My vocab brings all the boys to the yard, and they’re like – what does “wrest” mean?

#1:
groves
genie
drunk
greedy
merrier
menthol
dream
roof

#2:
beanies
gentle
alienate
gauges
bohemian
fedora
raison
froze
dozer
wild
jibed
facet
antsy
saith
tweak
cup
tide
door
lope

#3:
divines
wrest
bagger
enable
intuit
falcon
healer
thunk
about
merry
joust
opposite
raze
oxen
towed 
add
ire
anime
abuse
qui
fled

#4:
crag
bray
punk
idle
thaw
howl
pates
petunia
daze
nieve
lait
fobs
pi
ole
qi
coaxes
brays
idle
jinxes
to

I could teach you, but I must levy a fee.

Asian robots and beat poets.

People have eyes of a tongue, is the observation times for the sake of talking.

My writer-friend and roommate Roy Dequeant just found out that most of the comments he has been receiving on his poetry blog over at Blogspot are, for better or worse, Asian robots. This revelation both amused and saddened me, for a couple of reasons:

1) Dequeant is a talented poet who deserves actual literary-minded people reading and commenting on his work.

2) The comments the Asian spam-bots are leaving, once translated, are very fortune-cookie-esque, things like: “Maturity is the ability to adapt to life in the vague.” This pleases me. What was even funnier about this was that we have been trying to apply these comments to the poetry and figure out what the commenters were trying to say.

3) In my head, all of these Chinese commenters were hackers from Beyond The Great Cyber-Wall, braving labor camps and Communist oppression to read my buddy’s free verse. It was very romantic and intriguing and goddamnit, I still haven’t given up on this premise yet.

In any case, here is one of Dequeant’s most recent poems, conceived on a cross-country Greyhound trip a few weeks back:

“Preaching Appreciation”

She grew up in the Congo, man
She like to get naked
And fuck
On baseball fields
Or the side of the road
Anywhere really
I loved that girl
His glazed over eyes
From recent encounters
With the local kids
Filled with tears
That fled to the corners
And dribbled down
A stubbled mess
Quiet and man-like
Like the men that wrote
The book in my hand
While cowering in foxholes
Go home, man
And hug your mama
Tell her you love her
That’s all there is
Love, man
Love 

(See more of Dequeant’s prolific work and comment here at The Musings of an Alabaman Barista – http://pissibaobao.blogspot.com/)

The widening gyre.

Writers are often influenced by the literary works of others. Stephen King built his entire Dark Tower series around a single poem by Robert Browning titled “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”. (Incidentally, I did a huge paper in school about the thematic correlations and allusions between “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and The Dark Tower.)

My own novel-in-progress, We are the Weapon, has also been inspired by a lot of different things – the PATRIOT Act, 2012 apocalypse hysteria, biblical Revelations, The Handmaid’s Tale, the War on Terror, 9/11, WWI war poetry, and (naturally) George Orwell’s 1984.

The most disturbing part about writing a dystopian novel over a period of several years during this particular time period is that I get to continually see elements which I believe should remain firmly on the page pop up in real life current events. Mass video surveillance and martial law are no problem in the fictional realm, and they’re even fun to play around with. But seeing these things in real life is not fun, and it’s not funny.

One small piece of inspirational literature that has molded my concepts behind We are the Weapon is the poem “The Second Coming” by William Yeats. It pretty much captures the essence of the world I live in when I don’t live in this one…

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs,
while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ William Yeats, 1920