You wanted to get the old band back together.
But we didn’t even have a band.
All we did was
sit around and drink
and talk
and smoke.
We played music
but it was music other people recorded
onto compact discs
and then sold to us.
Yeah, we’d go to venues.
There were crowds,
not drawn by us.
And there’d be bands there,
but not our band.
None of us wrote any songs.
None of us sang.
We didn’t even have any instruments...
I never want to go to sleep again. The only sleep I have any respect for is nap sleep, dog by my side, earplugs in, the rest of the world doing whatever it does all day—making noise, stirring up dust, laying out obstacles. But then at night? With them all asleep? And I’m gonna put myself under? I don’t think so. It never gets more quiet than when everyone’s asleep.
~
It’s not that I never sleep. I sleep plenty. Sleep is the opposite of lust. I feel it when I dream. Heartbreak, heart moan, heart ruin. Long, lost, and forlorn. Shorn or unshorn, whichever is worse.
~
I am just so in love with the world when I’m not hating it. Look at all these people going by, look at the moon rise in the sky. Let the road go by, cars like blinking ornaments. My teeth are singing, headed in the direction of an early Christmas.
Night Mining...
But Meg said, but Greg said. Camp host reading Stephen King. Spooky. The Cardinals lost, the Nationals lost. Padres at Rockies now, from Coors. There was a brawl in this game. Rox lead 5-0.
I turn down the sound of a commercial. It felt especially out of place here. In Denver you go to Applejack Wine & Spirits. In Chicago it’s Binny’s Beverage Depot. Heck, these days you don’t even have to go to the Binny’s store, they’ll bring it right to your door. Joe Maddon told me that.
I went to Binny’s a couple of times when I lived a summer in Chicago. That was back when beer was blowing up, craft beer—or microbrews, as they were then known. I heard the Tampa Rays announcer yesterday talking about how he used to live in Chicago. He was doing a Rays game against the White Sox. It struck me that a lot of people have once lived in Chicago, midwesterners at least. My brother and sister both live there now.
I’ve only ever once been to New York City. The Big Apple was the setting for a book I just read. It made me want to visit again; or, it made me wish I’d been born there, had a chance to spend more than a few days of my life there. I don’t think I could move to NYC now. Not as a dog owner. Not even as a married man. I would’ve had to have lived there young. If I were living in NYC I’d have to be able to float around. I could have a job but no attachments outside of that. Otherwise I think the City would crush me, wring me out, drive me mad.
I had a poem published last week on the website of Horned Things Journal. I will publish the poem on this site later this year. But you can read the poem on Horned Things now by following this link:
Horned Things Journal, Issue Two
This site is still relatively young but they have assembled an impressive and eclectic mix of writing and art in this second issue. I feel lucky to have had "Making Minerals" included in their journal.
I am posting today to highlight a poem I had published yesterday on another website.
My poem called "Newville 108" is currently running at a site called the Under Review.
I am hoping you will check my poem out there. Later on this year, I will post it here but for now I want to thank them for publishing my work and I want to invite you to check out their site, and to take a look at my poem there by following this link:
https://www.underreviewlit.com/issues/7-winter-2023
If you are headed there on your phone, I should say that my poem will read best and look best if you tilt your phone sideways so that the screen gets wider, allowing the poem enough room to accommodate the length of its lines. It also looks good on a laptop.
Finally, the Under Review has suggested that it might produce a limited run of print copies of this current issue, which I hope will happen.
The Speaker is third in line to be the President. But it’s more than that. This very House of Representatives could play a massive, deciding role in choosing the next President. I’m not talking about something akin to the illegal attempt to dismiss the Electoral College that some of these same Republicans attempted in 2020. If, in an election for President, no candidate secures 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives votes to choose a President. The implications are profound. Imagine a third-party candidate who receives, say, twenty percent of the electoral votes, who somehow emerges from the House vote with the White House in hand. It could happen. It’s in the Constitution...
What I’ve got here is some OG #18. I taste meat, grease, gas, incense. Not fruit. Bong rip. No cough but a little tenderness in the throat. Harvest was June ninth, twenty-twenty-two. The THC comes in at 26.1 per cent.
Creeping high. I’m on my first drink, which is not usually the case. Usually I’ve had a couple of drinks by the time I’m craving a smoke but we’ve been driving all day.
It’s Braves 5, Mets 3. An urge to write is a good early side effect but this urge might not be due to the weed. It could be the driving. It’s happened before. It’s the movement, my body through the gravity-controlled space of this planet, the vibration of traveling seventy miles an hour, backward in time, against the spin, in a car.
If I have already
gone insane
but I want to get
crazier yet,
what’s my move?
Go outsane?
Crazy outside means
Attack of leaf blower,
mind wound down
like weedeater string;
the smell of suddenly
snipped neurons;
amphibious on gasoline,
when two strokes are
none too many.
How many RPMs?
How much throttle?
Green guffaw,
zero turn.
In the end,
I throw myself
to the ground
and roll around
on freshly mowed grass
until there’s nothing left
to cut.
Note: This poem first appeared at The Literary Bohemian.
https://literarybohemian.com/poetry/two-poems-by-john-randall/
by Phil Williams
whither you come from
-or-
the magic eight-ball
i venture into something, it's a mind-blower, but i gotta keep it under wraps for j-rand.
see: i had envisioned a wry conversation/transcription that was intertwined. red-vines
and mr. pibb; chronicles.
adjacent antecedent (i.e. addendum): the spatial discrepencies had been a problem, but
the chronological shifting was downright vexing. first it was 2004, then 2007, then 2003,
the years and specific dream ramblings resemble a rorschach test; it's another brick in
the wall.
the wood desired chasing, and the family desired spaghetti. sorry, but my thoughts get
confused, like waves in the midnight surf. german balloon aka led zeppelin: it parks its
dreams @ ground zer0. eros may have called, but failed to identify himself, leading me
to this shell of thoughts. it could be an atkins of fiction.
outra-verted, a word i wordlessly think when i encounter 'yar.' i consider the rivulet to
my s(l)ide, but conclude she's w/ the tall man. i'm obviously hallucinating. the police
have arrived and i've simply said the word 'plant.'
realizing i had entered a house of mirrors and drugs, i texted j. still and nick s. they
were part of my cleaning crew in the mid 90's. i suddenly understand that i'm alone and sweating,
in a basement, no shaman. the disorientation slowly dissipates and my carb-stricken mind intuits
the next phase may require an umbrella, inverted.
Where one leak seemed fixed, another springs up. Well, isn’t that the way it goes? Stained wood, stained mattress. Damp kitchen, scary room.
Stove going. I was in the dirty attic. Three-legged chairs, canceled checks, dauber nests by the hundred. I go up there because the attic is my place to intercept the rain that finds its way through the farmhouse’s old, fallible roof. Like me, the rain keeps returning, keeps coming back to this remote piece of cattle country in the middle of the state.
A mist rises from the pasture, hangs there like a cloud. Above, the sky is clear. There is, thank God, no wind. It is still. I can hear nothing but the nothing that is, the nothing that once will be everything. If you would be so kind as to scatter my ashes here. If you would allow me to play the part of the sandstone, to let the water through.
The mice are back. Two traps, old cheese, picked clean. Leave the droppings where they lay. Wise rodents. Re-bait, try again...
The Writing of John B. Randall 