You can read my latest poem collection, Late-Night Lucid, through your local library! For free! Through Indie California, library patrons throughout The Golden State have access to an electronic version of the book that already has one 5-star review on Goodreads. (It’s the only review; we all have to start somewhere.) I am proud to have had my work selected by an organization whose purpose is the promotion of independently published books and their authors, and am delighted that you have access to it through your local California library. Suits my ethos.
The Indie Author Project (IAP) is a publishing community that includes public libraries, authors, curators, and readers working together to connect library patrons with great indie-published books. IAP has helped hundreds of libraries engage their local creative community and assisted in getting almost 20,000 indie ebooks into their local libraries. Most importantly, the project has worked with top curation partners and librarians to identify hundreds of these as the best indie ebooks available to readers—so they can be sustainably circulated to library patrons with confidence.
For more information — and instructions for independent writers wondering about how to participate — click the State.
Happy reading (and writing)!
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“Libraries are one of the few public spaces where you’re allowed to exist without the expectation of spending any money.”
[note: best if read on a device that preserves indentation/spacing]
“After everything he’s been through…” “Sports’ll knock some sense into him. Teach him something.” “He’s smart – he’ll figure it out.” “Just don’t say anything. You always say something and it always lands wrong.” “Life is going to hit that kid sideways.” “He says he wants to go to Japan. Live there. What’s he think he’s gonna find? Big mistake.” “Football? Right. Cheerleader more like it.” “You’re one to talk. Exactly how many times you land on your back?’” “He’ll find his way. He's gonna be happy. Gonna surprise everybody.” “How am I supposed to raise a gay kid?” “Maybe the swim team? Don’t they like that?” “You love him, you horse’s ass. That’s what you do. Every single day of your life. You love him.” “You always defend him.” “You’re supposed to be a teacher. Shut the fuck up.” “You’re supposed to be his father. Act like it.” “I’m that boy’s Grandma and I say he’s gonna be fine.”
I wonder where my hand is in all this, this marsh where moss floats and webs stay put, bugs plane pond-skin unafraid of the sleepy-eyed frog just back from the edge and full. Here is safe and here is calm; nothing ever happens here that wasn’t fore-ordained, announced by ripples or sudden silence. It feels like death. Happiness would be a shock. No need.
I’ll bide my time, lay here wild, skim this unmade life, this greenish eden-bayou, this unfriendly not-mine as all eventually devour this man, whispering via mosquito-buzz:
Winter left Los Angeles this week; it’s 80 degrees outside and I’ve run the air conditioner a couple of times “just to make sure it works.” I saw a t-shirt this week that read something like: Los Angeles: Earthquake. Fire. Flood. Democrats. The first three plagues brought a half-sigh from me, as in “Yeah, we’ve been through it, haven’t we.” Especially the fires. Those were scary and I mourn with the people who lost so much. I’ve never known a person whose house burned down. In two days, I knew six.
But…Democrats as a plague? Would that such a plague descend on the whole of the nation! Evidently, my political people have recently decided to experiment with Taoism. “If you don’t resist evil, give it nothing to cling to, it goes away on its own.” WHERE ARE THEY??? Aside from a few quips and a kumbaya gathering outside USAID offices….crickets. MAGA says this is because “the Libs” are exhausted. Maybe. Anybody who feels the connection between recent calls for President Trump to ignore federal courts and Andrew Jackson’s 1830 orchestration of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears, or finds the President’s reference to Napoleon’s rehashed version of “L’État, c’est moi” a bit…repetitive, has got to be exhausted. Again with the fucking Empire???
It’s not that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it; it’s that those who know history are doomed to watch. It’s exhausting. It’s this….again. And again and again…because it’s the nature of the nation. Even drugged-out poverty-stricken I-Ching-ing Philip K. Dick realized something was coming to the Land of George Wallace and Home of Floridian HellQueen Anita Bryant. It’s just not that hard to imagine Nazis and Japanese Imperialists taking over a nation that already thinks it’s sport to scare the living daylights out of displaced Haitians and laughable to not laugh at Puerto Rico’s dignity because “it’s just a joke, man.” We weren’t ripe for the picking; we were already on the conveyor belt.
Which Is Why I’m putting out my first and perhaps last recommendation of What To Watch Next:
No review. No plot spoilers. Just Watch It. It’s like truth serum. Heroism is not automatic and neither is resistance. Both are chosen. And come in different forms.
If you’d like to read my take on HOW TO RESIST (I’ll leave heroism to the likes of Sophocles), see my French-channeled piece “Résistance.” (Click the word before “Click the word”) Centuries of ancestors whispered for weeks in my ear: Always remember, they’re hunting you. It was a sobering realization, one every single non-white-non-straight-non-male non-rich person understands intuitively if not physically. The only question is how we respond to the current pogrom. We might be tempted to sit still rather than face the fact that people who scare others into invisibility or cause nightmares that parents will be taken or stand mealy-mouthed behind exquisite pulpits cannot be our friends. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be reasoned with or hoped for. “Maybe they’ll miss us, maybe they’ll change, maybe they’ll…..”
No.
Resist. Pray for them if you must, but resist.
How you do so depends…on you. As Kala tells ever-beautiful yet tragically familied Wolfgang after he’s exchanged gunfire with his uncle’s organized crime syndicate in the wondrous Wachowski piece Sense8 : “I’m not like Sun. I do not know how to use my fists, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to fight” — right before she uses spices and a few kitchen implements to blow German criminals sky-high (or at least down the hallway).
She’s a chemist. I’m a thinker. You’re a whatever — lawyer, mother, teacher, bus-driver. We all know how to fight in a way that’s true to our nature. My Great-Great Grandpa-priest fought by running off with my Great-great Grandma-Nun and…BOOM! Me. Fight the way you know how. Because, as Kala says after she destroys Wolfgang’s enemies, “I am not ready to say goodbye.” Not even close.
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For your reading pleasure:
I’m really getting into the whole microfiction genre. If you want a great collection, pick up Robert Scotellaro’s New Micro here. If you’d like to read my latest entries, you can do so here. Of course I like them all, but “Matches” has received some really good feedback (the word “universal” was used). As in all things, have fun reading…which is much easier to do when the story is one-n-done in 300 words.
And just so you know that I know what a podcast is…
I’ve been listening to the Open University on poetic inspiration — as in how to I get inspired?Here’s the link. It’s awesome…and the Irish accents are so, so sexy. If you’ve found yourself where we’ve all found ourselves, time on the hands and nothing to say, listen. It’s about a place to start that DOESN’T involve sacrifices to those horrible Muses.
And for the weirdness factor: there’s a group-cast I listen to all the time called The Whole Rabbit. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics, but principally center on awareness and occult interests. Watch the one on QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS here. Because everybody’s got to have a side-interest.
Until later, thanks for clicking your way to me. Be well. And remember, if people who hate like you, something’s wrong.
Resistance is not wearing a pink hat or marching with a million people or speaking your dreams hoping to tame wild beasts. That’s solidarity, and it won’t work.
Resistance is not trusting love as the enemy nails beams together. It is not honesty before Pilate. It is not true to Self. Truth is for Jesus, aching to die.
Resistance is silence as you speak lies. It is saying yes to Christian neighbors and doing what you can as you work, as you wait. It is letting proud boys believe they've won and their women, that you've found home as you sow faith and community – beautiful vines that slowly grow inch by inch, season by season, year by year.
Then, then…
when need’s grip snaps grieving sons and senseless tears, forgotten daughters; when bereft and lost they reach for friend, family, husband, wife; when only hope shields pain and you stand firmly between the question and its adjured answer: then, then remove your mask, then and only then let it slowly slip from your always-enraged face — show them your ageless hate just once, lonely soldier, so that as they sink their departing view
Writers published in Sortes 18 gathered July 7 to read recent and previously published work. Stories, poems, musical interludes, artful inspiration — is there a better way to spend the evening?
The writers/poets/artists (in order of appearance):
JULIA YONG
MARK RUSS
DANIEL RABUZZI
MARTE CARLOCK
CHARLES ALBERT
JAKE SHEFF
MICHAEL THÉRIAULT
DIPTI ANAND
GREG BECKMAN
ROBERT POPE
Enjoy! With thanks to editor Jeremy Tenenbaum for the invitation and awesome atmosphere.
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My reading included poems from Beginning Middle Man, So…What Do You Do?, and Late-Night Lucid. Each is available HERE. Or you could just hit the BOOKS menu button up-top.
I went looking for a feeling today, that one special feeling I once caught somewhere, maybe a river in Wyoming slipping by wild grass or a night when, still studying philosophy, I looked up from my book and noticed the soft-light of my little dorm lamp and loved it.
I hunt this feeling, trap it with Grandma's plastic tablecloth that was padded so no waterglass could be placed on it without almost toppling over and her tossing a tennis ball to a dog in the backyard, the distant sound of a train rolling down dark tracks as I slept.
I surround it and demand its name. It smiles at me and slips through the gaps and the hunt is on again for that feeling I'm looking for today, maybe walking down a dusty road in Sacramento and seeing a lizard dart off into the bush and then my shoes seemed quiet under the hot-white sky and for a moment I forgot where I was going.
Greg Beckman 