Archive for June, 2020
Would This Song Have Been A Hit In The ’90s?
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged A Kid's Inside, From Sour To Cinnamon, guitar, pop, Salon De La Guerre on June 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The Plague
Posted in Poetry, tagged coronavirus, covid-19, pandemic, plague, poem, sheltering in place on June 26, 2020| Leave a Comment »
You have your bulky joy
You wear your youth like yarn
Piss mordant till you dye
It keeps your skin from harm
The smoke was once alive
In yellow plaster’s pores
Nostalgic from the wounds
Love has too many sores
And when the plague it came
We measured its hours too
The worst things about man
Turned out to be virtues
We once invented need
In the pre-pandemic dens
Like strangers on TV
We see ourselves back then
A life force is absorbed
In the city’s coming squall
This is how you love now
If you can love at all
My Novel, ‘The Ghost and the Hemispheres, Vol. 2’ Now Available
Posted in Fiction, tagged Central America, Comedy, communists, Contras, epic, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, Fiction, Managua, Miskito Coast, Nicaragua, Sandinistas, The Ghost and the Hemispheres on June 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
I have just released my eighth novel, also known as Volume 2 of my seventh novel. The Ghost and the Hemispheres follows several generations of a Central American family as they experience a coffee boom, civil war, ethnic strive, a communist revolution and its aftermath. As the historical drama unfolds, everybody in the small town of Ascension is suffering from some sort of existential disorder that threatens their very concept of self, being and consciousness.
Volume 2 follows Patroclus Evers, scion of a once legendary family of coffee growers, as he leaves home and goes to the city to study medicine. Very quickly, he falls under the sway of radical students, poets and priests. Yet his dedication to social change is conflicted. From childhood, he has been haunted by feelings that there is another version of himself haunting the world. This person is not only an existential threat. Patroclus also fears that this other him might be enjoying life a lot more.
Volume 2 also follows his aunt Pepa through her own version of capitalist success and downfall, as she seeks the sexual validation of wealthy men, all to spurn the one man she couldn’t have.
The novel is now available in e-book form only, and only on Amazon.com. I hope to release a paperback version through Amazon’s platform next year.
The cover painting and design are by my friend Corey Brian Sanders.
The Future
Posted in Poetry, tagged black lives, George Floyd, Greenwood, Juneteenth, Tulsa on June 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »
It was in the Times
The future is looking worse
Racial strife. Illness. Hate
No.
The future is not looking worse
It will look better
When we stop lying
About what the past was
Beauty is Imperfection 