Little Johnny sat in the principal’s office quiet as a churchmouse as Miss Clair told the story again.
“I just don’t know what came over him, Principal Davis. He was playing with Andrew and Malachi and suddenly he slapped Andrew upside the head and pushed a crayon up Thad’s nose. Thank goodness the crayon was already broken or there’s no telling what could’ve happened!”
Johnny heard his father arrive outside the office door. They said they’d call his mother but since she didn’t go to church anymore he didn’t think they would. Sure enough, Johnny’s father was let into the office right as Principal Davis was asking him why he slapped Andrew and pushed a crayon into poor Thad’s brain.
His father shook hands and sat down. “You pushed a crayon up Thaddaeus Brown’s nose?” he asked.
Johnny mumbled, “Yes, sir.” Then he added, quickly: “They said mama was going to hell because she don’t go to church no more. So I walloped ‘em both.”
His father raised both hands to his nose like he was going to pray. All the adults looked at each other. Johnny couldn’t tell if they were going to laugh or were just thinking.
Principal Davis took over. Johnny’s father put his arm around him. Miss Clair nodded softly.
“I’m sorry to say it, little one, but your mama isn’t right with the Lord. There’s only one way for her to go, and it isn’t pretty.”
She looked so sad that Johnny felt sorry for her. Then she said, “And we don’t hurt people who are just speaking the truth.”
Johnny’s father gave him a nudge. He knew what he had to do. “I’m sorry,” Johnny said. And he knew he would never hurt anyone again who was just speaking the truth.
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)!
*
“Libraries are one of the few public spaces where you’re allowed to exist without the expectation of spending any money.”
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.
*
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.
This is where I met Babar and Gus and
Charlotte who was friends with a pig
and taught us both Life Goes On
even through tears.
I watched my mom carry her weight in books
to the librarian-lady paid to look mean
but she was actually nice as she took pictures
of punchcards and told me I would have
such fun where I was going.
We were poor though I didn’t know it
as I poured over a Big Book of Ships
and I listened to Drums
that I hated hated hated but
I loved the way my grandma read so I
pretended (I think she knew).
Later I'd walk to that funky stoned (literally)
building on my own, corner of Vanowen and Vanalden.
There I solved cases with Encyclopedia Brown
and found a book called The Battle of Midway
that taught me sometimes a war comes down to 28.2072° N, 177.3735° W.
Gray's Anatomy — wow! How did they draw that well,
and is that what I look like inside?
Where the Red Fern Grows because,
you know, dogs — and to make myself feel better
I picked up The Red Pony. Mistake.
Except tears and truth often go together.
Steinbeck became my god before
I met Corrie ten Boom in her hiding place and
Siddhartha Hesse kept asking me questions
until I found out why a caged bird sings
and that wars are going on always,
sometimes in the bedroom,
sometimes far from streets.
Angelou Birdsong led to Beloved Morrison
and Purple Walker, and I saw with new eyes a way:
war is going on always, always,
but to speak is to fight. Never stop fighting.
Never. Stop. Fighting.
Still later I met Monette and found his half-life
beautiful — maybe mine would be, too.
I put Melville back on the shelf 55 times before
I finally breached its first great wave and then thought:
was Hawthorne his Moby Dick?
Poor guy — Hawthorne was a crank
but damn if his letters weren't good.
Woolf my Patron Saint
showed me her room so that I could want mine.
Tan and Yen Mah who made my mom cry
because they knew, they knew — “we carry our stories” —
it wasn’t easy, not easy at all.
She loved those books.
All this and more in a library,
from my little corner one
(when LA had only one area code)
to the Library of Congress, a pilgrimage.
Memories of mom dragging me by the hand until,
later, I was pushing her chair to the books.
All these people, all these ghosts
dancing and sobbing and waiting on shelves,
waiting to be held or thrown, doesn’t matter.
Life buoyed by imagination,
imagination buoyed by life.
Freedom. Adventure. Suffering. America.
So of course:
Arizona
Georgia
Illinois
Louisiana
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
South Dakota
Texas
Wyoming
let's close the libraries.
We wouldn’t want anybody
learnin' nothin' new…
*
“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides.”
— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
Most of the time, it’ll be boring. But if we’re lucky, we’ll catch a glimpse of something we’re not meant to see. Pilots leave an apartment window open while waiting for flight attendants to arrive. We see their desperation. A man in a breezeway doesn’t think anyone is upstairs when he tries to get his dealer off his back, all while his little girl plays. The fratboy next door doesn’t know someone can hear everything — and wants him anyway. A whole political party shows its true colors.
These poems are dedicated to who we are when we’re on our own time — to the strange, laughable, heartbreaking, dangerous ways we do ourselves.
I’ve tried
to not want my City,
to make life here,
far from the streets and hills and men
that brought me life in such breadth that I gulped lust
at every turn, bodies and books and
sweet blessed fog, busses, parks,
crazies four floors beneath screaming
“HELP! HELP!” though there’s only a streetlamp,
three-hundred-dollar theater seats steps from
human defecation (it’s not pretty) —
tether-bridges to windy and windy headlands and
mystical beaches and sex —
where to walk is to be enveloped,
in love.
I tried
to love her instead of him, once upon a time,
way back when lies meant caring,
and my brain and niceness said I
shouldn’t hurt anyone so I
drowned Aaron in hope and went on screwing
and became good at it and talked about;
but each night, laying on top of her
sweet and forgiving body, sculpted
ballers did sweaty lay-ups in my room,
in my head
in me
and if it wasn’t for those players,
she never would’ve cum,
so it seemed like it was okay.
But it wasn’t.
I tried Return of the Native.
I tried The Glass Menagerie.
Everything by Faulkner.
All I wanted was Sassoon,
maybe a little Woolf,
but I’d lock myself in my room
to read words words words,
and I’d yawn yawn yawn —
while A Room of One’s Own
whispered slyly to Suicide in the Trenches:
“He’s missed the point.
“He’s really missed the point.”
Sushi Streisand Dances with Wolves
mango con limón my dear friend who wants
to be dear so he must be but…
no-fap novenas TED Talks on writing
guys who aren’t built
who really aren’t built
who seriously aren’t built
great personalities
no-fap
try try try
John Cage
no-fap
“Thy will be done”
Los Angeles
Christianity —
when all along, sweet lullaby,
sleeps the not-tried, the true,
until I put on a jacket
against cold San Francisco freedom
and smile
destiny.
Library of Memory,
finger on the spines
that hold together
me.
Oh, I do not like this book!
(Though I’ve read it a thousand times.)
I was too young to understand.
How was I to know?
(I knew.)
One night
sags the shelf
that ought to be
in the Restricted Section
(like the old days, when you had to ask
for the books with drawings).
These spines are warped.
Horrible!
I move on.
My, this one is beautiful.
Just look at its golden cover:
“Full of greeting cards and fairy tales.”
Here, I learn right from wrong
and begin to build My Best Self.
Things work out in this book
(just like a Hollywood movie).
Grandma really likes it.
I really should read it someday.
But they said I could take out only one.
Maybe this one? Bright and Sunny Days?
And there are other rooms,
futures I’ve never visited,
a place for faith. Philosophy.
I really should…
as I bow my head,
reach for Mistakes
and turn to you.
Greg Beckman 