Categories
2006-2010 Book Reviews

The Malaise Inside Me: Thoughts on the Moviegoer

Throughout Percy Walker’s first novel The Moviegoer, narrator Jack “Binx” Bolling spends much of his time engaged in an intense inquest into the contents of his navel. He is a Walter Mitty wiling away his time (and the novel’s pages) with day-dreams, remembrances, and meditations on the mundane, movies, and the malaise.

Categories
2006-2010 Poems

“VistaVision”

I came across this in a notebook the other day. I am posting it mainly so I can recycle the notebook paper on which I had written it.

O imaginary lover!
You exist only in dreams,
silent films showing
in my spinning head.
Your skin is ghostly white,
transparent,
translucent,
now opaque.

O imaginary brother!
You exist only in memories,
documentaries being filmed
in my thinning head.
Your arms are ghastly wide,
intransigent,
transcendent,
now opaque.

O imaginary mother!
You exist only in here,
paltry poesy written
by my shaking hand.
Your skin is ghostly white,
translucent,
transcendent,
now opaque.

Categories
2001-2005 Poems

“Navelgazing”

Look at that boy there,
where he silently sits
with cheeks afire and sandy hair.
He looks at the vespertine sky,
blanketed by blanched stars.
He looks to the moon up high,
its light shattered into shards
by his frosted apartment window.

Before he drifts into a dream,
does he recount the things
that set him there
in that pinewood chair,
the lone furnishing
burnishing this vista?
Had his ship not come in?
Had she sunk in port?
Why do his eyes,
sunken by consternation,
moor his reddened face?
With somber resignation,
he looks at the Eastern star
rising up from beyond
the white-capped trees.
Will the boy ever
exhale his unease?

Look at that boy there,
where he soberly sits
with a salt-watered countenance
until the morning sky is relit.