The Garden of Poetry and Prose: New Poems and a Story About Long Ago

 

My thanks to the editors of "Terror House Magazine" for publishing two of my poems on their site. Both poems, "No Country For White Men" and "At the Burial" are a little edgy, though my 'terror' in the first poem is largely tongue in cheek.

The journal does have an attitude. These sentences come from its "About Us" statement: "We stand against both the stultifying Beigeism of major New York publishing houses and the hysterical cliquishness of the “alt-lit” community... Terror House Magazine seeks to cultivate the Charles Bukowskis, Louis-Ferdinand Célines, and Philip K. Dicks of the 21st century: bold, audacious writers who depict human life in all its ugliness and comedy."

Here's the link

Terror House

The May 2022 issue of Verse-Virtual offered an optional theme of the personal "impact of war." In response, I offered a poem about the impact of the Vietnam War and the draft on some long

ago years when I was of draft age and the war in Southeast Asia dragged on.

Here's the poem

Civil Wars

What war meant to me:
staying in school
keeping your deferment,
my father and I, who never
talked to one another about our lives,
staring at the screen when an image appeared from
“The March on the Pentagon,”
shots of protestors, a gesturing spokesman,
a “We Won’t Go” sign –
Dad said, “Oh, that’s last weekend…”
“I was there.”
“I thought you might be.”
No further exchange of views
followed
Dad never spoke of his war
until his final decade
Even when my older cousins marveled
over the souvenir German rifle in the basement
the story
was like pulling the dragon’s teeth
 
I had secrets of my own
When the Selective Service mailed my punitive
reclassification notice to the parental home address,
Dad threw me an anxious glance
“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten yourself
in trouble with those people!”
I denied it, like the cowardly apostle
at the crucifixion
 
The truth was,
both like and unlike Dad, I would never share
my story with my family:

I had.

I have two more poems in the May Verse-Virtual:

Today Is Beautiful, We Have Things To Do*

and

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

To check out these poem, here's the link:

Verse-Virtual

Finally, here's my story about growing up in the late 60s, published by an online journal

called "Jerry Jazz Musician." Music is a theme in my story, titled "Thunder." But so is adolescence,

youth, the 60s, and falling in love.

Here's the link Thunder

Today was a beautiful day in the neighborhood of Planet Earth. Happy Spring! to all.