Blog2L2
- Baldessari May 18, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rewind May 11, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Going in the Opposite Direction May 8, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rope Man with Cigarette April 25, 2012 Derek Bridges
3 poems with drawings
1.
a hookah bar is opening in our neighborhood
and we young toughs flick our butts
at the Coming Soon! front window shout
while we smoke in the American way
and burn and burn and burn
2.
even now I cannot see her smile
without the stern of my heart
bashing into that same fucking rock
3.
I do not believe in walking up escalators
great men and minds have labored and sweat
in the construction of these wondrous things
that take me from the parking lot to my office
let them do the job they have been so well designed and oiled for
say I
as less patient men rush past me headlong upwards
in their dream-like speeding walks
all to the same slow fate
Seafaring Stories from the Sea-green Sea–Part 4
The sales girl was generally pleasant, mild-mannered and dainty. Coming from a long line of sales clerks she had a genetic disposition for friendliness, but strange muscles growled at the back of her neck whenever the sea captain entered the store. There was something about the man that turned all her pink nerves to red and her blue ones to black. His wheeze alone as he counted his change before dropping it on the counter was enough to cause a strange and disconcertingly visible cramping along her forhead.
It was something personal, but she could not say what. The sea captain had never done anything personal to her or anyone she knew. He only bought his ranch dressing, his copper kettle, his poultry. Sometimes he would FedEx a three day old mackeral to an old flame a few cities over. “Love is just a dead fish that hasn’t happened yet,” the captain said and no one quite knew what he meant.
The store manager, coming himself from a long line of store managers, noticed… Continue reading
A Short Essay on the Loss of Youth and Suchlike Things
I was lying in the tub the other morning, trying not to contemplate the ever increasing amount of water I displace, when I chanced to look up at the bathroom ceiling. Believe me, this was the best of my chance-looking options.
And glancing at that ceiling I remembered as a young boy fantasizing about walking on ceilings in general, as if this would be the greatest of supernatural powers: to look at the world anew all upside and excitingly foreign. In my youth I could imagine happy day after day strolling along the ceilings of the family home, surprising my sister, freaking out the mail-man, finding out what all that stuff was that my mom put on top of the refrigerator.
Continue readingSeafaring Stories from the Sea-green Sea–Chapter 3
3
There is turkey running loose on the deck of our ship. The crew has named it Socrates for reasons having vaguely to do with one of them having read a book once. The turkey is not full grown but neither was it a baby.”Too small to fry,” the Captain says, throwing his extra shoe at it. The captain, having only one leg, repurposes the extra shoe of every pair as his throwing shoe. Sometimes he ties a string to it for easier retrieval.
For being one of a species of the most landlubbing birds, Socrates is suprisingly sure-footed on deck, good at both avoiding the sudden strikes of the mecurial captain’s spare footware and adjusting to the pitch and yaw of the ocean. It was as if he had been born at sea, had come from a long line of turkeys specialized to the rocking motions of seafaring. He never shows the slightest twinge of seasickness in even the worst storms.
He lives mostly on potatoes and the worms he finds in them like… Continue reading
Seafaring Tales of the Sea Green Sea–second installment
Her bath was spiked with water from the ocean, gathered for her in barrels by the one-legged captain. The captain was well know for both his seamanship and his romantic entanglements and she was freckled and fair and famous mostly for a profound lack of modesty, but a little too for her beauty and the straightness of her teeth.
Sometimes she would tease the captain with a naked foot, elbow or breast peaking out of her bathrobe as he delivered the goods, stacking the barrels in a corner of her spacious bathroom, then setting up a needlessly elaborate network of rubber tubing and pipes to deliver the water from the barrels to her bath. She paid him for his services with her bingo winnings but the captain would have done it all and more for free.
Seawater kept her young, she said. It also made her much beloved by the neighborhood cats.
Now and then a starfish would get caught in her bathtub drain or she would find a wayward bullshark rearing its blunt and monstorous head from… Continue reading
Seafaring Stories from the Sea green Sea
1.
Sundry ships are crossing the seas, bringing us to the new wild shores. On each ship a cook, a baker, a captain, a whore. I swab the deck—wiping the footprints of each away in what I hope is a fluid and efficient motion. I love the whore but she is above my class.
I am a cabin boy, as my father was before me and his father before him. All of my ancestors have been cabin boys, even the women. It is our fate and our plight. We never set foot on land, but wait patiently on ships while the pilgrims unload themselves and their provisions, make there way into the wilds, with axes and guns and slide-rules.
My captain is a cruel man with a wooden leg and a plastic arm and an ear made out of tin foil. He likes to shout “Save you’re pennies lad,” whenever he sees me, sometimes taking shots at me with his sidearm. I don’t know what it means or why he does it. He also shouts:… Continue reading
TomorrowLand Excerpt: Letter from an Unknown Rail
Dear Reader:
See the world by atomic train! (and by “world” I mean world in the sense of the World Series, the World Wide Wrestling associating, or any of a number of world championships and organizations which in actuality mean only the United States, with Canada occasionally thrown in for good measure, if they agree to play nice and not get all whiny about things). See the Mississippi, the Maume and the Wisconsin. See the mountains, prairies, dead little towns, trailer parks and junkyards rise and fall around you. See the strange rusting place of abandoned factories, broken windows and the decaying shells of cars that is Detroit or Cleveland or Gary. See the sparkling glass palaces in the distance; the future cities that build themselves upon these bones, but do not like to stand too close to the swoosh and zoom of this common transit. Witness the complete lack of respect for durable goods that goes on in the western states, with houses, cars and washing machines left empty to rust and rot… Continue reading
Excerpt from TomorrowLand: Your New Suit
Another mad inventor. Wild hair, thick glasses, a lab-coat with strange items poking and bulging from every pocket. His latest invention—the micro-text suit. See it hanging in its vacuum-sealed display case. He will move it carefully into a garment bag and bring it to the offices of the Board of Directors. They will finally see the fruits of their investment—of so many years and so much money. He will explain to them his brilliant concept and execution, how he has managed—through patented techniques—to molecularly print the text of any desired passage onto the fibers of this comfortable and stylish material.
Continue readingThe Sleeping Class
Oh those men, those lives, those times, so fabled in song and story--a few stories, anyway, one or two songs; now they are mostly forgotten, but who were they and what made them do it? And what did doing it make them? Those sitter-outers of life. Those canny ostriches with their heads stuck in the soft sand of dreams while the earth changed and hardened around them. Those daring young men in their flannel pajamas. Sleepers we called them once, or VanWinkles, and once they did not mind such names. But eventually these labels struck one or more of them as derogatory.
Continue readingIntroduction to and from TomorrowLand
This fall(ish) I have a new book coming out thanks to the good people at Red Giant Books. It is an illustrated novel(ish) and I am actually pretty proud of it. If you are interested in having me do a reading near you, know that my time and energies can be purchased for the small price of a place to expend my time and energies and a beer. And the beer is negotiable.
Continue readingMy New Novel is Now Available in Ebook Form for $1.99 and Other Musings
Did I mention my new novel was available in ebook form? And for a dollar ninety-nine ! Yep! A whole penny less than two dollars! That’s roughly the price of half-a-pack of cigarettes and it is considerably better for you–unless you try to smoke it, in which case I’m guessing inhaling all the plastics and what not in your ereader would be pretty bad for your lungs as well.
Also, I should point out, it is next to impossible to buy only half-a-pack of cigarettes anywhere, so don’t waste you time, money and health trying. Just buy my book. For one dollar and ninety-nine cents.
But why is my new novel (New Hope for Small Men—available here ) only in ebook form? you ask or I imagine you asking in order to move this article forward. Well for a number of reasons, really, chief among them being: because I could, followed closely by chief reason number two: because I had to.
As surprising as it might be to you, it would seem that… Continue reading
Untitled Fiction Thing #2
He first saw Alfia Furst on the corner of First Avenue and First Street. It was May Day and the sun was shining on her in a way it was not shining on the parking meters or the grey and melting snow banks that still lined the street.
He followed her all the way to the coffee shop, and then continued on without her to the dry-cleaner, which had been his original intent. At the dry-cleaners there was a clerk he had always found attractive but this attraction was significantly diminished today. He accepted and paid for his pressed shirts with no more than the required amount of friendly banter.
Continue readingUntitled Fiction Thing #1
“My darling pet,” the bald ghost said to the frightened masseuse. “Your arms are open to me, my sweetest lamb, but they are open like umbrellas. Please, do not interrupt me with your soft mews of protest, your dulcet screams, your gentle skittering into the darkest corner of this all too bright room. You cannot dissuade me from my purpose. Let us gambol in the daisies and then later, when he have had our fill of that, piss in the bushes. ”
Continue readingOut of the Closet and into the Foxhole
Gays may now serve openly in the military (My bumper sticker worked; you’re welcome, gay people!) And some day, one imagines, they will be allowed to be marry each other too, at which point I would hate to be a young, bullet and commitment fearing gay person.
But this is a good day for freedom, if not a particularly good day for Mr. or Ms. Don’t-Shoot-Me-I’m-Not-Ready-to Settle-Down-And/Or-Die-Yet.
Continue reading