worker’s Day 2018, Pineapple and Don Whiskers, living in Madrid, walk the walk past Cazorla, with the best tapas, and the friendly waitress, down past the death ring, to gander at beautiful feminine male peacocks in El Retiro, eat homely tastes at the only Polish restaurant in the city, where Don Whiskers attempts to talk sports with little knowledge of sports, Pineapple dreaming the great dream of weekend getaways together, the nearby desert mountains, or northern, Basque and Asturian and Galician, magical escapes into nature, but also the realities of transient work and financial realities of lower middle class living, loving and living more with less, soaking into the sun, walking the walk, traveling to wake up, even if it is only within a few mile radius, friendship and travel and sometimes, despite the realities, a little hope.
An excerpt from my novel manuscript, The Autobiography of Don Whiskers, is over at #thesideshow. Partly based on experiences in Katowice, Poland, Cercedilla (Spain), Madrid (Spain), and Palermo (Sicily). It is part of an ongoing trilogy of nomadic surrealist novels. Part autofiction, part magical realism.
This excerpt begins in Katowice, at the Zoo, with pagan deities:
At the back of the zoo, in the magic forest, once a year in deep night, the pagan deities are resurrected, painted faces & spooky howling, primal yelps, very good, it’s a start, it’s not enough. The zoo is full of highlights, for example, the invisible hippos, complete with diving boards and lifeguards, but no hippos, the hippos are in hiding. Also the sleeping lion, you can sit on the still warm bench and imagine the lion. The bees, however, in full force, non-invisible, landing on creamy mountains of ice cream.
Read/listen to the story over at Five:2:One
delighted . . no more than delighted . . thrilled . .. . . stoked beyond words . . . to have Mu (dream) So (Window). . . surreal poems written while living in South Korea . . . forthcoming from one of my favourite presses . . .
Still revising The Heyday. Lots of re-seeings, re-readings, re-samplings, mixings and so on.
The Heyday (2005-2012) is travel writing. Basho. Walt Whitman. Herodotus. 18-19th travel handbooks, Buddhism, ethics and suffering and so on.
My experiences in South Korea, Katowice Poland, Elblag Poland, Ankara Turkey, Rome yadda yadda . . . .
Sometimes living in extreme circumstances without contact. Sometimes less extreme.
Creative translations from books and life and memories and experiences . .. blurring the lines . . . getting slippery . . . all writing as translation . . all words as already in the public sphere . . . including all poetry . .
The above picture is from visit to a Buddhist temple in South Korea in 2006 (Bongeunsa).
My hands are spread out for different turn-tables, mixing decks and so on.
Lots of books spread out on my table. Including my notebooks of travel notes and musings and poetry scraps. Travel handbooks from 18th century. Various 20th century books of poetry. Basho and Herodotus. Sometimes the music of what I am listening to makes it in the poem as well.
The present and the past collapse.
Here is one still in progress from one section of The Heyday called The Hermit Kingdom (South Korea 2006). Written 2006. Revised through the years.
A bit of Mr. Lautreamont in 2012 gave me the goading I needed . . .
He will perhaps goad me some more!! It is not yet finished:
