Friday, November 23, 2012
Monday, August 6, 2012
Drawn Blood: Collected Works from D.B.P.Ltd., 1985-1995 by A. Razor
List Price:
$9.95
6" x 9"
(15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
254 pages
Black & White on Cream paper
254 pages
ISBN-13:
978-1478156895
(CreateSpace-Assigned)
ISBN-10: 1478156899
BISAC: Poetry / General
ISBN-10: 1478156899
BISAC: Poetry / General
https://www.createspace.com/3923496
Saturday, May 26, 2012
BETTER THAN A GUN IN A KNIFE FIGHT
BETTER THAN A GUN IN A KNIFE FIGHT
by A. RAZOR
Punk Hostage Press, 2012
Available today right here, right now...
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
My Pedigree
My Pedigree
I was born into a cataclysmic world of uncertain conditions and secrets.
My mother was from Roswell, NM and when she was just a little girl,
she claimed she had seen a flying saucer fall from the evening sky and onto a hilly ranch in the distance.
She told me she viewed the wreckage and touched the velvety metal hull that had broken into pieces on top of her little girl world.
She was what they call a tall drink of water at an early age, which got her into trouble and kept the boys in check at the same time.
In her early teens she rode an old Harley through the sand of the arroyo at night with no headlight, just the moon and the stars glowing off the desert landscape all around her. She moved to Dallas after high school, spent some time at the Chicago Art Institute, then came back to Dallas to work at one of Jack Ruby’s nightclubs.
Jack helped her move to New York City so she could be a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall, which didn’t work out well because she liked to hang out in jazz clubs all night and she had joined a witch's coven in Greenwich Village in a moment of rebellion and it was in the Village where she met my father at a jazz club he ran and she became his gumah.
My father had been born in Sicily, as had his father, and moved to America to join his father at an early age because of a vendetta back in Sicily. My grandfather would soon be murdered by Jewish gangsters dressed as policemen when my papa was just a young boy, fresh off the boat. My father would become a quiet and sullen man who owned restaurants and clubs in all the boroughs. A man of great respect, they told me.
When he met my mother I suppose they hit it off well and spent their time together for a few years as my mother worked as an A & R for a record label called Kapp Records and my papa did what he did, moving her to a brownstone in Brooklyn near a bar called the King’s Inn.
I would be conceived in this time, in this place, in this way. My mother walking around the neighborhood, everyone calling her “Tex”.
They never had seen much folk from Texas around Brooklyn, especially around Flatbush & Church, especially tall bottle blondes in fur coats, cat rimmed glasses and pill box hats.
Things began to change, as I understand it, about a month before I was born, when JFK was shot dead in Dallas.
My mother became a social pariah, a target for anger and ignorance, with her distinguished southern drawl and the nickname, “Tex.”
I was their only child, born during a blizzard in Brooklyn on a Christmas morning to a lonely woman who collapsed in the emergency room after walking some 20 blocks in the driving snow on Christmas Eve and catching severe pneumonia.
A few months later my father would be shot in his head while sitting with his back to the door of his favorite Sheepshead Bay restaurant.
My mother would flee New York and search for my grandmother, who had abandoned her back in Roswell before the UFO’s came.
My grandmother was sawed off shotgun of a woman who had left my mother when she was still young, my grandmother still being a teenager herself.
She left to follow a honky tonk man named Lefty. I heard tell my grandmother could sing and dance on top of a piano back then, one of the tunes she was most notorious for was “If You Got The Money Honey, I Got The Time.”
My mom found her mother east of LA, in a place called Redlands, CA. Granma had 7 more children since my mother was born and she was living with a man who had finally tamed her, somewhat. They lived in a humble house near an orange grove. My first memories would be of picking oranges and running if I heard someone coming.
My mother was introduced to a man who took her to a place across the valley where we were living in a clapboard shack next to a wash that ran out of the Cajon Pass and into San Bernardino, or Berdoo as it was referred to by the locals.
I thought I was a cowboy/indian hybrid living in the shadow of the San Bernardino Mountains and running wild through the desert as much as I could, day and night.
I was growing big and strong in the furnace of the summer and the treacherous flash floods of the winter.
My new grandfather, the last of my grandmother’s husbands and the father of the last two of her 9 children, who had a couple of kids of his own, was a fiddle playing Okie who made his own instruments by hand and played them on Sunday instead of going to church, so my granma, who dabbled in religion between whiskies and card games, called him a heathen quite often. He called me “skunk” and taught me how to field dress wild game and fish with just a string and a safety pin.
My new father was from Las Vegas, because the pass we lived at the mouth of led there, and I was always told about how Sammy Davis Jr. had lost his eye in that pass trying to rush back to Hollywood in order to save his white girlfriend from Frank Sinatra.
My uncle’s all rode Harleys and had their own club that had a clubhouse. I was allowed to stay at their clubhouse while my mom and stepfather worked.
I learned about engines and firearms and what the difference was between a wife and an old lady and how a 15 year old girl could be an old lady, only it was different from the old woman who kept hundreds of stray cats and shot at me with salt rock out of her old, rusty shotgun.
I wandered around the streets on my bike, exploring all the culture the area had to offer back then for little kids who wandered about.
I watched the pimps drive their Caddy’s and Lincoln’s down Mt. Vernon Ave. in front of Geri’s Velvet Lounge while the girl’s smiled their empty smiles at me as I went on my way to Shamrock Liquors or Circle K for nickel and dime candy.
I was always welcome during the day at the Monkey’s Hideout, a local bar on Highland Ave.
I could roll balls on the 25 cent pool table while chewing on a pickled pigs foot or I could go over to San-Hi Lanes where the pinball machines were still nickel & dime or five plays for a quarter.
I rarely saw paper money then and if the coins ran out, which they often did, there was an abandoned underground army installation that was inhabited by derelicts who always left half empty short dogs of port behind with used porn mags to peruse.
I would stand over the derelict artifacts and touch them with the curiosity and reverence of a junior archeologist looking over a find, nervous in the pit of my stomach that I might get caught.
That was where my drive to get coins began, my desire to spend them and my time pursuing them, rather than explore the last resort of lost men way too soon for my time. I made a decision to try and avoid this solitary life of sadness among subterranean holes of cheapened decadence for the sake of forgetting.
My moments down in the “bomb shelter”, as we kids called it, caused me to be concerned for myself. As if I knew, even then, I might end up needing to forget something so badly it would drive me to this.
I somehow knew that I would need to find an appetite for more than just a little money.
My first job in life was to clean the dog shit out of pit bull pens and to feed and water the dogs as they were important because they brought in much needed income and were a family tradition. I loved those dogs and they seemed to love me. The love made up for the pittance of coin I was given to do the chore.
I remember how I spent some of my first allowance when we took a trip to Hollywood. I spent it on an RC Cola and a Chick-O-Stick, that I devoured while I watched an arcade machine smash a penny into a medallion in front of the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd.
I was 5 years old and I was making my money shoveling shit and spending it in the big city. You couldn’t take it away from me if you tried.
I was holding on to it for dear life and I didn’t even know it yet.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Waiting, Pt. 2
artwork by Terence LundyWaiting, Pt. 2
...it is the prominent moment that counts in the record book, but all those other moments had families, too...they felt things, did things, some ordinary, some strange, some defy all explanation...no one wants to have t explain this stuff that happens, they want it to be self explanatory, they want it t sell, sell, sell...sold...gone on too far on a cool breeze blown at a cold time when the latent prints were left behind in the form of icicle daggers through the heart, nothing left for the crime channel or the court tv or the kardashian shopping network or even the cooking channels to stew up into some blend of cathartic bonanza happy cowboy ending on the rootin' tootin' ponderosa where the lil' doggies are not afraid of the hoss that walks backwards toward them...I told the maitre' dee at the airport deli to make me a reuben w/ corned beef n mustard n he told me he did not like poetry which I dug to mean he didn't like peoms w/ the poets in them, which I dug wild (the whole "I" always being about me is a drag to read, everypoet being an "I" already, its 2 much sometimes, don't u agree?), cuz I don't want to be here I would rather be there watching the hitch up happen in the common man's happenstance, altho the cold is still more common than anything (could you close that window, please) and don't, under any circumstances, type BOMB in this moment as the taxi down the runaway has been postponed because of a pre-existing condition so as to not jeopardize all the clever things that they can do with social security now that there is an election going on they can erase the last remnants of slavery, but don't tell those guys over there cuz they don't seem like they would understand and that might make things worse for the rest of them, knowaddimean? nudge/nudge wink/wink....this is where the astertrix would stop you and give you some supplemental information bout how low we can go in this dick chopping, bushwhacking contest that has become the digression of the times while wild billionaires run around with the idea that there is plenty more where that came from, whatever that was, & don't worry too much because you are gonna bring the ratings down & we might lose the asian subtitles that are necessary to keep investment potential up as well as trade agreements agreeable...why shouldn't a third of the planet own everything, just so there would be a new sheriff that knew the score...the time machine has been running overtime as the wheels of fortune turn & twist in the wind of no articular determination, so as to proliferate a new, more virile form of communication that involves human centrifuges that could produce new clear wintertime landscapes that could mean christ mast all year round for the kids (they'll love that, is the word on the street) no more happy new year's will be needed so put away all the noisemakers & quit rocking the boat so much cuz we are all in this liferaft together n it ain't gonna get easier until you all learn to go easy into the night as the blades are now readyto slice n dice all the needy peeples into neat lil' ribbons that will be tied into bows on the everyday present under the neverending tree of lifetime subscriptions to a more posterior standing in the community of what is passing for cultural stimulation these days...they are ready now, for boreding...
Death Is A Soft Vision, Always Beckoning
Death Is A Soft Vision, Always Beckoning
she stares so cold into now
taking away every last breath
she holds hands with us all
soon enough
she ends lifetimes
with a lick of lips
with a slight smile
without any noticeable
change of expression
or exasperating sound
coming from her throat
not because she
does not care
more so, because
she has held the hands of those
that even she felt deserved
another chance
but, it was not to be
so she goes about her business
a long, infinite stare in her eyes
that has lasted forever
it is a forever that is
so long so that
no one knows
more than her
that
most likely
it will last
forever more
never stopping
for anyone, least of all
for her
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Library Girl
Library Girl
she is more than clever
she is more than well read
line for line
she is more than heart
but, she is mostly that
she is more than the
presentation
of words
she is living in the sanctuary
of the place where words
are reborn in rediscovery
over and over again
to a standing ovation
from all the souls
kept inside the Dewey decimal
formation that shelters
all this hopeful abundance
of wordsmithed dreams
made real as they are spoken
each word another angel
brought to life
as it exits the mouth
of every poet
she has chosen
Please Learn To Call Me In Your Dreams, Pt. 1
Please Learn To Call Me In Your Dreams, Pt. 1
I am almost asleep, but not quite
the phone rings as if it might be
part of some sadistic dream
I am turning into a nightmare
but, I get it, finally
I wake up and grab the vibrating thing
just before it falls to the floor
"Hey, did I wake you?"
I am not quite aware
enough to answer
truthfully
"No, I was just laying here...uh,
on the couch..."
the lie pulls me into consciousness
"So, are you going to send me that piece
you wrote for the upcoming issue?"
I hesitate a moment, WTF is she...oh, yeah...
the piece...right...
"I have it almost ready, a couple
more days is all...is that gonna work for you?"
I am not really sure what day it is or what
upcoming refers to in any sort of time frame
"Well, I want to look it over and give you feedback, is all."
go fuck yourself, I will wipe your genetic code from the face of existence
"You know, tie up all the loose ends, typos, cut the fat, an editor has to
do her job."
why the fuck did I agree to this...fucking lames that think they can write
or wrestle the meaning of someone's art with their bland machine
with their conformist mechanics, their protogeekist tool hands
their heartless, mindless software residue plans
trying to gum up my fucking works
I gave up killing snitches, traitors, backstabbers along with all other
forms of miscreant DNA drivel so I could live a little bit longer
so I could maybe have a shot at a bit of freedom I was
never able to make happen the way I had been living
since I was just a kid...I gave up...almost...
there are a few thing no one can take from me...
"Yeah, I thought it was the piece you read that you wanted,
why don't you just tell me what you want to do to it? Maybe
it is not what you want after all. Maybe you need another
style of writing that I don't do."
"Well, Andrew,"(I could send someone to your house at 5am
for calling me anything but what you know you should call me...)
"I hope its OK if I call you that? (Actually, no its not, who the fuck
do you think you are?) " Anyway, Andrew, I just wanted to explain
to you that its my job to edit your piece into something that fits into
our literary journal so that it has a cohesion to the rest of the work in there."
why is this persons problem mine all of a sudden?
oh yeah, I was being agreeable with civilians again
they play by a different set of rules
adhere to a different set of principles
they are all politely clawing & scratching
for some recognition in the greatest of
senses for the mediocre choices they have made
they never joined a side, they just asked for protection
from involvement for their capitulation to the hive mentality
they take all these ideas so serious, like freedom under the god
of the constitution that is guaranteed by the armed forces they
turn a blind eye to when the corruption falls onto people at the bottom
of the pile...they are like rabbits used as bait to trap the combatants who
would rather die than give up their allegiance to unfettered freedom of total
refusal to be governed by political manipulations that corrupt people into marks
for the systemic oversight of institutional living with minds held in bondage from
seeing or seeking the truth about the life of the beast that is the human animal as
it stands as one part of a whole universal system that is greater than any construct
of laws that are instituted to give false senses of security to drones of complicity as they
drone on into the future of an antiseptic lock step marching of codified ideations of artistic
output...wait...she is still talking...it seems she has asked a question...I don't have a clue...
"Yeah, I will send it to you in a couple of days...is that okay?"
"Umm, sure...are you okay? Did you understand what I was getting at?"
...this is what I get for being agreeable and lying...I must make amends...
"yeah, look, to be honest, I was sleeping. I don't think your publication is right for me.
nothing personal, but I am more simple in my terms of creation, of creative output...
sorry for the misunderstanding on my part...as for your part, my name is razor...don't
call me if you can't call me by my name...please learn to call me in your dreams from now on...thanks
good bye"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
