Release: Melusine Spring/Summer 2013

VISIT MELUSINE 5.1 Spring/Summer 2013

Melusine has just released its tenth issue, Spring/Summer 2013. I’m very pleased and emotionally overwhelmed that my poem, one very close to my heart, was included: “The House,” which is about dark aspects of childhood.

“The House” occurs next to Pindar’s Medusa by Whitney Vaughan, a work of art that evokes tears from the soul. I'm so honored, especially because --

Melusine stunned me with its quality from the very first poem. I thought for a moment I was reading the “Best Poems of 2012” or some such anthology. I still remember this poem: "Equinox" by Leah Silvieus. My awed review is here, if you wish:

The Realm of Melusine


The editor is Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, and she perseveres in excellence of editorship even though she recently gave birth to a baby girl. You can read her musings on how this complexifies, and also edifies and enlivens, her life, by reading the editorial section of the new issue.

Melusine embodies a very special and ensorceling nook of the poetosphere. The magazine is beautifully designed and the poems stay with you, change the way you feel and hear.

Consider visiting. Why not offer congratulations to Editor Kihlstrom for publishing issue ten!


Owl

Poem: Edge of Safe

Recently published in Danse Macabre #69 (Pravda). To read it in situ, along with "Meccaless" and "Right Whale," teleport here:

DM 69 PRAVDA

Gratzi,

Owl

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Edge of Safe

water and rock
swallowed each other,
day in and out, until

the comber-foam
bared the white of rabid bread;
and the stones the weight
of jaded loaves.

it reminded her of a prophet,
ebbing abundant,
shredding what little there was
to feed a sea of roiling hands.

the same miracle, repeated.
the same two-headed feast.
from orange to blue to red
to dusk.

and at night the cerements:
many pilgrims in orgy,
thrusting to swirl,
thrashing to devour

and rage.



------------------------

Acceptance: WHL Review

Three poems accepted by Wilderness House Literary Review. I’m very pleased with these poems, which I worked on interminably, and also pleased that they are appearing in this excellent journal. The editor, Irene Koronas, always does a fantastic job sorting through the submissions to this popular venue.

The acceptance of “Capitol Shirt” is especially exciting, because it is based on the art of one of Maine’s most well-known and tremendously talented political artists: Natasha Mayers. Natasha created a series of postcard-sized acrylics (4 x 6 inches) that satirize the “suits” that control the financial world. You can view many of these postcards, each unique, here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7242108@N06

I am also working on a poem called “Road Man” based on one of Natasha's “bankster” postcards. She has given me permission to post the image in relation to this poem, and I will share that image here. The poem isn't honed yet:



I just found "Capitol Shirt" on my computer. Since she gave me permission, I will post this image too. I cannot post the poem yet, because WHL has first rights:




Thanks!

Owl

Poem: Cerberus

Originally published in The Vehicle:

http://www.thevehiclemagazine.com/?page_id=937

The version below is slightly modified.

The alternate title of this poem is "Peoplesuck"

Enjoy!


Owl

------------




Cerberus


triad of pinschers,
mutated knocker
on fate’s door,

stabbing
into teeming shambles
of half-flesh,

and barking
in the umbral throng,
too many babblers to shunt

except by savagery,
too many moldy egos
in a downward trench.

death the hated embolus,
fearsome cork
bottling a seethe of wounds:

bloods vaporous and blended,
decaying bloat
of beggars and brays,

huddles of tatter
in a scared compendium,
worried by stark teeth.

The Metamorphosis of Greed

A recent report stated that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now at their highest point in three million years. Add to that the unprecedented rate of global temperature rise in the last quarter century. Another recent headline: “Global Warming May Cause Major Extinctions By 2080." Here are some links for all this stuff:

http://www.hngn.com/articles/2900/20130513/global-warming-cause-major-extinctions-2080-study-finds.htm

www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html

www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/science/earth/global-temperatures-highest-in-4000-years-study-says.html

The rate of temperature increase is dangerous because animals and plants will not have time, through evolution, to adapt. On a geological scale, the sudden spike in temperature is like a javelin shooting out of a graph of slight slopes.

The momentum of ignorance is massive. Educated people are outnumbered and rationality is a weak tool compared to the bullhorns of demagogues. Those bullhorns, in turn, are part of massive propaganda campaigns orchestrated by giant corporations, financial colossi that benefit from the destructive status quo.

The encroaching catastrophe is already underway. New Orleans was obliterated by weather. Sandy Hook in Manhattan, too. The polar caps melt, the climate bands shift, animals migrate, including pesky insects. Maybe most important of all to the citizens of the Empire: food prices have gone up.

Still the bulk of the people are blind. Denial. It is a well-worn psychological phenomenon. If you can get past their denial, which is not easy, you get the next mental shield: confirmation bias. Which is to say, reality is interpreted as the person wishes to perceive it (or maybe I should say, as their favorite politician perceives it).

If you happen to think that greedy scientists are lying about global warming to get power, you can always scrounge up evidence worthy of an impregnable conspiracy theory.

And so I think our lovely Earth, and human civilization, are going to suffer the full ravages of a headlong train wreck, one in which a boot on the brake petal was hardly applied. Those of us who dare to be alert need to prepare ourselves for the epochal calamity coming down the rails.

However, let me admit to a little selfishness too and say that I hope to be dead before the full chaos of the Metamorphosis of Greed.

By “prepare” I mean we need to come to grips with it. Psychologically. Myself, I keep saying I am sorry to the Earth in my prayers. I keep speaking to future generations, in this blog and in my poems, and telling them that we were not completely without empathy in this accelerating, bewildering time.

If these future generations actually get a chance to exist, they have a right to hate us. Indeed, today’s younger folks already have a great deal of anger at the “baby boomers” who lived high on the hog while spreading not only pollution but attitudes of hedonistic self-absorption.

I hope, though, that these future generations deal with their hate in a healthy way. I pray they don’t end up hating themselves or thinking of humanity as inherently evil. A virus on the Earth. By 2080, famine, riot and war might be continuous. Maybe large segments of civilization will collapse into barbaric darkness. But, people of the future -- and I am trying not to say this sarcastically or in ridiculous sanctimony -- don’t give up.

Maybe it is almost an impossible task, but strive to surpass, ethically, the present social disease of consumerism. You, hopefully, will be able to better spot, using us as a signpost of failure, the great enemies. Avarice. Ignorance.

Educate all your citizens and do it thoroughly. That is the key to a possible happy ending someday, somewhere. Let me be ridiculously optimistic for a moment: human civilization is young. Maybe the next ten thousand years will be better.


Owl

Release: Danse Macabre 69 (Pravda)

I have three poems in Danse Macabre #69 (Pravda), just released! They are:

“Right Whale”

“Meccaless”

“Edge of Safe”

You can read them here, if you wish:

PRAVDA POEMS


The Editor, Adam Henry Carriere, is an amazing cryptic fantastic monumental soul. His panache and hurricane-strong editorship are overwhelming. Carriere published my full-length collection Jugularity recently--and he is still doing his very best to market it, as you will see if you follow the above link.

Jugularity also has a new review on Amazon (5 stars). You too can purchase this dark consortium of words--only $4. It is only a few clicks away (feel free to read the blurbs under the cover if you desire persuasion):

GO FOR THE JUGULAR


Thanks for reading, be good to yourself, and please forgive my crumpled exhausted mind.

Owl

PS: read my review of DM here:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2012/05/acceptance-danse-macabre.html

"Everyone is my bête noire and everyone is my raison d’etre."

Aearte Kestrelspell

Release: Viral Cat Spring 2013

READ VC SPRING 2013

Yes, yes, yes, Viral Cat has released its Spring 2013 issue. Great great contributors. Videos. Screenplays. Paintings. Stories. And, yes, poetry!

Viral Cat blows my mind as no other journal can. Don’t believe me? Check out my ecstatic semi-psychotic review:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2011/02/release-viral-cat-february-2011-issue.html

Actually I ramble emphatically about Viral Cat twice:

http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2011/01/acceptance-viral-cat.html


Visit my poems “Nameless Wife On the Flood” and “Cassandra Reflects” in the new issue. The former is sandwiched between two fervent landscape paintings by Lorna Ritz. She makes the paintbrush gush in all the right proportions.

Thank you VC Editors!! Prowl on!

And you, dear readers, May your night skies be lush.

Owl

Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and the Sick Sad USA

Every once in a while I feel the need to step back and look at the decline of the American Empire, though in a sense it seems pointless for me to do so. It is pointless because thinkers far greater than me have already done a vastly better job of delineating our failures and evils as a world power.

For instance, Noam Chomsky is considered by the New York Times to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, intellectual of our age. Chomsky points out all the global-level lies, corruptions and atrocities the US has committed. He does it prodigiously and pretty much unassailably. He is a walking encyclopedia. If he had studied to be on the game show Jeopardy instead of researching foreign and domestic policy, he would be an all-time winner, right up there with Ken Jennings.

However, Chomsky is not the sort to ingratiate himself with a prime time fluff show, one that replaces wisdom and knowledge with cute question-answers to sterilized trivia challenges. Because of Chomsky's specialty--honest analysis of the moral wretchedness of the US--he is effectively banned from the mainstream media. His public speeches are far too dangerous to give prime airtime. Yes, he does get to speak to sold-out crowds at Universities. But our corporate-media masters know that as long as they dominate America’s major pulpits, free speech exercised by Chomsky among intelligentsia won’t challenge the plutocracy. And it pretty much hasn’t.

Another prodigious thinker, far more important and far-ranging than I will ever be, is Gore Vidal. He was considered a boy genius by age 20, wrote dozens of novels and inconceivably many essays. Vidal, like Chomsky, has written extensively on American evils. Unlike Chomsky, he does it with literary panache. You don’t have to decipher turgid presentations of history because Vidal condenses beautifully and stingingly. He died in 2012, but before that, like Chomsky, he was effectively blacklisted from mainstream publicity.

Once and a while, Chomsky and Vidal snuck a small slot in the hydra-head world of TV channels. Here is Vidal discussing Chomsky and how both of them are prevented from reaching sizeable audiences (relative to the population of the United States):





Because both Chomsky and Gore have spoken out so much and so well--and there are others like them too--it feels pretty pointless for me to discuss the ongoing evils and continuing deterioration of the American Empire here. Full-length collections by great writers and thinkers, like Chris Hedges (“The Empire of Illusion”) come and go. Sometimes they even get named as “best sellers” by some esoteric criterion. Yet none of this changes anything. These great voices are swamped by bullhorn-levels of saccharine pablum and patriotic half-stories by half-news agencies. Huge corporate conglomerates control what Americans think and hear, effectively limiting the power of the educated to affect the system.

The whole dysfunctional national scene is exceedingly frustrating and apparently ineradicable. America controlled most of the geopolitical globe in 1950 and since then has quickly slid into a rapid and disgusting decline, driven by idiotic war-mongering and a corporatocracy of parasitic avarice. Currently, the wealth distribution is monstrously skewed toward the rich, but--surprise, surprise--most Americans have no idea how bad it is:




Yeah, what’s the point of me saying anything more here?

Owl

Release: Pirene's Fountain April 2013

Pirene’s fountain has just released its April 2013 issue, including three of my poems: “Moth,” “Air Meditation” and “Over Arizona.” You can read them here:

VISIT THE FOUNTAIN

Pirene’s Fountain will soon be merging with Glass Lyre Press, which is eagerly seeking manuscripts. If you have a chapbook or full-length project, consider submitting to this sensuous venture:

GLASS LYRE PRESS

Best to all and--


Fly Well In the Dark,

Owl