Since
returning to Vietnam eight years ago, I’ve received just one royalty
payment from Dan Simon’s Seven Stories Press, the publisher of my Night, Again (1996), Fake House (2000), Blood and Soap (2004), Love Like Hate (2010) and Postcards from the End of America
(2017). It makes no sense that not one of my Seven Stories books has
been sold after 2018! An old friend of Simon told me in NYC Dan was
confronted in his office by another author. This enraged man grabbed
Simon by the collars over, you guess it, missing royalties.
If you Paypal me $14, or more if you’re inclined, I’ll send you a PDF of Postcards.
This nonfiction account of America’s collapse is more relevant than
ever. With little money, I traveled across the US over years to document
its unraveling. Though Postcards
should be taught at American universities, I’m shooed to the other end
of the world and deprived of my royalties, but that’s just how they
roll, yo!
Eating Fried Chicken
I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times
When I’m eating fried chicken
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes—
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.
But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times
When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything
That’s not generally available to mankind.
(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)
And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots,
And meat brings humiliation,
And each gasp of air
Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.
Borderless Body
Before, I was a miserly person, dried up, stiff,
Stuck, completely wrung, stuttering, fanatical,
But this morning, my skin felt unusually cool and conscious.
My body tingled. Suddenly I could understand and speak
2,000 languages. My soul blossomed, my breasts budded.
I peeled back my foreskin to scrape clean all of my obsolete
And labored presumptions. My teeth, the gaps in between
My teeth and my breath felt unusually fresh and clean.
I could see very far away. I could sympathize with each
Strand of hair stranded on the skin of each person.
Shuddering, I ejaculated for the first time in life, into life.
I became aware of my miraculous vagina and anus.
Finally, I had been allowed to spread out, to blend into
All humans, animals and things. I just wanted to leap up
To kiss everyone right away. I just wanted to service
And suck everyone right away. I also wanted to be sucked
By everyone on this earth. I was willing to forgive
And apologize to each toe joint on each person.
Naked, I walk through the street as the very first human.
Before he breathed his last, they led him outside to look at
the sun for the last, and first, time.
*
Travel books fascinated him so much that he spent his entire
life chained to his desk, with the curtains drawn, reading them.
*
He loves maps for their own sake, it is true, and when he
shouts out while pointing at a random destination, “I want to be there,” he is
not expressing a desire to be anywhere, particularly, on this great earth, but
only a wish to be a fiber, a speck at most, on an intricately-folded, colorful
piece of paper.
*
After half a century, a man returned to the city of his
birth to discover it practically unchanged: all the old buildings were
miraculously intact, although yellowing slightly, and the entire population of
half a century ago, 2,489,863 souls, by exact count, were still alive, although
yellowing slightly.
*
Two men were life-long enemies because of a word said
decades earlier, a word misheard, misinterpreted, and exceedingly trivial, in
any case, to any objective observer, a slight inflection, some say, a thread of
air escaped from between more-or-less-closed lips, or a twitch of the eyebrow,
and yet the results were the horrifying death of one man, and the maiming of
the other.
*
He ignored public fascinations with movie stars, athletes,
statesmen, revolutionaries, mass-murderers, and poets, by writing
well-researched, footnoted, and illustrated biographies of bus drivers,
cashiers, beauticians, filing clerks, plumbers, and roofers.
*
At the border between there and there, a young man who was
caught with a generic secret inside one of his bodily orifices was forced to
swallow a strong doze of laxative, then whisked to an insane asylum, where he
spent the remaining years of his productive life.
*
Slang is crowding out real words, he foolishly thinks,
forgetting that every word belongs to the shadowy vocabulary of an illicit
crowd, invented to reassure and flatter its speaker, and confuse outsiders to
what is being said.
*
The pretty woman confided, “Whenever I closed my eyes I
would see its aerodynamic head, its black turf, its angle, and then suddenly
the phone would ring, dispelling my vision.”
*
After his fifth gin and tonic, the scrawny, asthmatic man
known as Uncle Moe divulged to an empty ashtray, “Yes, I must have known more
than a thousand of them, but I’ve never known any of them more than twice.”
*
There, he could appraise them without the anxiety of actual
contact, without stripping himself, a pseudo yes to a usually no situation.
*
On an unseasonably cold night near the corner of Broad and
Pine, one dandy said to another, “Yes, yes, life is short, and we are the
beneficiaries.”
*
Resigned, the single woman begins each conversation with a
male stranger: “We’re only talking because you want to fuck me.”
*
He has traveled around the globe a thousand times just to
spill his seed on the carpeted floors of unheated hotel rooms.
*
At 40, the bachelor decided to travel, to see the world, and
among the many marvels he discovered, he was dismayed to find out that women
everywhere, judging from the evidences gathered through the thin walls of hotel
rooms from Brussels to Johannesburg to Riga, always vocalize their pleasure
during sex, and that men, any man, really, always last minutes and minutes
longer than him, which explains, finally, why he was still a bachelor after so
many years, despite the good looks and charms that had attracted countless
women to him initially.
*
The well-matched couple remain childless after five years of
marriage, and now sleep on bunk beds, him on top, her on the bottom, although
they flip flop occasionally
*
Suddenly she couldn’t remember her husband’s birthday, her
children’s names, his face, whether she had ever cheated on him, whether she
was even married.
*
A boy was born on the luggage carousel at Singapore’s Changi
Airport, spent his infancy in the storage room of the baggage claim, grew into
a happy, healthy child prancing around the beautiful atrium of the food court
(often serenaded by classical music), had regrettably brief friendships with
people of many nationalities, had sex for the first time, with a backpacker of
indeterminate ethnicity, behind the check-in counter of the Royal Brunei
Airlines (terminal 2), read the biography of Lee Kuan Yew and many bestsellers,
spent much of middle age brooding in the departure lounge, then died, of
abdominal hernia, in a well-scrubbed stall of the men’s room.
*
Convinced that war is the only authentic game, the only game
worth playing, he dedicated himself to being a mercenary, and proceeded to
participate in the Pakistani-Indian War of 1971 (where he lost a finger), the
Yom Kippur War (where he lost his right foot), the Falklands War (where he lost
the right side of his face), the Gulf War (where he lost the left side of his
face), and the 1995 civil war in Sierra Leone (where he lost another finger).
*
A fake life is not redeemed by a real death, he finally
realized, as orange flames licked his angry eyebrows.
*
A national icon in his youth, loveless and lampless, he
languished for decades in cold, inhospitable countries, working an assortment
of bullshit jobs that deeply offended his sense of personal greatness, his
destiny, which he came to understand as the punishment of the people he had
left behind, the wreaking of havoc on his homeland, when he would return.
*
He is a lifelong ingrate, having betrayed everyone—lovers,
friends, relatives, dogs—who has ever benefited him, on principle, but he is
strangely loyal to one whom he has never met, who has done nothing for him, who
does not even know that he exists.
*
To your less-than-delicate question, Sir, I can only
respond: Of course I would do it all over again, because even though I’ve lost
my left eye, and my right ear, and my nose, and both of my legs, I’ve
experienced something truly different, truly amazing, and have managed to
escape an absolutely meaningless life that was slowly killing me back home.
One Sentence Poems
I hesitated before the penetrating,
Seasoned, bright, slightly wicked face
Above a smooth, white body,
Perhaps malnourished.
*
She yearned to be impregnated
By each bold, extravagant mind
She met on the yellowing page.
*
Each night, without fail, it rang
At exactly 2:13, but she never
Picked up the phone because
That’s the exact time he died.
*
All morning, a live ant carries
A dead ant across the vast,
Cheap, polyester carpet,
In grief or hunger?
*
Before making love, drunk,
After the party, mother and son-in-law
Despised each other.
*
Insolent, stupid or insane,
He declared his occupation as
Resting, yawning and sleeping.
*
He wears outdated clothes,
Eats outdated food, lives
In an outdated country.
*
Based on defeats big, small and spectacular,
A lifetime of continuous defeats, he decides to pen
An instructive book for humanity, to stimulate
Progress and righteous living, before he dies.
*
Deaf, blind, missing arms and legs,
Caked in blood, he crawls onto the stage
To receive his medal from a draft dodger.
*
Tearing up, puffing, he twisted
My arm, yanked my hair, before
He handed me the diamond-
Studded wedding ring.
*
Morning, night, in light or darkness,
I took the initiative, then waited,
Waited and waited, but he wouldn’t
Dare touch me.
*
Though she’s of a different race
And half his age, he likes to bury
His face in her tangy armpit,
And calls her mom.
*
Though he’s of a different race
And decidedly sunken chested,
She likes to suck his nipples
And calls him mom.
*
Infatuated with women’s traces more
Than actual women, he’s absorbed
In collecting every fragment,
Memento, trinket, fossil, souvenir,
Scent, vapor and drip of women.
*
After sex, she always forgot
The name of whoever
Was next to her.
*
The last day on earth, the sun
Doesn’t set but rises, rises
And rises.
*
Out of all sounds and colors,
He could only hear two notes
And see two colors.
*
Reading this sentence,
He forgets the previous,
Because his mind can only
Contain one relatively
Short sentence.
*
Reading this word,
He forgets the previous,
Because his mind can only
Contain one common and
Not too abstract word.
*
A lifelong liar,
He doubts everything,
Including dogs barking
And birds chirping.
*
To collect a paycheck each week,
He must lie nonstop to everyone,
Including his wife, kids, dogs, birds,
Fish, snakes and horses.
*
He would only eat each dish once,
Talk to each person once,
Sleep on each bed once.
*
Lying alone, naked, wrinkled and ripe,
He still mumbles in satisfaction, Betrayal
Is power.
*
He’s hyper sensitive
To every shift, twitch, twinge,
Belch and hiccup of his soul,
And oblivious to the conditions
Of every other living thing.
*
He’s very philosophical about
The great suffering of others,
And very emotional about
His minor irritations.
*
He always sees another’s misfortune
As a consolation, a spiritual boost,
Frankly a personal stroke of good luck.
*
He knows a little about everything,
Except the things he knows nothing about.
With no publishers and all my self-published books banned by Amazon, I will now sell PDFs of them directly, starting with Kafka, Anti-Semite.
If you PayPal me $12, or more if you’re inclined, I will send you the
PDF. This is the only way to get my writing out in some concrete form.
The internet is ephemeral. Though canceled, I’d rather not disappear
completely.
The PayPal donate button is at the top of this blog. Thanks!
Table of Contents:
Kafka, Anti-Semite Hemingway’s Castrati White Flight: Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” Flannery O’Connor’s White Trash Breece D’J Pancake's Quiet Magnificence Democracy of Violence Rockiest Horrors Apocalypse Now Capa's Moments of Death Scitan in Mind Shithology Norman Lewis’ Blind White Girls Starving Frontiersmen vs. Wusses Jack London? Orwellian Love Architecture of Cruelty Dying Thoughts Fred Reed, Joe Biden and John Cassavetes Marveling, Again, At Paul Bowles' "A Distant Episode" The Sorrows of War Trần Vũ, Gore Envy and Trauma Fulfilled Brian Keenan’s Horrific and Wonderful Beirut Evelyn Waugh’s Hippo, Die Antwoord’s Lion and White Malice Disguised As Charity Henry Trotter and Billy Monk in the Tavern of the Seas Room 666 Musical Omens Crumbling Sewer On The Hill From Caruso to Bebe Rexha Genghis Khan vs. Thomas Jefferson Reflecting on Jing Ke, Tian Guang, Fan Yuqi and Gao Jianli Eating Your Children Christian to Death Namibian Peace Corps America's Last Hope
Thanks for a $100 contribution from a repeat donor!
