John Rullo's apocalyptic Planet Love

Sci-fic fiction from John Rullo that grows truer by the day:

 

Planet Love opens on a cold winter evening at a Long Island Open Mic. John is a member of the house band known as The Cocktails, and after backing up Big Vinnie on a cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” Vinnie tells John about his encounter with a UFO. Although John is skeptical, he soon experiences a visit from a supernatural entity that overwhelms him and turns his life inside out. Just when he thinks he has seen the full picture, a string of events unfold that leads to both the end of the world as he knew it and his role in Earth’s rebirth. Based upon real life events, Planet Love’s story of hope, intrigue and mystery speaks to our everlasting search for the ground of our being and our unity with all life.

 

From Planet Love: The End of the World as We Knew It by John Rullo

 

For more on the book:

Planet Love:The End of the World as We Knew It: Rullo, John: 9780615475806: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on John Rullo: John Rullo – GIANT STEPS PRESS

 

Jim Cohn's ode to a field of sunflowers

 

The Sunflower Fields of Manitoba

 

The sunflower fields of Manitoba

Show me that each & every heart must bow

            From the weight of its own light.

 

Manitoba

(Undated, early 1980s

 

From Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems 1976-2021 by Jim Cohn

 

For more on the book: Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems: 1976-2021: Cohn, Jim: 9781958266007: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on Jim Cohn: Jim Cohn – GIANT STEPS PRESS

William Seaton's touch of Borges: "Perhaps I am a video game"

 

Perhaps I am a video game

and someone is playing me,

with a small lever

moving me deftly right and left.

“Perhaps,” I said to Patricia

“we are competitors,

well, not us, but our operators.”

Suddenly I felt I had lost

forty points and still the game

rolled inexorably on.

It would not be so bad, perhaps,

if I knew some being somewhere

was doing it all:

trying to avoid disease monsters

and self-flagellation

and ugly ego pits

and seeking on the other hand

to accumulate wisdom

and money and the taste

of fresh berries -- ah! --

and thrills and love-kisses

and the premium prize

a quiet lake in the mind.

 

 

From Planetary Motions by William Seaton

 

For more on the book: Planetary Motions: Seaton, William: 9798696999210: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on William Seaton: William Seaton – GIANT STEPS PRESS

 

For more on his blog: Poetry on the Loose

Steven L. Hirsch's "Train to the End of The World"

 

Train to The End of The World

 

Metro North platform like a wailing wall

survivors stand heads bowed waiting

for the train to the end of the world.

 

Parking lot now half-filled, yellow ribbons tied to antennae on cars

abandoned

by commuters who never came home.

 

Crematorium ash drifts uptown on a sour wind, the migraine that wouldn’t quit.

The bond trader back at her desk by 7 AM the next morning

gags on a buttered roll.

 

Root canal of city tooth labyrinth

Vicodin sway trance across 7th Ave.

holding my jaw in a numb jut.

 

I hop the “N” 2 stops to 49th

Stare at sheet music in Colony’s window

avoid the office a few more minutes.

 

A hollow echo down the tube

as the falling column roars

here I am boarding the train to the end of the world.

 

The PATH is rough, flooded and treacherous.

Fly a flag, wave a knife, steal a plane, sift gray mud for body parts.

Busy desk a mountain of rubble, recession’s blinders on.

 

Will I reach the promised land with my children?

Will I accomplish the thought, word and deed, voice of peace and security?

Will the tassle be torn from my shoe, jammed under the

opposing seat of this foursome?

 

Will I be late for that early meeting?

Is my beeper dead? Is my Palm Pilot alive

where I have crashed?

Lights flicker and rails squeal past Christopher St.

 

9/2001

[Originally published online in Napalm Health Spa: Report 2002]

From Demon Commuter and Other Poems by Steven L. Hirsch

 

For more on the book: Demon Commuter: Hirsch, Steven L: 9781958266038: Amazon.com: Books

For more on Steven L. Hirsch: Steven L. Hirsch – GIANT STEPS PRESS

Nine Lines by David Cope: "Seven a.m.: Buffing the Floor"

 

Seven a.m.: Buffing the Floor

 

looking up, a boy’s at the door,

blood streaming thru his hands,

scalp laid open---numbchucks.

no, he didn’t know who did it.

                   on the nurse’s bed,

                   coldpack on his head . . .

he had to get out of there,

staggered to the door

didn’t want to talk to no cops.

 

 

From Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971-2024 by David Cope, published by Grand River Poetry Press (Grand River Poetry Collective).

 

For more on the book: Moonlight Rose in Blue: Collected Poems 1971-2024: Cope, David: 9781968226008: Amazon.com: Books

 

For more on David Cope: David Cope – GIANT STEPS PRESS

A Brief Note on Gordon Ball’s My San Francisco by Kirpal Gordon

 

What a book Gordon Ball has created!

Weaving threads of his personal and professional lives via compelling photographs (both color and black and white) and an eye to history, Beat Generation and counter-culture documentarian Ball creates a multi-tiered narrative that highlights events synchronistic and serendipitous on his many visits to the City of Hills.

On the front cover of My San Francisco, he stands with his family in 1950 on an ocean liner in the Bay headed for Tokyo to rendezvous with his father who got out of Shanghai before Mao shut it down. So begins Ball’s lifelong love of the city by the bay over the next half-century in which both his blood and self-selected families play crucial roles.

He returns to the Bay area with his girlfriend Candy in 1967, before editing Allen Ginsberg’s Allen Verbatim, and serving as manager of East Hills Farm, a retreat for poets in upstate New York that Ginsberg created (see Taking Giant Steps: Gordon Ball's East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg: A Conversation with Jim Cohn & Kirpal Gordon for more).

In North Beach, he sells the Oracle on the sidewalk and rooms across the street from the City Lights bookstore. He meets the manager Shig Murao, who helps him find work and who becomes one of the major reasons he returns over the years.

The writing is lively, highly descriptive, brisk and in the Beat Gen tradition. He employs his own punctuation and builds sentences that stay in the mind long after one closes the book. Like all of Ball’s work, whether film, photograph or prose, he finds brilliant strategies to convey his countercultural documentary wizardry.

My San Francisco is that kind of ars poetica!

To purchase, click My San Francisco: Gordon Ball: 9781937370329: Amazon.com: Books.

                                                    Photo of Gordon Ball by Patrick Hinely

Peter Manos' Ars Poetica from his new work, Myriads

 

Peter Manos' Ars Poetica from his new work, Myriads

Unwritten

 

I didn’t write these poems so much as

Discover them, becoming spokesperson

For each, as each opened into being

Requiring no pen, paper, keyboard,

Or screen in order to be recorded

 

After clouds and fog silently parted

Words gathered aloud, line by line by heart,

And managed to hold fast. It all cohered—

Scaffolded in memory’s atmosphere.