Category Archives: shards

August 18, 2019 · 6:39 am

the mongolian & the mongoose

The Mongolian & the Mongoose

A Mongolian and a mongoose were matching wits on bar stools in a Saint-Lewis tavern. Rolling dice for drinks. Putting quarters in the jukebox. Slow dancing off in the shadows.

The barkeep served them but he wasn’t happy. Especially with the dancing. The men at the bar studied their drinks and showed nothing, but the barkeep knew a fight was coming.

He glanced over at the Mongolian and the mongoose. The Mongolian was normal sized, but the mongoose was huge–on his hind legs dancing, he could lay his head on the Mongolian’s shoulder, which he did.

The barkeep remembered reading somewhere that the mongoose is playful by nature, and swift. It can snatch up a cobra from behind its hood and kill it just like that. But this particular mongoose, dancing on its hind legs, was awkward and kept stepping on the Mongolian’s toes. The Mongolian didn’t seem to notice, and he hadn’t had all that much to drink. He was in love, that’s what it was. In love with a mongoose.

The tension was building in the men at the bar. It’s a regular’s bar, and strangers of any kind were not welcome, much less a Mongolian and a mongoose. And then there’s the love thing, radiating out of them like cyanide fumes while they danced.

Finally Sweeny the longshoreman got to his feet and kicked his stool over, and the other men at the bar did the same.

The Mongolian and the mongoose disengaged, the mongoose going down on all fours and suddenly seeming dangerous, while the Mongolian unsheathed a sword that somehow the barkeep had missed. He spun it over his head with alacrity before going into a battle stance, the sword extended in front of him, glinting in the pale light of the bar.

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August 15, 2019 · 8:13 am

the yo-yo of disjointed emotion

Artwork by Andre Nax

The Yo-yo of Disjointed Emotion

Tomorrow is Leonard Cohen’s birthday. Today is Maxwell Perkins’ birthday. Today is also the birthday of 3,410 infant Ethiopians, 463 mad Turks and 42 suave motherfuckers on Park Avenue.

Tomorrow is the birthday of Annette Funicello and Attila the Hun. Neither of them is related to Leonard Cohen, peeking thru the curtains from a Paris hotel room. He looks down and sees that he’s barefoot. A sour discovery. There must be a song in it somewhere.

Is Leonard Cohen Mother Theresa’s love child? An idle thought. So many questions hung out to dry in the Canadian sunset.

The future’s whiplashing out of control, but don’t fret. Don’t bite your nails. Don’t choke on the wishing bone. Why the hell did you swallow it in the first place?

Gone the days of unchecked adventure.

Gone the days of eat it all and die young.

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August 14, 2019 · 10:19 am

Secret admiration societies stockpiling hemlock. Skillets filled with half-baked fish. The warning light that blinks while you sleep. The line you step over continually in spite of the spiders and quicksand. The furry answer that you stroke like a kitten. The tiny viper that coils up in your knee sock. The pledge and promise that you can’t keep your hands off. The trembling turtle dove on the high-voltage wire. The circling hawk. The tuba band of beer-soaked Germans.

Sex dies, sex dies, and then what? You retreat to a house made of gingerbread and huddle close to the oven, telling lies to the wicked witch who sits in her rocking chair and checks you out with her one good eye.

“Let me touch it,” she says in her crackling voice.

“No, no,” you say. “Those days are gone.”

“Stoke the coals in the oven then,” she says, “and set the table.”

“What’s for supper, hon?” you blurt out. “What’s that you got in the oven?”

“Come on over here and give me a peek at it,” she says, and swats you alongside the head with her broom.

“Please,” you say.

“You want I should turn into a princess?”

“I ain’t the one you’re lookin’ for, babe!” you sing out.

She lets out a screech, hops on her broom and flies around the room two or three times, stirring up the bats that had been hanging from the rafters. Her burlap gown slides up her thighs, revealing gray legs covered with hair and warts. She lands back in her rocker, exhausted, and flings her witch’s hat in the corner. She begins furiously scratching her dry scalp, her tangled gray hair dancing every-which way.

You begin to wish sex hadn’t died. If sex hadn’t died you’d be in the arms of some golden girl on a tropical beach instead of trapped in a witch’s gingerbread house in the Dark Forest.

You’re startled out of your reverie by her gnarled hand clutching your knee. She’s kneeling before you, her eyes green and sad.

“It’s only memories,” she says softly. “Here, let me show you what the future holds.”

And she opens the oven door.

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July 22, 2019 · 4:16 pm

the survival meal

The Survival Meal

A little man lives in my head. He gives orders. He overrides considerations. He doesn’t take no for an answer. Right now he has me parked out front of Circle K in the dark at seven o’clock at night with a 16-ounce cup of coffee and the engine running, writing on a yellow pad under the light from the neons under the awning.

For some reason the little man in my head doesn’t want me to write at home. He prefers I go up on the hill overlooking the valley, but if that’s not possible, he grabs hold of whatever’s available. I tried to argue with him about this Circle K business, but he wouldn’t listen.

Three sexy women have gone into the Circle K since I’ve been sitting here, and each time the little man cut me off before I could write them down. “That’s not what we’re here for,” he said. But here I am, slipping it in anyway. I’ve still got some say in things.

Ten minutes until the movie starts. It’s Christmas night and I’m going to a movie.

People keep going into the store. They come back out with cases of beer, gallons of milk, things in cellophane wrappers. There’s an advertisement on the Circle-K door for the Survival Meal–a picture of a hot dog in a bun with a ribbon of mustard on it, a small bag of Lay’s potato chips, and a twenty-ounce Styrofoam cup of cola with a desolate landscape printed on it under the date “2012”. Something Mayan. All for $3.50.

This may be the reason the little man sent me here.

To tell you about the Survival Meal.

To make me aware that the world is coming to an end.

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July 20, 2019 · 11:55 am

the pepsi generation in lockdown

The Pepsi Generation in Lockdown

The soma imperative and the Secret Police, a dichotomy of despair. Food groups, food pyramids, corporations cashing in on cancer and heart attacks. But keep smiling, help is on the way. Here comes the FDA, here comes Ronald McDonald with his maniacal smile and a fist full of raw meat, here comes the whole damn Pepsi Generation beating hand drums and shaking tambourines.

All awards are political, all things political are corporate. Whose time clock do you punch? When’s the last time you woke up in charge of things?

The Pepsi Generation went to London and got tossed in the slammer. Coca-Cola is the official drink of the Summer Games,and McDonald’s is the official restaurant. The Pepsi Generation is past pull date, their hair’s gone gray, they’re arthritic and riddled with cancer, they need to get shot up with insulin just to keep on eating junk food. They won’t last long in lockdown, but they’ve lost their hype so who cares? They’re in there with fish-&-chip vendors and sellers of soda pop, charged with violating the rights of corporate personhood.

This is the real game going down in London. The Olympic athletes are corporate army ants, and we’re all entertained.

Big losses come in small increments until indignation dies on our lips.

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July 4, 2019 · 6:05 am

the real american

The Real American

“Sag mir Bescheid or I’ll tan your hide!”

The last German in that neck of Appalachia, laying down ultimatums to his son, the boy gawking at him like he’s gone over the edge on moonshine, wondering where the old man comes up with this shit, not having a clue about ancestry, it’s way too inbred, an I’m my own grandpa sort of thing, so inbred one person’s thoughts can spill into another person’s head so that homicide is often suicide. It’s been decades since the sheriff rode up into these hills.

The old man is the only one still speaking the old language, the rest of them gave it up when World War II broke out and the militia came up the logging road in tanks and drafted everyone in sight. They used them as interpreters and snipers and gave them a taste of store-bought whiskey for the first time in their lives, and out of the twenty or so that got yanked off the ridge, only Wilhelm returned, Wilhelm being the kid’s old man’s grandfather. So it must have been Wilhelm taught his grandson, the kid’s father, to talk Kraut. But sweet Jesus, that didn’t begin to explain anything, and a dark cloud came rolling over the kid.

One man in Appalachia speaking German who never heard of 9-11 and who has no idea who the president is – the last real American.

HCOLOM PRESS is the heir to Vagabond Press, which began as a main player in the Mimeo Revolution of the Sixties and continued publishing right into the jaws of the new millennium. HCOLOM PRESS embodies the spirit of Vagabond Press, retooled for the times we live in.

Hcolom is Moloch spelled backwards. Moloch is an Old Testament deity to which children were sacrificed, a practice society still engages in with increased enthusiasm. Consumerism is the new Moloch, manifesting itself like cancer in war, politics, the arts and religion, in every nook and cranny of human endeavor, draining the intrinsic beauty out of life and mutilating the innocence and magic of childhood with its commercial meat hook. HCOLOM PRESS intends to publish books that by their nature repudiate this pernicious force–novels, poetry, children’s books and books that transcend genre.

Our launch book, in June of 2006, was John Bennett’s novel, Tire Grabbers, a fable of sorts, a reality book rooted in the fantasy of our times, the story of the coming of Moloch and the children who rise up in rebellion against it.

Books of kindred spirit will follow close on its heels. Go for it by clicking here… or hit the Hcolom logo above… or just hit any of the following covers…