The soap opera organ announces
what we can hardly bear to hear.
A metal-aproned matron
summons the skin ribbons
she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500,
circa 1969. Her tremolo
is a casual torture. We mistake
her voice for a choir of a thousand
veiled mothers and wobble dutifully in
to an Easter dinner of wood duck and greens.
There are no roses
around [...]
A man with a backbone
is dangerously exposed.
This explains a shortage.
.
image © Tony Karp, Techno-Impressionist Museum
writing © joesmith, 1998
© 1997 by Peter Johnson.
from Pretty Happy! White Pine Press, New York, 1997.
.
Hell
“If you want to understand the social and political history of modern man, study hell.” - Thomas Merton
It’s probably like the excitement of your first cigarette, but it lasts forever, that dizzying nausea — the Unknown: with imitation human heads on their [...]
BUY THIS BOOK.
It is not a way of life that a wise man proposes, but a way around life.
*
You say nothing could be further from the truth. I say nothing could be further than truth.
*
Sophistry is what reason becomes when it is employed for the purpose of reconciling us to life.
*
So much havoc has [...]
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A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.
To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said [...]
