Of Elsewhere
It’s like living in a clam, the sky is mother-of-pearl, bubbled rainbow relief, dizzy blue depthless depth of metaphor. The sky is light. My father once said that, since I was a writer and all, that he wanted to hear how I would describe a strange and glorious sky. Typically, I could think of nothing […]
O why was I born with a different face Why was I not born like the rest of my race When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend Then I’m silent & passive & lose every Friend Then my verse I dishonor. My pictures despise My person degrade and my temper chastise […]
I’ve seen the word thought-policing used (here, for instance) to describe a form of abuse in which one person tries to control the inside of someone else’s head. The abuser wants to know what the other thinks and feels and gets angry when they think or feel the wrong things. This is described unambiguously as […]
I had a generally good babysitter who nonetheless, to my indignation, had a temper. She once was mad at me (it had to do with clothes? I think I was five) and yelled at me. I burst into tears. She got even madder at me for crying and told me to stop. Watching parents at […]
At some point I wrote that I preferred the literature of conviction to the literature of perception despite lacking all conviction myself. I speculated that this was because I took malicious pleasure in all the scenes where people prove how right they are and how absurd their opponents are (a pleasure that in me has […]
I’ve tried expressing the ideas in my last blog post, Snaring the Moon, in poem form too; questionable if and how much it gains, but I had enough fun trying to make the form work I thought it might be interesting to share. A glosa, the form I’m using here, takes the first stanza (in this […]
One night in high school, my father and I took a walk along the railroad tracks in moonlight and then lay down to look at the stars. I have had most of my powerful experiences of nature in the presence of my father, and tonight was no exception. I looked up at the sky, saw […]
Hello! I wanted to announce that I just got a poem accepted into the November issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly! I have a chapbook reading coming up at a local bookstore on the 20th. Wish me luck! The chapbook has sold at least thirteen copies (it’s only being sold locally). These things are pretty exciting to […]
Near the end of Descent into Hell, Hugh Prescott and Adela discuss daydreams. Hugh only barely daydreams, whereas Adela does so often, and her defense of this calls the temptress Lily Sammile to her side. It is worth asking what exactly Lily Sammile is, other than Lilith. Her magical remedies seem to be an exaggerated […]
In the last post, I observed that in a Williams-ian afterlife I might well find myself with “some large messy mess of myself to get through.” Descent into Hell centers around love and reality’s conflict with self-infatuation and illusion. If Sodom is a city of disordered love for others, Williams calls “Gomorrah” as the city […]
Of Elsewhere 