almost human

but feeling not quite. returned to work today which helped unfreeze my funny bone. this cold had turned me into one big grouch indeed. oh the horror! the horror! now if i could only stop the urge to hack a cough so hard it feels like my brain is about to launch thru my nose holes.

just the same, i felt well enough to sketch out a poem in my moleskin in bits and pieces thru out the day which made me feel good. the sketching out part, i mean, who knows about the poem.

the past couple days i've watched a few movies, the norwegian zombie nazi splatter platter dead snow and the peter weir helmed movie green card which was weir's introduction to mainstream u.s. moviegoers to crazily charismatic gerard depardieu, being my favorites.

also reading thru the archives of new zealand and australian zines such as hutt and cordite. a poet i think is wildly fantastic is joanne burns whom i've read for the first time in an issue of verse a couple years ago but hadn't noticed her poems were so abundant on the net. burns' texts, in a word, just simply pushes my buttons -- in a good way.

finally, what nearly cinched my feeling almost human was taking the mail down to the mail room. in the middle of the mail room, sitting on two large carts, were books on top of books. novels mostly, true crime, sci-fi, detective and so forth. i asked the security officer sitting nearby what's the deal with the books. he told me that instead of throwing these books away it was decided, by whom i don't know, to gather them up and let people have their pick, first come first serve.

piles and piles of books, oh my! i felt like charley in the great chocolate factory. most of the tomes were tom clancy and robert parker type thrillers. i like good pulp but saw very little in the ways of sleaze. then my eyes alighted on a paperback edition titled the a to z encyclopedia of serial killers. couldn't pass that up. set underneath that slab of dementia was a clean hard-back copy of portrait of a killer -- jack the ripper case closed by patricia cornwell, a real find. another glance at another stack and i spy a copy of the wretched of the earth by frantz fanon and i wondered who in their right minds would throw these books out?

wild