The Force of July

Duel of the Fates?

Not really but I wanted to use the title to Star Wars movie we never got to see which would have been a hell of a lot better than RISE OF SKYWALKER (unless that’s what we’re calling Jedi now…in all honesty Star Wars ended with RETURN OF THE JEDI…

But enough of all that…for the first of July rather than the fourth Dumpster Fire Press presents THE FORCE OF JULY…

Two unique works from two uniquely un-American authors to precise who have something to that is pretty much universal but revered in this Land of Selective Freedom and Coca Cola…

First off we have Kathleen Yearwood’s novel SELF-MUTILATION…

Dumpster Fire Press is proud to present our first full length novel from Canadian folksinger Kathleen Yearwood!
SELF-MUTILATION- is not just a story of survival against frenetic odds along with chaotic factors and a haunting past but a full on indictment of economics in general pull veil away to reveal a sick religion of self-mutilation in order to continue a prolonged existence in a realm beset by capitalist realism.
A true myth for the poor to live by, looking at the reality within a reality that we’re one should be able to thrive no matter the odds in a rigged game of fluctuating variables and Kakfa-esque characters and scenarios implementing whacky and disturbing contact…but there’s a way to exist alongside it and you don’t have to totally abide.
Better living through bonding with surivors of survival.

CHAPTER 9 “I think I remember the day I realized that poverty is a powerful form of censorship.

 I realized that because I was listening for voices about my experience, and I couldn’t find any. Not readily. I found opinions about people like me, or sort of like me, by people who were nothing like me. From the poor there was nothing but silence.

   When I got unable to hold down a job and there was no man to pay my rent I began living in barns and chicken-coops and I began to think about my approaching middle age and how it would be, exposed to extreme cold in the winter and always being told to move on, I began to feel a gnawing hunger for stimulation and for opportunities. I had entered an almost complete isolation. It was a physical turning away and it was a perfect reflection of the isolation I had always felt but not seen. Poverty is both cause and symptom of isolation, poverty arrives when you don’t have any ties, when no one knows where or how you are, and when those who might care are just as helpless to do anything about it. Then everyone starts to think poor.

   Starting without expectations, one is easily convinced that even the necessities of life are not necessary. One continues to live, even without sufficient food or shelter, and then you lose all interest because soon there is no hope for anything better. I learned I could live on what my neighbours threw away.

   And I learned something else too, those long, freezing nights. I saw a parade of every beaten poor person I had ever known. I  smelt the basement that smelled of dog shit and diapers and concrete dust, three or four babies with snotty faces, the woman who lived there, took in children and rented out the top floor. A new mother gone mad in a shack with the rain pouring down day after day. Drunk and screaming in the street. Head down, shuffling and eating garbage, wanting nothing because wanting is a sin. These people do not write books. I saw the shattered young woman who had been committed by her husband and couldn’t leave the mental hospital until he and her doctor decided she could clean up the house and cook some more. The old men who lived their lives in that hospital, now spat out into a dank house in their grimy slippers, coagulating in the shameful grey lobby waiting for lunch and pills, so they could lie on their beds all the rest of the day waiting for dinner and more pills. These people do not make movies. They are well represented in documentaries on inner city losers and how they survive hard times. They feature in documentaries about women in poverty made by middle- class women. We show up for these projects, but we don’t get paid. We show up because we think it might help somebody, we show up but everything we say does not even constitute a period in the tidal wave of discourse from the top. There is nowhere to read our culture and our philosophy, we have a cultural future and a heritage without even the smallest of monuments, without even the smallest complaint.

   But the parade of poor people taught me even more. I saw myself there, putting on, putting on the cloak of poverty again every day. Too cold to expect more. Too isolated to know any different.

   I heard the voices I have always heard, whispering or shouting in the eyes of the welfare ladies: Poor people- must be too stupid to get unpoor. “You must learn to budget”, another lecture, more disrespect. No one ever lectures the rich about over consumption or responsibility. They do as they please, they waste as much as they want and are considered golden.

   Then I learned what the women in the concentration camps knew. No matter how exhausted or despairing you must tie your shoes and brush your hair and mend the skirt because they are looking for signs of weakness or of madness. You must appear able to work, ready for the task, you must learn to conserve energy and appear busy.

   So I started smiling everywhere I went. To the prison, to town to watch people fulfil their roles laid out without a murmur. (The daily  witness of  this bondage disturbed me) but for years I pretended to accept and to appear ready for the task. At home in my shack I could weep.

   This isolation I entered and re-entered every day was like a form of deafness. I looked more or less like everyone else, but when people spoke to me I could not decipher what they said. I could focus on one word at a time but not on the meaning, or the intent. Or the sense. Each word was a discrete package: jeer; Jehovah; jehu; jejune; all I was able to do was amplify each photon of sound as it crawled to me through the cold congealing air. POP, POP, POP, always the same volume, just more or less densely they arrived and the air is more like cold mushroom soup than air. I can’t be sure of what anyone’s said to me. I certainly never remember what I’ve said. That’s because I must reinvent the world every day, and that means every thought, every sentence, every moral, every act.

   When I turn my eye inward now, it’s not the parade of the beaten poor I see. I see poverty without squalor, a house cold, but full of books, a woman with her shoes tied and her hair combed though she won’t see anyone possibly for weeks. And when I turn my eye outward are you interested in what I see? I see a waterfall of discrete and mostly painful and nonsensical words falling down on a world nearly devoid of love.”

Secondly we have Aldo Quagliotti’s INCUBI & SUCCUBI which is a collection that I definitely needed to read to recover from the poetry fatigue of April Cruelty…

Previous VOICES FROM THE FIRE contributor Aldo Quagliotti heralds a new work of poetry from DFP with his new collection INCUBI & SUCCUBI…
This is a work that rejuvenates the depleted, those demons feeding on you and haunting you…yeah, you’re riding the demons but don’t forget rider…you’re the one who can tame them and if they can feed off you, take the energy back that cannot be created nor destroyed.

Florist

I was a florist and was cheerful

arranging color wheels in severe modules

seemed to be rewarding

not a small drop of stress

would cross my eyebrows

my palate drenched in stimuli

closing my eyes

just staring at primulas

you’d imagine the magnificence

of your tedium in the loopy days

sneaking out of your body

wrapping itself to a growing phalaenopsis  

overlooking elsewhere

Shitty day

It’s a shitty day when I’m congested

the small code left

for a stroke to get me

needs a pin to be reset

curiosity strikes forward

the arcane Atlantis will be back

to give me a pack

offering, as a comfort,

a chanting snack

lubing-up my ego:

you’re an unrepeatable phenomenon  

What if

If snow is so immaterial

why would you love me

we share the same consistency

I’ll disappear the same way

one day

my head beaten to the ground

my heart fertilizing fields

my poetry still so petite

illogical, spitefully chasing

the round bullock of grammar

never grabbing the sense

of a full tense

would you draw my pulses

to the wall, in colorful Morse code?

I’d pose for your inquisitive mindset

nothing is brighter than your drafted smile

If I stopped falling, every time

In love with your warmth

the pod of my immortality

a bouquet full of magnificence

Smug

The Saracen smile

is out in the Oz

ahead of the curve

a wizened grin

reflects the usual eyesore

a silicone buffet

groups people

from all over the void

whilst a cheap uniform downplays

the transportive power of boredom

the tactile skin of an invitation

is that I’ll forget this meeting right now

insurance you said?

I’ll ignite my vocal folds

away from congratulations

I remain a piece of paper

that sends my brain aflutter

poems are minnows afloat

they play dead if the T&C kick in

to hide the subsets of death

just pretending

All over again

Let the strobe-lit nightmare get me

demons will flirt all night long

long-sleeved ‘cuz that’s how I testify

my constant will to escape

I’m cold and so frozen and so passionate

the heat will defrost

my breath won’t go away

just hibernate

I reaffirm my transformation

the hot-blooded wish to blow this nation

like the wolf of the three pigs

I get my inspiration

from stars being the sky’s wig

the sensation of a metaphor

being more powerful the more you dig

the more you twist, the more you twig

the more you insist,

you are yet to be born theretofore

let alone understanding

what Sisyphus teaches us

There’s your Force of July…intense enough for you?

Probably not enough but hey, we’ll keeping pushing until you get fully triggered…’cause that’s what you do when residing in a flaming dumpster…