Author: johnbrandall

John Randall is a writer living in Missouri. His interests include camping, running, walking, cutting and burning wood, messing around with magnets, foraging, and listening to podcasts, many of them about baseball.

Farm Party, Fall 2013

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Then E Vaughan.  He unwraps and tosses a potay—it lands with a thud.  I go and get more wood from the creek bed.  Patrick helps, drags back a cedar.  E Vaughan is working on the tractor.  Will it start? 

Putt, putt, huff, huff... 

"Come on, baby!" 

"Now we have liftoff!" 

"Don't start counting your chickens yet."

Patrick saws.  B offers up the last two cinnamon rolls.  Bucky and Sarah are down, getting their stuff together.  There was a day, down here, the first Sunday, when we were eager for getaway....

E Vaughan backs the tractor up the hill...


My first Farm Party account...

Ampersand, Rotated 90˚ Counterclockwise

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     Here I am
          at
    ROCK BOTTOM
            again

                   Death, death, death, and destruction

         Bourbon at 13:00—

     Song helps,

                      a Nobel would do better.

              Hand to forehead,
                                            seated,
                                                      elbows on desk—

         
                      staring, stoned, bereft

    
                           all of the past up to the present
                                      & this is what's left.

WI/MN 2013

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"Enough planning, un-planning, re-planning, and planning for a lack of a plan. I am packed, I am ready, I am waiting."

— John Randell Cabot, Lake Superior, 1687

1

Lostant
rain on the pavement
good light, power lines & their
towers.

Toluca, Tonica, Winona
Mammatus clouds, water
drips down, hits my
face when
I open the
window.

A nut bar, worry of heartburn.
I went around the corner only to
have a cigarette.  But then Pat
has one and I wonder why I hid it.

State highway 6, Ottawa/La Salle-Peru
On the Illinois River.  Nice place?

There are a lot of windmills, and
an exit for highway 30 to Sterling,
to Aurora—where I went to school once...


Continue with this travel poem...

It Might Not Have Been Blue Mountain, But We Did Ascend a Mountain in Jamaica

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Note: What follows is not a dream but a carefully crafted piece of fiction.  Any semblance to recent, factual events is purely coincidental. 1 The Veaux-Hanns picked us up Saturday in Pat's Vibe after they had gone to some sort of comedy show down along the Loop.  We were ready for them.  It was ten … Continue reading It Might Not Have Been Blue Mountain, But We Did Ascend a Mountain in Jamaica

Northern Exposure Pastry Contest Goes Very Much Awry in Germany (Nap Dream)

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Don't ask me what was going on in this one.  I suppose I was just minding my own business living in my apartment here in St. Louis only it wasn't St. Louis of course it was Germany. I put a packet of ketchup outside one of the doors upstairs on Level 3.  Some guys with … Continue reading Northern Exposure Pastry Contest Goes Very Much Awry in Germany (Nap Dream)