Bully Trigger was written in early 2021 as a way to deal with a specific problem that has been bothering me since I was in the 5th or 6th grade. I never liked bullies (who does), and for many of us, that reason is personal. We were bullied ourselves or we saw people get bullied…
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The following poem was written in the late 1980s, although I don’t remember the year exactly. At that time, I was introduced to free verse poetry through a creative writing class I was taking. What struck me today (for the first time) was the idea of a castle in the sky, one of the central…
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Focus, man. Focus. I don’t do this often, and I don’t know if I’ll do it again. Feel free to mark this day as “weird.” “So, what’s new in the WORLD?”Asks a demon in my midst.“Funny thing you should ask,”I breathe out from behind my bars.“I was going to ask you the same.” That was…
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I have been looking through various works-in-progress, those novels that–for whatever reason–were abandoned on the side of the road while the mind went looking for a gas station down the street. One of them, Driving the Spike, made me think of two of my favorite reads: Stephen Crane and Japanese Death Poems, as presented in a…
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As I do the research necessary to write another novel, I find myself running into things I didn’t think existed. Some writers might need a little inspiration, and the archive of legislation through the years is certainly broad enough to provide that inspiration to many people. But that’s not what this is about.
This poem is one I wrote in 1988 or 1989. It is, most definitely, “Crane-ish.” I love this poem, and I hate it at the same time. I guess that’s art, is it not? Despite its rather positive message buried in negativity, I use this particular poem as a reminder of horrible people who promise…
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I’ve been on a few glass-bottom boats in my day, but I’m not 100% sure why I wrote this poem. I remember sitting in a dorm room in Alaska in 1992 and hammering this out on a $1500 laptop with a massive hard drive attached to a dot-matrix printer five times the size. Oh, to…
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