August 18, 2024
Poetry
For you Sam, Favorite books
Artwork by DALL·E
For you Sam Sam calls it this human experiment I ripped off the phrase It features in the opening story of my book Which I sent to Sam Who read the entire goddamn thing No one else did that But he did He read it all Except for my Beowulf adaptation My pedantic and brutally faithful to the OE but suicidally slapstick Beowulf 120 thousand words Unbelievably most people get hung up not on the Beowulf but on the sci fi story about martians who chase cowboys up an old tree wham bam the martians are just blobs so must depend on legsuits to move on the planet earth scryaik scree they are large softboiled eggs directing these humanoid exoskeletons but all brain they have artillery and hovercraft wham blam balam so eventually extirpate the yeehaws from the tree Imagine yourself but a thousand years wiser Encased in a battlehard exoskeleton Flying through time and space Whatever space or time They blew them to smithereens Repaired to their spacecraft Moved on They killed those men just for fun That is the human experiment No no one ever gets to the end of my book But Sam read the whole damn thing Then he wrote me a letter This human experiment he wrote Sam who was a Hindu monk for two years living in an ashram eating rice said ha ha I love your sense of humor. Favorite books The guy in the bookstore who sold me the vintage hardboiled novels: The Swans of Desolation Chips Down For Maloy Shadow of the Black Temptress Spawn Rangers of Nazi Canyon Ghosts of Cold Laguna Doctor Cipher on Pirate Island Beyond Maggot Mine Only Dolls Dance Alone A Fistful of Blonde Empty Boot, Empty Coffin No Match For McGill Red Pony Run Ack Ack At Dawn Bees to the Honeysuckle Hun Dead Johns Tell No Jokes and so forth knew all their authors and plots they smelled like his apartment.
