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    Cloaks and Maidens; Gods and Train
    Cloaks and Maidens; Gods and Train
    Cloaks and Maidens; Gods and Train
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Cloaks and Maidens; Gods and Train

    By Broken Walls Publishing

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    About this ebook

    A collection of short stories and excerpts from novels
    A few quotes from the book:
    "Even a billion dollars is only so many pennies...yes, the bulk of it will make most men bow over...but not all...it is coinage yes but it rarelymakes change. "
    "Guilt is the strongest prison; he who is a fugitive from himself is never free"
    "Childhood ends when we stop believing in monsters and start making them

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBroken Walls Publishing
    Release dateApr 14, 2013
    ISBN9781301826391
    Cloaks and Maidens; Gods and Train
    Author

    Broken Walls Publishing

    biography https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/125584560 I first began writing a long time ago as a poet. Poems turned to prose. Prose matured and grew a tale and traveled haphazard but in a novel way. I wrote from the bewilderment of life...I wrote not for gain but out of loss. I used to say I was a ‘god-hunter’.....and that voice would either find me Saint Theresa’s ecstasy, Krishnamurti’s peace or Nietzsche's madness. I found no conclusions, no doors but eventually the walls I wrote on became grafittized and tapestaric..... I had become a poor painter in words.... I have written a number of books on taoist philosophy (Tiger and Bent Tree); social/religious philosophy (Seven Days); adventure fiction (Firestorm) ; political theory (Political Moments); short stories (Cloaks) and a series in children books (Rubear) I am currently working on another Political book and, also, a fictional novel about a 12 year old boy dying of cancer during a war in Europe in the mid 2030s. Poet The poet makes a feast out of dirt and then minces his words. The poet is goat footed at the banquet, grinning widely into everyone's distaste. The poet sticks shit to a blanket. The poet fornicates with shadows. The best poet buzzes darkly incessant in your fabric skull. The worst poet is an indigestion. In any coffee shop, you can smell poets by their inertia. Good poetry is waterproof. Everyone has at least one poem in their closet. It is solely theirs in the way we forget the maker of a shoe after we have worn it awhile. When poetry dances, it is clothed; you are naked. The drums rhyme. If you are patient, everything rhymes. Even God.

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      Book preview

      Cloaks and Maidens; Gods and Train - Broken Walls Publishing

      Introduction

      A mind roams within its own restlessness; indeed, it defines itself by the limits of its own self-imposed walls. Or are they bars?

      Can we see beyond what we have experienced... can we thus imagine what is not previously an undercoating of a scene; of a portrait done over and over again, gripped in the poverty of a bad painter?Language comes from the past; it is a thing of the past. How then can a thing of the past imagine the future; describe the future; bring the future to mind? It cannot.

      History repeats itself because the shadows of the bars of the cage repeat themselves. Humans, whether writers or readers, forget to squint.

      What then is fiction? Fiction is half-built upon non-fiction. Which, of course, is the past described with a language of shadows. The truth of the Past as seen in the shadow of bars. In this book, none of these stories are true. They cover a range of human experience from homelessness to spiritual triumph to near-schizophrenia obsession. I imagined them all. Yet somehow from a past of my own where none of these states existed. If they have validity, it is not from the facts, from the shadows of the real imagery of bars limiting my imagination. I have squinted well to see places and things and people which could exist. Emotionally.

      We make fiction for the same reason we make gods. To awaken aspirations. Or deviations.

      My beings are now as the half-immortals of the Ancients; created but not safe. Nailed upon a Cross of Wills.

      I willed them exist; shall one more madman or madwoman will them to remain in existence? Thus immortal if carried one by one into further generations of time?

      Now... by common consent...I and you, the reader, shall, perhaps, bring them, by our wills, to existence and immortality. I, existence..the Reader, immortality. It is the Reader, not the Writer who holds his Nero’s thumb up or down, nay or yea, and thus gives continuing Life or Death to these Beings of My Creation.

      And, alas, there are so many whims to this that I can not but be the good Christian and smile before all you Lions.

      Fiction, then, is far more humbling than non-Fiction. For non-Fiction is of the Past and having once existed (though vague and cloudy in its future interpretations) will thus continue so. Who denies the Past ...its past?

      For this, the Thumbs do not vote.

      But in Fiction the Sons and Daughters of My Creation have no past, thus they begin without a Beginning...they appear, they conjurgate,...into Reality...into view...into consciousness...into the Arena...indeed, even into each Reader’s soul.

      Awaiting Resurrection.

      " It is the foot that tells the heart of the tale."

      Garry Bissel

      Index

      Chapter Title Page

      1 Bob 9

      2 Iron George 20

      3 Monsters 37

      4 Cloak of Insignificance 45

      5 Self Journey 60

      6 Maiden Voyage 66

      7 Lawnmower 95

      8 Razor Jack 104

      Bob

      Two weeks off the booze for Bob this time. How many times had he quit before? Five? Six? Each time going back at it in a fatalistic plunge away from the misery of a dry, empty existence without it.

      He was fifty-three now. He still worked at the same line job at the castings plant where he'd been now for...shit...how long? Since he was 17 anyway.

      Lived in a little apartment four blocks from work. No car. No TV. No phone. Everything went on the one thing that kept him numb enough to still want to stay alive.

      This time quitting was a little different, though. It was plant shutdown for two weeks. Over the Christmas holidays. Most people travelled; or stayed at home; families and such.

      Bob just drank. Hard. Especially the last six years. After Sylvia died. Cancer. That's where their little house, savings, car had all gone. Pissed away. In a way it was a funeral pyre. After Sylvia's death Bob only saw the emptiness of what was not there; keeping it all would be like not filling in a grave.

      Bob liked working though. It was hard, sweaty, fast-paced work. Cleaned him out everyday. Kept his mind too busy for pain. The only bad time in the day was the ten minute sober walk after quitting time at four. But two fast beers and that was over.

      Five or six more beers then he could walk to the liquor store. Take that home. Drink it then or go back to the bar and then drink it later. Not all of it. Some he always left for the morning. For the sickness, the dry heaves but mostly to avoid the walk to work sick and sober. Thinking.

      Trouble was he was getting older. His body couldn’t take it; he had to drink more in the morning now. His bosses noticed it, talked to him, warned him. He'd dry out for awhile. Let everything cool down. But the pain of sober would win in the end, defeat him. Again. And again.

      Two weeks before shutdown it had been bad. The drinking. Real bad. He'd only been to work 3 days out of the two weeks. Went in the last day, more or less just to get his vacation cheque.

      The boss had laid it on the line, get help or don’t come back. Bob had cashed his cheque but not went to the bar or liquor store. He was scared.Really f^&%'ing scared. He knew without that job, he'd die. Not from hunger but because he somehow knew it would be the end. Oblivion. Only a few months of the kind of drinkin', he usually only did on the weekends would finish him.

      Isn’t that what he wanted? For some reason, he wasn't sure. He didn’t want pain...but maybe it was....hell, he didn’t know.

      From a pay phone, Friday at 4:10 pm, he had phoned AA. Went to a meeting. More meetings. He didn’t talk much. Didn’t really listen much. Tried not to think. Just sat. Safe. Maybe there was hope. Not so much about drinking. He knew he could stay quit for awhile. More like hope from the other. The pain. The hole. Strangers couldn’treplace....well, her.....but the hole didn’t seem so big.

      They weren't religious or anything but the god stuff kept coming up. Bob didn’t like the word God. He always heard the word Sylvia right after. And death. And why. And then he'd have to stop thinking again right away. Do some really hard not thinking cause he didn’t want to lose this chance. Screw god he'd say to himself and throw it into the hole.

      In between meetings he wandered. The streets. Coffee after coffee. Sometimes he'd meet

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