A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex

Michael McClintock (Pasadena, CA)
I am "retired." I worked for 25 years at the County of Los Angeles Public Library. All things considered, the library work was good, but there was still the crushing weight of a bureaucracy and, with us, a political agenda run by the Grand Sheepherders in the form of the Board of Supervisors and this agenda frequently interfered with the goals of a free public library, squandering millions each year on useless crap and politically-motivated, programmed pabulum. Despite that, the Library's reading rooms were always filled, and wisdom and freedom glinted in many a bloodshot, rheumy eye and in the clearer, hungry eyes of those just beginning to make their long run from society's diversionary madness and mind-slaughter: people discovering independently and for the first time that herd-life was living death, and that there were possibilities of a life armed with books and words outside the herd. [I] cut through my own self-induced suppression of that kind of thinking. This is where my training from childhood through middle-age to be a worker ant, obedient and silent, becomes my internal enemy-the worst, most lethal enemy we can have, as it lives and grows inside of us, next to the heart and in the brain. To kill it, bag it, throw it into the river of terrors is a cold struggle...

The Poets' Graves Multiply Like Ticks over the Dead Hills
I see bleached, barren hills dead in the sun
the washed yellow of weak piss that comes from drinking
Too much lite beer

Bald hills spotted with hard black dots, like ticks
Hooked by their teeth onto the buttocks of fat women
Lying naked in a line

For the proctologist's inspection: the fresh graves of poets
Thousands of graves marked by spinning pinwheels,
delicate and diverse

And scraps of paper tacked to miniature billboards
The size of postcards fluttering in a little wind, bearing
Scrawled pleas

For attention, for mercy, for explanation-
Why do I lie here? Where is my retreat?
Isn't this the workshop?

You can find my book on Amazon-dot-com-
Have you read it? Did you like it?
Weren't you at the seminar?

Questions-so many questions, the graves on the hills
Unloved, self-contained, and at the memorial gate
Busloads of fresh corpses

In a long line up the highway, blowing exhaust, belching
Smoke and short bio notes about the cute cat, the love
For the outdoors

To be buried here is to get here with money taken
And ticket punched, all those asses purchased
And kissed, lobotomies received and certified

To be buried here, to be included here
Unknown and splendid, scattered among the grand tombs
Of the temporaries-Rita, Yusef, and Popular Jack

Wind them up! Zip-a-dee-do-da! The music plays
orphιe aux enfers* by each new pit, each paperboard clown
lithographed and lowered, poets of their country and their time

………………………………………………………………
*The song/little dreary music piece that is played popularly by circus carousel music boxes, droll as hell as the little mechanical figures turn on top of the box . . . you often hear it at god-awful carnivals, those little cornball events held in the church or school parking lot or in the town park meant to fleece the locals of their loose cash. The image or associations are meant to be ridiculous . . .pathetic, dreary . . . just like the music.