You read that right. Everything I’ve published since 2018 is free for the next seven days on Smashwords. Trying to kick your amazon habit lately? Well, you can buy all of my books on Smashwords instead… or rather, just add them to your library because they are totally free. Even if you already have copies elsewhere, why not pick them up on a different service?
Recently, I completed a short narrative lyrical poem titled Falk’s Karma. This was recently submitted to a publisher so I can’t publish the thing out in the world on my website. However, I can provided an advance review copy for my wonderful paid subscribers, all of whom I treasure.
As to that, It seems likely this year I will have a lot of finished works. I’ve been writing 1000 words a day for almost two full years now without missing a single day, and what it’s yielded is a large chunk of a book series and quite a few shorts, essays and poems. So I am going to do my best to get as much up here first to paid subscribers and then out into the world later. I’m excited for you to read some of my latest shorts and the forthcoming novel, Shades and Shapes in the Dark and it’s sequel, Through an Endless Darkness Gleaming.
Shipwrecked and trapped on an island full of hungry banshees, Falk stumbles upon a cabin and takes refugee. But once he arrives, two mysterious strangers appear at his door and compel him to make a choice that will change his life forever.
Once an older man named Falk,
Ordinary and plain,
Sought shelter in a cabin, in the forest, in the rain.
Alone, he was for miles wide.
Lost, with no one to see,
So strange than a cabin here,
in the land of frosts and banshees.
A sailor marooned upon the shore,
With luck turned in a storm,
Falk wandered through the forest,
seeking to get warm.
He knew the island he tread upon
From darkest lore and tale,
When the rain changed to ice,
The banshees traced your trail.
Preorder for my novel, Shades and Shapes in the Dark will begin soon! The book is headed off to the editor next week. The nove is a dark fantasy/horror story set beginning in the 90s and span 40 years. The story is about a dark force, that follows the main character Clarissa through her life, and how she must learn to fight back, ultimately drawing on ancient magic and wisdom. The first book begins when she is only 9 years old, and encounters the shadowlike creature for the first time.
Each chapter in the novel has a poem that opens the piece. Sometimes this poem is something to do with the character, sometimes narrative information for the reader, sometimes foreshadowing, and sometimes it includes a bit of the lore of the world.
Chapter 10 is titled: The Shadow of Samhain. It takes place on Halloween and, of course, since it’s the season, I thought I would share that opening poem.
Come all ye, gathering shades,
The time of Samhain is at hand,
We will rise to rot and scatter,
Our blight across the land.
For the first of us comes at witching hour,
To seek his contractual prize,
Lust for power brings him strength,
With every victim’s demise
But a bargain struck will not go unpaid,
A boon of power is owed,
It matters not who is struck down,
Nor the depth and breadth of your woe
More news of the novel, including the release date and more is just around the corner!
For the last ten years I’ve been teaching college courses in Anthropology and Geography. But last month I signed on to join Teach for America where I will transition into teaching middle school or high school. Sometimes at the end of the semester I would recite this poem for students, to try and capture everything we’ve learned in the entire term. Also, I wrote this about two years ago, and I realized recently that I never actually posted it even though it’s one of my favorite pieces that I’ve written.
This spoken word poem is inspired by the core message of Anthropology so artfully put by Horace Minor many years ago. he said that anthropology is, “Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.”
This poem also appears in my book, A Luminous Liminality: A Collection of Poetry and Art
It’s all about relations,
No I don’t mean sexual intercourse,
I mean how people build their foundations
How they relate to causation, or build a nation
And what they consider freedom and liberation
The tracks of humanity don’t just stop at one station
The imagination is filled with endless destinations
Everyone has hopes and dreams, sorrows and frustrations
Everyone wants to experience the sensation of cessation of suffering and damnation
Options
We are a range of cultural options
Our choices are the result of a kind of cultural adoption
Humans are a wonder to be sure
We explore, go on tour, only to identify what we consider pure and impure
We fight wars because we are insecure, but wait there’s so much more.
For every detour we endure, we can also find the cure
For our madness
For every act of hate, there one of love pushing back against the sadness
The thoughts people carry are the result of causes and conditions
A steady diet of enculturation a kind of cultural brain nutrition
Of what’s clean and dirty, right and wrong
How best to gather food or sing a song
How to unify a community and get along
Culture is about adapting and understanding where you belong
So much of it is arbitrary but we claim tradition is important because it has. Gone. On. So. Long.
But tradition is selection of past perceptions
Rooted in imagined past and cultural objections
There’s nothing inevitable about the paths we choose
The things we keep, the things we loose,
Or how we use and abuse one another
When we forget that all beings have once been our mothers
And we yell and scream and blame one other.
For our problems
And so it’s relative, the way we know
Our goals, dreams, aspirations, the places that we go
Flow below the assumptions and you will find a place to grow
But take it slow.
Because if you think you know,
You’re wrong.
Relativism is a practice,
lifelong
And that beginners mind, keeps you from getting too headstrong
Don’t assume right or wrong
Just be curious, instead of furious.
Cultural relativism is poison, a disease?
Oh please, I’ve got no interest to appease
The keyboard warriors whose agenda is to throw feces
Like our primate cousins…
Relativism doesn’t mean you allow ignorance to thrive,
It means you contrive to understand what it means to be human and alive
The things we do to survive and strive for
Opens the doors to more
Possibilities
Because every culture is a library of wonder
They all have lessons and wisdom bright with lightning and thunder
So shut up,
listen,
and put down your hands
You don’t have to like, but you should try to understand
American Fundamentalism
Capitalism is a religion,
Economists are the priests,
And until you realize that these systems and money are imaginary, (gold standard or no)
The suffering will never cease.
Debt is our sin,
Our hearts are weighed and tried,
And cast into hell and homelessness,
If our monthly payments backslide.
Our credit scores the earned merit,
Pay tribute to the gods,
To the great titans of banking,
Bailed out in 2008 after committing forgery and fraud.
The stock market is the holy temple,
Where the tendrils of power hoard and hide,
Yet no commodities can be found within,
Just devotees chanting the holy mysteries inside?
And Let us pray to management,
The ones holding land in holy trust
To dole it out to those with the most merit,
Leaving most the parishioner’s with wind and dust
Capitalism is our religion,
The one true American faith,
It is in the market we trust,
Not a deity, but a wraith
Fresh this morning at the end of February of 2024, here is a piece of spoken word poetry titled, Growth. Text is below the video.
Organic,
Certified fresh on grocery store shelves,
Shopping in civility,
In and out like seashells,
On sea shores with shifting tides,
Circulating trash.
There,
Standing over there,
Something untenable,
Titanic,
Trembling walls of plastic,
Like tumors,
Like free trade,
Growing beyond the boundaries of what was always bountiful.
Circulating wealth into the center,
But consecrating that concentration cannot hold,
Beyond borders,
Beyond beauty,
Creeping towards climaxes of cataclysm, catastrophe,
Coffins at higher costs.
Then,
Virtual panoramas rise,
Hiding villainous views.
Prisons of perspective,
Pluralities of Plutocracies,
Lending to lingering hours,
days, weeks, months, years,
of long, lonely lifetimes.
A gaping maw of similarity,
Simulations without suspense of belief in the simulacra.
Marvels generated in single seconds,
For sensual,
Bread and circuses.
Divide and conquer,
Squabble and squander,
The grass is green of yonder,
Keeping you somber,
Silent, with overtly simple explanations,
Of Black and White thinking.
So you can,
Demonstrate your diligence.
Your dedication, and deliberate reconstruction,
Of that simulation,
Of that model,
Of the other,
So that,
Nothing ever grows in you.
Because,
Your certainty shopping at certified organic store shelves,
Is the only ritual you need.
Sometimes I think about why I became an anthropologist, about what my goals in the profession were. I think about what I’ve done with my life and what I want to do. So I guess, here’s what I have to say.
I took this photo in Oregon in May of 2022.
I have dreams of walking the world,
And resting in the arms of it’s people,
To sit and sip their hearts desires,
To journey through every kind of steeple.
I have dreams of walking the world,
To touch all it’s natural wonders,
To walk through every stormy night,
My path illuminated by lightning and thunder.
I have dreams of walking the world,
Even if it means my death,
For what better way to end your life,
By learning and loving with every breath.
I have dreams of walking the world,
And discovering all the ways I am wrong,
To learn of all my weaknesses and limitations,
Because it is the whole world to which we belong.
You always hear… wherever you go there you are. But who are you?
They say, Wherever you go, there you are
But I am no where to be found
I circle round all day looking
And find nothing even remotely profound
The when of me isn’t looking much better
For I will die again soon
But if I am willing to die every single moment
I can dance with the spirit of the moon
The urge to transform I cannot suppress
Nor is it a journey light of heart
To delve deep into myself in all it’s intimacy
Is to tear my ego apart
Wherever I go is not where I will be
But a moment just past recognition
I slip away so suddenly
Beyond the unknown and into a permanent state of transition
I cannot grasp the formless
And certainly not my mind
For I am not an individual
At least, nothing so easily defined
It turns out I am made from simple things
Contexts and conditions of endless configurations
To know them well is to know the source of all things
And get closer to some kind of liberation
It requires a little madness to begin
To start the process going
So I will let go of the ways I think and feel
And consider another way of knowing
I’ve been thinking a lot about self-honesty lately. I’ve had more than a few hiccups in my life recently and somehow, I seem to be okay with it all. That doesn’t mean there aren’t heavy moments or difficulty or struggle… but it’s alright.
I’ve found so much peace and just letting my creativity flow. Here is one such flow.
You don’t really know yourself. None of us do….
How could we?
We are not individuals.
We are not a simple narrative of birth to death.
There is no line that we walk,
even if we consider the m~e~a~n~d~e~r~I~n~g~ paths that hold our
[Traces…]
We Walk…………… Forward
drawkcaB ……………klaw eW
We die many times in a single life.
Have you ever tried to count your deaths in this cycle?
Bardo is forever.
Because
We are a profound amalgamation
of the connections,
the environments,
the knowledge,
the experiences,
we have encountered.
It is not possible to untangle yourself so completely that you can measure the shape and structure of
who
you
are.
Yet, we must try.
There is no more noble a pursuit then to
Examine yourself with honesty and intimacy.
Love
The
Fact
Finding
Mission Within
And you will find the whole universe mirrored.
Do not try to grasp at concepts
You are water,
Ever flowing,
Ever Changing
A closed fist can never hold water for long
Know thyself?
There is no end to self-knowledge
So BE in a relationship with yourself
Dance with the Depths, The Shadows,
The Desires, The Light,
And move to the rhythm of laughter.
Tenderness dear one…
Always Tenderness
Because self-honesty…
Though necessary…
Tangles with turmoil
And Temper Tantrums
But Persist in your pursuit
For we need a true communion of the heart
Sometimes we see things that aren’t there. Sometimes we see things we want to see. And sometimes if we know how to look, we can see a Buddha. This poem is about learning to look, even in the most chaotic of places.
I see a buddha in the mess of words I wrote above,
Though,
I’ve veiled them from you.
It’s personal okay?
But let me say that it was all about,
How often I get to hear sparrows sing,
Or taste the morsal of a good word from book or craft,
Or chase the geese like a wild man again so that every passer by thinks me mad.
I see the buddha in the mess of words I wrote above,
Because my sadness is symmetrical,
For I know not which path is the mindful one,
And there are more than two besides.
But weave weave weave weave,
I must learn to weave,
Because I see a buddha in the mess of words I wrote above.
Loridian's Laboratory 