Full Writer's Sanctuary show

Following is the fully embedded Writer's Sanctuary Show in which Carolyn Howard-Johnson and I read lots of work from our new book Deeper Into the Pond and one each from Blooming Red. This includes the previous guest, author Tony Rodriguez.  The text for the longish poem I read - the one dedicated to David Foster-Wallace, "Coming Back" is below the show widget. Hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed chatting.

Listen to internet radio with World Wide Word on Blog Talk Radio

Coming Back

i.       She sat straight on the bar stool legs crossed tightly

stared abstractly through the buzz surrounding her in the stillness she created within that spot

a magic trick you couldn’t create if you tried

opened owl eyes into grief creating emptiness inside the rowdiest bar in the neighbourhood.

No one dared point a finger.

We tried not to look at her but it was hard.

      So we looked out of the corner of our eye when we walked past, our heads thrown back fake laughter all the while drawn towards the silence of that pain the peripheral gravity that wouldn’t let us settle into our evening of forgetting.

      The louder the laughter the deeper her pull.

     

      Still she sat against the clinking glass ice cube slide and when it was too much truth we linked arms and left her there alone.

     

      When we returned, she was gone.

 ii.  I thought about him all day

      immersed in his voice, the knock-knocking intensity that gripped the inside of my head. 

I understood (almost, really just almost) after staying in that horrible wave of truth and power and no stillness whatsoever where the words move around your body in tightening magnetic fields that won’t let up 

not even for a breath

no breaths.

He strangled for a simple breath, begging in his very last line, for someone to tell him how

I wanted to tell him

speaking calmly

in and out that’s all but he was already breathless

off the page

to a place (no place)

with no fear no more sound.

iii. This is the last one

no cause for celebration no rockstardom

because what you’ve made won’t last

the eternity sleep

nothing profound

in ice

the crystalline inorganic solidity of it

your life stopped

at its most fragile, beautiful point

poised for so much more

than just success

that relative, reprehensible word that masks and tears your life into diamond dust needles.