City of Legends

I just found out that the line from my poem "Idol of Clay" -

"Hatred unlocks no doors in Heaven"

has become a minor mainstay at quotation sites for the topics of hate and Heaven.  I stumbled over someone invoking it on Twitter, then found it at several sites around the web.

Not complaining, it’s nice to be quoted (and quoted correctly, and attributed).  The poem itself was about a dishonest former lover (there’s another kind?) whom I was quite angry with and someone of our mutual acquintance asked why I did not hate her.  To me, hatred is like fear, a wasted emotion, disabling and manipulating us into wasteful thoughts and actions.

And, in truth, the last few times the lady in question and I have spoken, it has been as friends.  She even wrote one of the forewords to my book "The Compleat Panther Cycles" and, no, it wasn’t the Panther, but Brigit (for you muse trackers out there).

Ah, to have such epic ladies in my life again.  I fear I fall towards the gloaming.

Friends, Romans and countrymen.  My fellow Americans.  Ladies and Gentlemen.  Lords and Ladies.  The loyal suppositions and human suppositories.  Rabid but respectable raccoons, poets, artists, lovers, ex-lovers, future lovers and the silent stalkers of the cyberverse.

I am still alive.

I did just add the fReado widgetized versions of The Compleat Panther Cycles and The Morgantown Suite Poems to the header bar for this blog, to ease access to these free online editions.

Enjoi.

I mean, is this cool beyond belief or what?

Finally, after much fumfering and threats of jihad, the first two of my books to be made available specifically for the Amazon Kindle, that remarkable eBook reader that is dominating the marketplace, are now available at Amazon.com.

The Compleat Panther Cycles, that darling of the intelligentsia of the digital renaissance, is now available for your Kindle device at a fraction of the tree-killer, massive 700 page volume it normally is.  With all of the poems, forewords, annotations and jaw dropping internal artwork featuring Jillian Ann, it comes in at just (get this) $9.59!!  Amazon retails the hardcopy for $36.00.  That’s almost 75% off!

As such…, last years dynamo of passion unfurled and hurled defiantly into unsympathetic winds, got turned around in record time and is now ready for your paper-free purusal for a mere $6.39, that’s more than half off the cover price!  I actually feel a little cheap at that price, but if they want to sacrifice their margin, I’m good.  The poetry is no less passionate or penetrating or, sadly, ironic. 

In any case, this means I now feel compelled to push on with adding more of my books.  Watch this space for updates.

I promised a surprise.  Nothing expected.  Nothing about my love life (I have a love life?  Amazing.)

What I am about to announce means I am embracing a shifting paradigm in books.  The amazing part is perhaps how slow I have been, considering my relationship with the digital renaissance and the elements of that movement over the last two decades.  Ah, well, even Odin is blind in one eye.

To the point:  I am working this weekend to bring several of my books to Kindle, the eBook reader that is marketed through Amazon.  This will provide my content of my books, in the layout and form originally presented, available to the audience that is embracing the paperless book movement.  The books will be provided at a lower price than the hard copies, particularly with The Compleat Panther Cycles, and will be the full books, no detail lost.

To assist in the market, we’ve come up with a series of marketing slogans (isn’t this fun?  No.  It makes me feel like a pimp, when in fact, as the author, I am the hooker.)

The books selected to be the first wave of my transition, along with their "clever" slogans are:

The Compleat Panther Cycles 
slogan:  Kindle the legend

As such
slogan:  Kindle the fire

The Morgantown Suite Poems
slogan:  Kindle memories

A Ronin in the Temple of Aphrodite 
slogan:  Kindle a quest

 The slogans are subject to tweaking (I am an editors’ nightmare).  The whole idea is to use the name of the device as the verb.  The final prices will be released when the books go live, sometime in the next three days or so.  I will keep you informed.

Now, back to dealing with some interestingly erotic text messages I just received.  Bad girl.

Okay, I promised you three books this year.

Book one is underway…expect it in the Spring.

It will feature approximately 70 poems (although I have an itch to make another "TCPC" telephone book-sized volume) several of which have never seen light of day.

It will have a cover featuring one of my most popular past cover models returning to the fold  (she insisted) but I’ll leave that as a surprise.

The title? 

loveaddict

And it will feature romantic, erotic and some of the edgiest, rawest works you’ll ever read.  I am considering adding internal illustrations as in The Compleat Panther Cycles.

I was looking at my friends’ list on Facebook and realized I have an awful lot of people who have played roles of significance in my life on my list.  Present and past.  For instance:

• Relatives?  I have all four of my sibs, as well as the unofficial 5th DeVault brother.  6 neices and nephews.  My Mom.  My poetry bro, Larry Jaffee (founder of Poets for Human Rights as well as the writer of the foreword to my book Love Gods of a Forgotten Religion).
•  
• Book and CD  connections?  I three different editors for my books, including the stalwart Jan Innes.  I have the cover and inside illustration model for The Compleat Panther Cycles.  I have the cover model for my CD Nightblooming.
•  
• Muses?  Nightblooming Jasmine (of course), the Butterfly, Suede, The Selke, The Mad Gypsy herself and the older sister to my first real muse, Alabaster.
•  
• Various and Sundry?  My first girlfriend (from the 6th grade!), the person who has done more interviews with me than anyone else (Barb Holmes), my "Teal Protege" and various friends and inspirations responsible for dozens of my works and some significant good in my life, as well as assorted writers, editors, publishers and recording artists (even Billy Vera).  People I might otherwise not have regular contact with.  People hiding in plain sight (yes, some people are not who you might think they are, some don’t know I know who they really are).  People I have sat down to dinner with, read with and written about, as some have written of me, readers, lovers and critics.

I see there’s a lot of good to my Facebook friends.  I think I’ll keep them.  And collect more as people choose to enter into my lifestream.  I enjoy the process and the people I intersect with.

Thirteen years ago, today, I put pen to paper and wrote a small set of poems I dubbed The Panther Cycle, owing to a pre-discussed "totem" to be used for the young woman whose picture had caught my fancy.

That spawned 92 other cycles of work to and about that same woman and relationship that flourished and fell in full public view as my mailing list of people who wanted to be informed whenever a new cycle was written grew to hundreds of people. And not just random people, most of my subscribers were fellow writers, some even well-known and respected authors of modern fiction, genre fiction and poetry, even a biographer or two. It was an heady time.

In time came the book PanthEon, and finally The Compleat Panther Cycles, all full of the stuff that filled those eighteen months with wonder, passion, pain, regret and poetry. I divorced, gave over practically all my worldly possessions, only to have her retreat in guilt, marry another and have a child, before moving to my beloved Los Angeles, which I had eventually deserted (at least temporarily). I moved on and married (and divorced) a Leopard.

The works themselves have kept and expanded their audience, despite the fact that I rarely give them a nod in public or read them at appearances. They make up, numbers told, about 3% of my total poetic catalog, but have an outsized reputation thanks to the feeding frenzy back in the mid-nineties, during an early part of the digital renaissance, before the web was flooded with poetry sites.

So, for 13 years of making life…interesting…I’d like to just now tip my hat to the works, their legacy, and the woman who inspired them. For good or for bad, they are and she is a part of my legacy, and while since then I have lost my heart more than once, written other poems and published other books, they will be part of what is remembered when I am gone.

Happy Anniversary, Lauri.

I write. You can criticize me for what I write, what I write about and my style, but you have to admit, I write.

I’ll try to keep it to two posts today…then maybe I’ll fade it back to one a day, soon…

I started laying the musical framework for Aubergine last night. Challenging, as I am demanding a lot from myself on this one. It won’t be easy, it won’t be simple. But, I am game. A reader has suggested I post a link to my version of I rained poetry, and maybe even let readers vote on the selections for the Evangelist CD. I don’t know. Too many things to ponder. My brain hurts.

To those of you who find my promotion of my book As such… a bit surreal, or even hypocritical, I apologize. The simple truth is that I am keeping a promise I made, in both letter and spirit. I have broken other promises in the past (and, sometimes, keeping one promise means breaking another), wrestled with definitions of faith, truth, honor and morality, sometimes losing, sometimes winning, and sometimes being caught in those webs where no matter what you do, you are doing something wrong in absolute terms or someone’s eyes. It is exhausting, and exhaustion sometimes leads to errors in judgement. I actually considered, for several days, pulling the book from circulation.

It is one of those 51/49 percent situations where no matter what I do, someone will find ample room to criticize me. That’s just part of the terrain. Life has no easy answers, no cut and dried resolutions. Someone, somewhere, will take offense at anything you can imagine doing. Anyone who even dreams they know everything that I am doing or why needs therapy. Hell, I probably need it…but it makes it so much more interesting to see me work it out in anapest hexameter, no? I’m going to screw up more in this life, those of you without sin…buy a catapult, I’ll stand in the open and let you snipe. If it makes you feel better to use me as a lightning rod, then I consider it a public service I am rendering.

I began packing my cargo boxes for the tour. A bit early, you say? yes. But I need to keep a running inventory on this trip, as I am traveling with a massive amount of books, CDs and merch (do you have any idea how much a single copy of The Compleat Panther Cycles weighs?). The bookstore reads are nice, as they order their own stock…but the coffeehouse, cafe, etc., type reads need me to drag my own stuff. Pain in the ass. But the boots are nice

Okay, one miracle down (you have no idea how much furious effort is going on in the background to accomplish all of this)…

The City of Legends Store has re-opened.  You can get there by slicking the linked name (in the previous sentence) or by following the top of the page link that reads "The City Store" (trying to keep it simple).

We’re offering some discounts on some books and CDs as a "Pre-tour Blowout", and as always, free shipping and custom signing.  Shopping cart services are courtesy of PayPal.

Available in the ‘Store are:

Books:

• As such…romantic poetry of rebirth
  
• Ronin in the Temple of Aphrodite
  
• Psalms of the Monster River Cult
  
• The Morgantown Suite Poems
  
• The Compleat Panther Cycles

CDs:

• Nemicorn
  
• The Naked Reads
  
• Amomancer:  nightblooming
  
• the last romantic verb

Not in the store?

• from an unexpected quarter
  
• Love Gods of a Forgotten Religion
  
• PanthEon
  
• 101 Great Love Poems (hardback and paperback)
  
• Invocato

But I may later decide to fold them in…I just hate making the store too chaotic and huge.  All of those not in the official store can be purchased elsewhere.

And yes, when Evangelist is done, it will be available through the City Store.

You’d find me a comic figure right now, my skin blotchy red and purple, my hair definitely of the bedroom hair category, barefoot, dressed in black from head to toe. Dancing to All Over the World by Strange Fruit. I Niacin-loaded just a bit ago, the first time in a while. I needed to get back on my regimen, my patterns that had proved successful in the past. Note, flowers to Blairgowrie don’t work.

The flush caused by proper overdose of niacin just helps to flush the capillaries, cleanse the cardiac palette and deliver the other arcane chemicals, oils, minerals and vitamins I have developed as "my mixture" more efficiently. The flush itches like a bitch, but that’s just a side-effect that tells you it is working. Like fire ants with chainsaws. Yikes! Don’t tell me to use the time-release. I want the loadburn.

Coming on the speakers now: Don Henley and All She Wants to Do is Dance (it makes me think of you know who, out stylin’ the night away. I am glad she finds joy in that…) My playlists are minefields, but so is life.

I wrapped up two variant readings of I rained poetry and shipped them off to the Jezika™ this morning. Here’s hoping one is to her pleasure. Take one down, 1,473 still left for the weekend. 1,473 bottles of absinthe on the wall…I sing.

The usual peaceful-if-intense detente state that has existed in my head for many years has been moving towards a shooting war of late, but once recognized, a chaos state is not a problem, it is an opportunity. I am still writing obsessively. I am keeping just ahead of the madness…just ahead. U2 gives me Vertigo. Thanks, guys.

Some have noted that the widget on Amomancer for selling my books through Amazon contains seven of my books, but not "As such…". Read nothing sinister into that…Amazon has just not put up the cover yet. As soon as they have it available, it goes in the rotation. That is the most important book I have ever written, with the most beautiful cover (and foreword)…I am not the bastard some would think me to be. Yes, I said the most important.

Note: Four years, 3 months, 12 days. I made a promise. I am no longer lashed to the third rail. That was unseemly. This has to be a test of will, not the strength of a strap’s thickness. I am holding on by will alone, now. I dreamt last night, a beautiful dream in white and bright lights and daisies with a soundtrack provided by Enigma. I am at peace with the storm. I sleep in the arms of chaos and kiss the fire. This is life. Pleasure and pain, smiles and the saline rain, I would live it again if offered. I have promised the next dance already, so I guess I have to.

You can write it, or you can live it. Or both. I am sorry for and to those who are discomfited, hurt, stressed or put off by my ways of thinking, expressing myself and living (and loving). Truly. But I am who I am and in the balance, a greater force for good than evil.

My life. It is my life to make of it what I choose.
I will win, and lose
and smile more often than not.
Courage will give me hope. Hope will give me
strength. And strength
will give me the courage to seek new truths.

Those lines open my poem "My Life". I may make mistakes, but I don’t rewrite my histories, deny my heart or refuse a request for help. I once told a lover I’d take a bullet for her. And for any member of her family. And for anyone she asked me to, even an ex. I don’t know if she understood. Maybe that’s what drove the wedge between us, I know it used to piss of my second wife.

I have things to do, people. Love to all. Special love to one, she knows who she is.