Just a reminder, guys … if you care to keep track of my various poemy-type things or strange stories, you can always check my Future publication page right here at the blog. If somebody doesn’t keep tabs on me, I’m bound to get into trouble.
I hope you all are looking forward to a terrific Autumn!
I got some great news tonight — I’ll get to see my poetry featured in Scars Publications’ Down in the Dirt magazine for a third time. My poem “The Writer” will appear in the May 2020 issue.
The poem will also appear this week at the Scars website. (The publisher produces both Down in the Dirt and cc&d magazines.) Finally, “The Writer” might also be featured in future Down in the Dirt collections; the magazine regularly reprints selected poems in anthology format. (I was lucky enough last March to see my poem “hens staring upward” reprinted in The Flickering Light anthology following its initial publication.)
Thank you, Editor Janet Kuypers, for allowing me to join the range of talented voices that are regularly showcased by Down in the Dirt!
(It was really damned cool.)
This was the massive rainbow late yesterday afternoon in front of Mill Mountain. The video doesn’t do it justice. It was super-bright and it was gigantic. It looked like it was hitting the ground just a few blocks away.
If you look carefully, you can see a second rainbow arc above it at right.
There was a pretty neat sunshower preceding it as well.
I’m quite happy to share here that Synchronized Chaos will soon feature two of my science fiction/horror stories and one poem.
The stories are “Shine Now, Fiercely, Forever” (my time travel horror tale) and “At the End of the World, My Daughter Wept Metal” (my nanotechnology horror tale). The poem is “An Altogether Different Slumber.” All three of the pieces dovetail nicely with the editorial inspiration for Synchronized Chaos — the mathematical concept of chaos theory. (It really is a unique online creative journal, and I encourage you to check it out.)
— although you kinda can’t tell from the photo. I should have stuck a coin beside it for scale.
Insert the Dune joke of your choice, people.
Why the giant bugs, Roanoke?
Because there is no god, and because life is a stupefying, interminable Kafkaesque nocturnal hellscape.
Hey, I generally love Ben & Jerry’s. It’s an awesome brand. But Pumpkin Cheesecake ice cream combines two of the very worst things in the universe — into a new and confusing amalgam of horror. (Anyone who knows me will tell you that I abhor all things pumpkin-flavored. And I’ve harbored a private loathing of cheesecake since college — there’s a weird story behind that.)
So, for me, this is like taking two things that cannot possibly be worse, and yet somehow making them worse via cruel combination. Like maybe a giant spider that also has gonorrhea. Or maybe Donald Trump singing an entire Whitney Houston album.
Remember that fish entree I showed you that looked like “Pumpkinhead?” I would rather eat that than this.
My friend gave me a permission to post this picture only if I said it was delicious. I lied to her.
This is just a smattering of the early “Godzilla” movies that thrilled me as a kid. They played on television in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s. Hot damn, was I happy when these came on. It was the next best thing to a holiday.
The first trailer that you see (and the photo below) is for the original “Godzilla” in 1954. That scene where he tears through the high-tension powerlines made a big impression on me as a little boy. I never forgot it. I should point out that I (like most of the world) saw the Americanized version of the movie, which was heavily re-edited and released in 1956. (That is indeed Raymond Burr that you see in the trailer.)
“Godzilla vs. Megalon” (1976) is another that I remember well — probably because I saw it as an older child.
Am I crazy, or does the “Son of Godzilla” trailer from 1969 mention “Frankenstein” for some reason? Something got lost in translation.
Like an awkward emperor,
you sit alone atop
the rooftop of my urbane neighbors.
Squat and fat and white, you’re
a satisfied and unenlightened despot.
Edicts issue out
From your discordant “caw!”
What do those yuppies think of you?
Your mien makes
Their rich art-deco house
A commonplace kingdom.
Your ungainly gait makes
a prosaic palace of their home.
Cardinals arcing over
are airborne scarlet darts.
Pairs of swallows will sometimes
loop in symmetry.
You’ll have none of it. You’re
All utilitarian flight
And graceless landings.
If you were human
you’d be a pot-bellied plumber, perhaps
in a wife-beater t-shirt
holding a beer.
Other birds will swoop and dive.
Other birds will sing.
But your cawing only exhorts us,
“Hail to The King.”
© Eric Robert Nolan 2013
Photo credit: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=437394
