THE IRREPRESSIBLE HEAD OF PIERRE ELIOTT TRUDEAU

 

A LITTLE EXPLANATION is required, here. Some years ago, I found – in a dumpster outside a government office, of all places – a hollow bronze bust of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s bratty 15th Prime Minister. To someone who cares nothing for politics – a penny opera for crusty old buggers, I’ve always thought – it’s a wonder I didn’t pitch it right back where it belonged. But something about the bust, cheap and ill-made as it was, struck my fancy, and I wound up taking it home.

For the last 5 years, it’s leered down at me from its perch on top of a bookshelf in my office. I’ve avoided eye contact with the bust as much as possible during that time, to the point that I seldom – that I never – notice it anymore. Strange, then, that I should have a dream about the thing, last night.

In my dream, I was walking into my office, coffee in hand, when I became aware of a voice in the room. I saw no-one, but looking up became aware that it was the bust of Trudeau talking. It was reciting one of my poems – “Ra-Tom Wakes in the Afterlife” (about a mummified cat) – and not in its present, but an early, discarded draft. And I was so horrified to hear the poem with all the warts intact that I began violently screaming, waking in time to hear the echo of that screaming bounding down the hallway, like a rhino, outside my bedroom.

What fun!

JUST RELEASED – The new issue of knowonder!, featuring my story “Twylla and the Tiger” – a cautionary tale about the dangers of feeding children to zoo creatures. The practice has one or two merits, I’m sure – but still .… You can either order a copy, or view it for free online (which would be so like you).

　

 

JUST RECEIVED a strongly-worded note from an American children’s magazine editor, declining a poem of mine, “Gruff and Fum-Fudge,” on the following grounds:

1) Today’s children really don’t know what a “sonnet” is.

2) The whole this is obviously a sexual allegory.

This is a little baffling, as the poem – clocking in at 49 lines – is decidedly not a sonnet; and try as I might, I can’t find any trace of allegory, sexual or otherwise, in the quest of two dummkopfs to find a runaway kite.  In the golden days, I suppose, the town dunce grew up to be a trash man, or the mayor.  Now he becomes a magazine editor.

 

 

 

THE FACE-TAKERS

Dreamed a coterie of rich old ladies, and the occasional dandy, were employing black market catburglers to steal the faces of the young and beautiful.  The last were abducted, and drugged, their faces surgically removed, then dumped, faceless (but very much alive, sadly), in back alleys.  Then the crones would replace their own wrinklly faces with the smooth young ones, telling friends they’d simply “had work done.”

I caught onto them, though, when I bumped into a dowager with the identical countenance of a recently abducted friend.  I woke up screaming “Face taker!  Face taker!”  It was delightful.  I suppose it would make for a good story.  A little pulpy, though.  We’ll see …

Not much else to report.  But watch for my new children’s story, about a girl who’s fed – by a witch – to a tiger – in next month’s knowonder! magazine.