Two from Round Bend Press

I posted my first publication on Lulu one day approximately 18 months ago. My novel, "The Friends of Round Bend," didn't become a best seller. That day was, however, an exciting moment for me. I had at last published a novel!

That had meaning for me. Fuck the rest of the world.

Fifteen years earlier a friendly publisher, K.C. Bacon, had brought out my short one-act play, "The Problem," but that experience didn't make me feel as writerly as the novel did.

I celebrated my first sustained work in years by starting this blog, as close to a PR gambit as I've ever played.

In the years between the publication of my one-act and the novel, I stopped writing for long periods. During what should have been my most productive years, I went to a series of dreary jobs every day (when I had the work), and a series of dreary bars every evening. That is I worked and drank beer. I drank and roared and brawled on occasion and stormed into the night feeling like I wanted to murder everything.

I still do at times.

I woke up most mornings and puked, and on rare occasions I tried and utterly failed to get anything down on paper that pleased me. I wrote another play, work-shopped it briefly, saw its limitations, and put it away.

My routine stagnated into misery followed by the demons of disillusionment and confusion.

This is silly, I thought, so I went back to college. I was forced by the academy to start writing again. I put it down as best as I could, little academic essays that I collected and passed on to an old friend, Charles Deemer, who once helped me get a play produced on local-access television.

Deemer had recently become the founder of the Oregon Literary Review, an adventurous online publication, so I took a chance and sent him a selection of essays.

Lo! He published them, and I did feel the writerly love. That selection is my book of essays, "Alt-Everything."

So here I am. Never mind that the publisher and writer of my novel were one and the same. The old argument that "vanity" publishing is unworthy of notice or praise was buried long ago. All of us have heard the success stories. A self-published book gets noticed, takes hold, and becomes a literary phenomenon.

Writers dream of that sort of thing. And without the public relations push of a gigantic publisher, dreams are all that writers have.

Oh, and it helps to have a little talent, like the gentlemen I mentioned above, who have been kind in allowing Round Bend Press to publish their latest work:

Poached Eggs

The police were out front.
Why else would one go to a restaurant
at 3 am on Burnside & Broadway?
One should probably stay away.

The glare I got from the black dyke,
The old coats beneath the bright lights,
Should have been sufficient warning:
Poet, go to bed this early morning.

But poached eggs won out.
So even when the dyke began to shout
And the old coats unleashed themselves
Like an army of rented elves

(And their general dead)
I wasn’t thinking of going to bed.
Nor was I thinking of small talk,
Nor of taking a meditative walk

Along a sea wall in the summer sun,
Nor of all the things that are always fun
To do, or not to do, until another time,
Nor Perrier with a twist of lime.

No. But the police were out front.
So I, at the Burnside & Broadway restaurant,
Tasted poached eggs in the bad part of town.
Good poached eggs are so rarely found.

(1985)

from An Establishment of Change: Poems, 1974-1994, by K.C. Bacon, Round Bend Press (2010)


Having Coffee With An Old Girlfriend

a chance meeting at Starbucks
a table together to catch up
and I keep imagining her
naked in 1980

we were a couple then
pulling in the same direction
ending each other's sentences
laughing at the same absurdities
and never sad after sex

what went wrong?

I study her face as she tells me
about divorces, breast cancer, a troubled son
deep lines and blotches
on the ripened beauty of a young woman
eyes a shade of blue
all the oceans should demand

what went wrong?

on a Sunday morning in 1980
embraced, out of breath
damp with sweat and sex
the phone rang

my mother asked
"are you all right?"
which blew my mind
how does my mother know
about my sex life?
"on television it looks terrible"

mom, what are you talking about?

"Mt. St. Helens erupted!
the mountain exploded!
it's on television!"

after that we celebrated May 18th
as Cosmic Sex Day
and now over coffee
I wonder if she remembers this
but don't bring it up

we finish our coffee
how nice to see you and all that
but don't exchange phone numbers
and for the life of me
I can't remember what went wrong
after we caused Mt. St. Helens
to explode

it must be this way
happiness and ecstasy
are so rare in a life
that memory hordes them
and protects them
driving out any threat
that may compromise the power
of their echoes

and in this way we believe
what happened once
can happen again
and maybe we're right about that

but also maybe wrong

from In My Old Age, by Charles Deemer, Round Bend Press (2011).


TS