With the publication of Burn Baby Burn (April 2022), I’ve also completed the work, begun during the Pandemic: Improvisations, Contemplations & Dialogues While Listening to Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas – A Diary – (Summer 2022) in a boxed set: 3 CDs (my readings from the text over excerpts from each sonata) + booklet – from Bison Disc.
Finished the work of editing my second collection of Prose Poems + Short Fiction entitled: What Must Be Told – Due in 2026 – From Unsolicited Press
Snow
“was recorded by soprano Adriana Valdez; baritone, Charles Coleman, & pianist Jai Jeffries, music by Debra Kaye. Released on the compilation album CompCord@40, April 19, 2024″
Snow blew in with its rabbit’s foot & a dose of clap from the watchman’s daughter. It worried grandma & charmed the pants off Robert who’d come to butter-up the cook & stayed through December. Snow, with its glass harmonica & soprano saxophone will not be hidden away & insists on equal time in the bathroom. It’s never been determined where or when it might arrive. Snow bunnies & popcorn. What a movie it was! One thing led to another & there was no stopping the women with Uzis & the men who ran with them. No stopping, that is, until brother Frank arrived with his handy-dandy machine & sent them paddling furiously across the Milky Way with tails high & masks askew. Snow allows for conjecture. Instance: It wasn’t enough for her to shovel past him in her spring-green jeans mouthing platitudes: lovely day & invigorating isn’t it while he plodded like a Clydesdale muttering Fuck you & stick it sweetiewhen Snow showed its furious face &, much to his delight, a flock of deranged geese swooped down to carry her off reminding him, one last time, of their meeting that August afternoon & a romp in the neighbor’s pool & then to bed in the guesthouse while the guests were sunning on the lawn. Too bad, he’d thought, she couldn’t have stayed for another in the back seat of the taxi but there will be others or . . . Snow & the warmth of a bundled bear sleeping it off under the barn & Willy with his bad leg & rusty shovel harmonizing with the men from Terra Haute in the back of the old Ford 150 with Snow marking their every tuck & thrust, marching two by two, shoulder to shoulder or soaked in blood & scurrying between bodies broken & bodies torn . . . Snow wears warrior white, slips & slides trench to trench & truck to truck, won’t be held accountable, demands mayhem & promises to return intact . . . After a long silence, it’s come to this: In the last frame, freed from intermittent clouds, a hot sun shadows Snow across the valley, hand by hand & boot by boot, his grim jaw tensed, a tattered banner flapping overhead exclaims: flurries to resume by nightfall.