the black cat

is a halloween decoration sent by alex gildzen in a package that included a dvd double-feature 1950s sci fi horror cheese fest and alex's newest chapbook, passd ports: poems & pieces [nightballet press; 2012].  i don't know how alex made it but his unexpected gifts were the medicine for my melancholy.  i've been vacillating between poor me and woe-is-me for no good reason.  comes with the territory of writers, i suppose.  perhaps it's a hereditary disorder.  whatever.  i'm here to testify to the power of giving in and up.  i thought fuck it while watching the second episode, sick, of the third season of the walking dead [mindblowing killer stuff this season!].  joy rushed back thru me.  all i've ever wanted was a life in poetry.  and now alex's book and gifts of halloweenery heralded proof of a life in poetry.  passd ports is a sequence of travel poems and prose.  alex lives life to its fullest and conjures that life in these jewels of texts.  here's a taste:

Bovina TX

there are more wreckd cars
than cows in Bovina

                            nov 97

a short poem that is a snapshot to the larger decrepitude of a small town in texas.  humor married to a journalist's eye for detail.  in another poem in prose, subtitled a short story, the narrator confesses '. . .I sit in lobbies because of the great joy I experience sitting in lobbies'.  that's what writers do, observe, collect, write, sit still and make great joy.  this chapbook is a wonderful read by a poet at the height of his powers.  i experienced great joy in reading it.