New Titular / Failsafe-B Lost Rock EP

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The Tender Buttons collaborative is up at Titular, and it includes elements from a chapter of The Immortals Act Their Age called “Shovels” (big thanks again, Reynard and Jimmy for asking me to send something…). I’m big happy to appear alongside Prathna Lor, Amy McDaniel, Desmond Kon and Reynard Seifert, co-editor of Titular. Here is “Shovels” in its entirety:

SHOVELS

All the afterlives before this one’s when Dr. Coffin's voice buried on an old tape recorder was posthumously resurrected.

Half asleep, he reached down from the top bunk and grabbed the tape recorder from a table beside the lower bunk no one else slept in.

He looked at it, rewound it a little, pressed Play to hear what the last thing he said was.

His ears grew into shovels, and he used them to dig his way through the cemetery of words his mouth once gave birth to.

His ears dug in, his voice said:

[ The first breath is a main entrance, the last thought before breaking in.

The only thing I've ever been good at is practicing.

Dreams were a talent I developed out of an early hobby of sleeping.

Since then, I've learned insomniacs count missiles like sperm rather than sheep.

Sometimes, I'm never even sure there is a target until I crack its eggshell. ]

He pressed Fast Forward, his voice said:

[ Unlike me, pharmacies are bright, really clear until I walk out of them.

Sheep follow each other down my throat, and I always lose count. ]

Dr. Coffin yawned, his voice said:

[ I know when one arrives, the journey may never have existed.

To those in the waiting room, the approach matters only to the disease being cured. ]

His voice said:

[ But there's a traffic jam on the road to recovery, and I take baby steps toward Maturity's nowhere. ]

Dr. Coffin closed his eyes, shuddered falling asleep.

He hated that feeling sometimes.

He loved that feeling sometimes.

It was like life.

Odd, Dr. Coffin often thought, how he had something like life to compare things to.

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An EP of eight Failsafe-B rock songs has surfaced. These songs are actually pre-Failsafe-B, but it doesn't matter. They belong. I wrote them with my friend and co-producer Sterling Smalley back in high school, for our old band Siva, c. 1997. We didn’t record them until 2003 in Sterling's home studio and, under circumstances which are now kind of funny to us, these songs have been, until recently, ‘missing’. They feature me on guitars, bass, keyboards and vocals, with Sterling on drums. I feel they still ‘kick ass’, as they are heavy and melodic. Here’s maybe one of my favorites of this batch, the very last song of the EP, titled “The Ghosts of Oceans”:

'Snowing Fireflies' and 'Of Creatures' Available for Preorder

My chapbook Snowing Fireflies will be released soon from Folded Word Press, and it’s available for preorder from Folded Word Press. You can order it here, or, for a copy with a signed inscription, you can order here. When you preorder, if you use the coupon 'FWBG' you’ll get a 5% discount. US shipping and CA sales tax (if applicable) are included in the price.

Also, my forthcoming poetry collection, Of Creatures, is now available for preorder at BN.com, and I think it will also be available soon through Amazon. The poems which make up Of Creatures are different from much of my other poetry (such as the work found here and here), as I feel them to be an experiment in optimism. Here are individual pages for both Snowing Fireflies and Of Creatures.

Thank you for your time and consideration…

Medulla to Publish 'Pseudo-Masochism'

Medulla Publishing will publish my chapbook manuscript Pseudo-Masochism (Amnesias and Artifacts) in February 2011 (Big thanks again, Jennifer...). This collection consists of sex-themed stories and poems about an anonymous ‘he’ and an anonymous ‘she’ and their relationship.

Earlier versions of some of these pieces have appeared in Buffalo Artvoice, elimae (2nd poem), King Log (1rst poem), LITnIMAGE, Megaera (2nd poem), New Wave Vomit, Poetic Inhalation, Poetry SuperHighway (1rst and 3rd poems), Sleep.Snort.Fuck., and Unscroll.

Medulla Publishing will also be publishing an anthology of works from the first three issues of The Medulla Review and my story, "Placebo Effect," which appears in Issue #3, has been chosen for inclusion.

Thank you for your time.

A Working Prototype

You’re nothing if you don’t have a job.

If you don’t go to work and earn a paycheck, performing mindless tasks on command, volunteering your time for money you won’t receive for at least another week at the expense of your health and happiness for someone else’s long-term profit, you’re nothing.

Worthless.

You need to get up off your ass, get out there into the world and acquire gainful employment, without which you might not make it in the world or become financially stable, and even with financial stability you might not make it but you have to take that chance.

This isn’t a philosophy.

There isn’t any time for lofty concepts.

You have more important things to worry about, like what you’re going to do with all that time you’re wasting at home, unable to afford the rent it costs to live there, and utility companies demanding ransom.

You need money to pay the electric bill so your alarm clock wakes you up to go to work.

You need to leave home, go to work for the money it’s going to cost for you to come back home, something to live for, for the money it’s going to cost to get yourself back to work.

You’re not a prototype.

No one else wants to work either.

But they have families, just like you, children to feed and clothe, like you do.

And they also want to enjoy the small increments of time they don’t have time to waste when they’re not humiliating and degrading themselves by going to work and doing things which have nothing to do with who they are, which have no concrete relevance to their lives, which are arbitrary and meaningless, producing things they can’t afford to buy that other people like them, for the same reason, can’t afford to not produce.

You’re not the first to want to boycott their own life, to avoid their responsibilities, shut themselves in, lock the doors and windows and stop paying the phone bill.

But you still have to pay your rent, because you really don’t want to get evicted, because you need a home address if you want to get a job.

And what if you get sick—it’s not important that your job may be the reason you need health insurance.

It’s not important that there are no jobs available.

The Medulla Review, Issue #3, and 'The Immortals'

Issue #3 of The Medulla Review is live, and it includes a chapter from The Immortals Act Their Age called “Placebo Effect.” Issue #3 is “themed around darkness, death, apocalypse, and alternate / future realities.” Here is an introduction from editor Jennifer Hollie Bowles:

Dear Writers and Readers,

Volume 1, Issue #3 of The Medulla Review is themed around darkness, death, apocalypse, and alternate/future realities. I am awed by the original and fearless ways in which writers tackled these heavy themes. The works chosen show how beauty and irony breathe even in the most painful of human hours and depths; how life is impossible without death and its latent meaning—change; how apocalypse can be necessary and gentle, and how the seeds of the future lie everywhere in our individual and social constructions of reality.

Sometimes love is the darkest of emotions, marriage the worst of hells, and politics the most depraved of endeavors. Perhaps it is not death that frightens us so, but rather it is seeing our loved ones fragile and feeble—and our fear of letting them go.

Some writers questioned philosophers and gods, and some searched for answers in caterpillars and mice, storm leaves and skin cells, carnivals and crayons, and even in the ultimate symbolism of a mere can of tuna in the face of starvation. Yet, in all of these musings, voices emerged through the minds' awareness of unknowing within knowing and the hearts' passion to connect with others in this—creative catalyst—we call existence.

Namaste,

Jennifer Hollie Bowles
editor-in-chief
The Medulla Review

There's a lot of great work in this issue. Big thanks again, Jennifer...