James Daniel Bowman the Third @jamesdanielbowmaniii - Tumblr Blog

Upon a time (once or for evermore): Bodies at the feet of a killed guy. Two out of these three, Present bodily, stare at Each other, then avert their eyes, then stare at Each other again, in the way of new acquaintances. The third is just this ethereal presence, Predicated on the rotting carcass of a Falling (or long-fallen) feather…. And are all three Drinking heavily? Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes.

#poem #poems #poet #poetry #poesy

Fissures In A Wish: Chamomile Demure and the Future of Art By James Daniel Bowman III Social worth aside, Demure’s practice has metaphysical implications. By transgressing recognized categories, her work births conceptual landscapes where a swerve from one genre’s structural makeup to another genre’s structural makeup creates taxonomy-trashing patterns of space and time with explosive and implosive temperaments. Now I’ll place less emphasis on the fact of her evasion of easy categorization and emphasize instead the views made available via these transgressions. By means of this budge in attention, her relationship with surrealism, Dada, and magic realism can be more cleanly seen. I invite you to view Chamomile Demure from an editorial perspective since her poetry so frequently stresses both the sway of the surreal--as a force at work in life as well as in thought--and the problematic limitations of communication (whether visual, linguistic, symbolic, or otherwise) to such an extent that her texts themselves seem semantically suicidal: though they never commit semantic suicide, teetering always on that edge. Dada, in her hands, melds metaphors together, becoming a tool of collage, of combination; used to purify images and words (alone and together) in a process of decontamination that has little to do with what we’ve heretofore called “communication.”

#avant-garde #chamomile demure #contemporary art #alternative comics #indie comics

Entering Abaddon By James Daniel Bowman III I asked my abstemious mother, who was ever-abortifacient when it came to her own pleasure, what her problem was (I think I might’ve rolled my eyes and said, “Live a little! Jesus!”) and an unexpected abreaction followed. The weepy scene played itself out like a song, reminding me of a chapter I’d read recently (in a book titled The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, by John D. Caputo) called “Praying and Weeping,” and reaching a wet crescendo. In the end, mom said “cow pox” again and again. It’s hard to say whether cow pox was out of context or not. (Did she say something about a barn?) None of it matters, though. Her repressed memories’ power was (alas) far from irrevocable. She was the martyr again, within hours: her self-salvation had unraveled aborning.

I wince through piss-tinted glasses and see an equation (dilapidated, prowling) in the bulky warmth.

#piss #glasses #equation #bulky #warmth

Hell The nauseatingly never-ending moment’s hair is yesterday. The pee to be peed is tomorrow. Hence the gigolo-sludge of handguns in the never-hidden-well-enough hideaway. Hence the mischief-maker, squinting through crime into crime, and beyond that--at crime! Let’s make a slushie of this whole soiled society! Sound fun? Here comes Cum Boy, semen oozing from his pores like pus! And look! Is that Gus the molestation-smith? That man makes getting molested feel fresh and fun again, Jim. (In the background of the picture we’re all in there are many enemies; but who needs enemies with neighbors like these? The carpet convulses, vomits once upon itself, and, becoming anonymous before its death-- Which carpet? What was I saying?

You always expect, going in, to detest the goring of your mind; which you know will be an unavoidable aspect of the task-at-hand as an author of any nimbleness. In visions, my stunned mind trotted around like an animal in an arena, towing blue entrails through dust to the sound of clapping hands. As it happens, my mind (though pierced, and deeply) endured to appreciate its savior-assailant: a text. This text.

In the Long, Television-Lit Minutes Since By James Daniel Bowman III She put sadness in his saguaros (those ones, over there). He saw it sometimes and thought of all the smoking they did in those few days together, remembered her eating disorder, remembered her telling him how much she hoped that nothingness, “utter and complete” was all that followed death: that she would rather not, thank you very much, exist eternally (even in bliss). In the long, television-lit minutes since pizza, the young human paced aimlessly on the dog-hair-peppered carpet of his friends’ condominium, and looked through this window (this one, right here) at the moon. “What have I become?” he asked the empty living room aloud, “She taught me brevity on that very couch (that one, right there),” he added, staring sentimentally at this tattered brown loveseat (this one, right here) where he lost his virginity. He thought, “It’s such an odd idea: ‘losing’ your virginity. Nothing, I feel, was lost. I’m still as innocent and childlike and romantic as ever. Maybe my experience was unique. Something, I think, was given to me. An experience, yes, but more importantly another thing, something else, something the radiance of which is still in me, hidden or visible, spicy or mild.” Looking at the loveseat, some hushed thunder started in his heart and a path led him back there, to then, to her, and to the idiot he was, asking not one thing about her sexual history but just dipping right on in, disregarding all diseases but the disease he already had: a loneliness so strong he needed communion--then and there--to assuage it and (more importantly) what it brought: those thoughts of suicide. “What have I become?” he asked. Why did he ask that? Wasn’t he healthier then, and there, alone, than he ever had been with her? Hadn’t he decided to embrace life, in the end? Hadn’t “Life before Love!” become his innermost mantra? Hadn’t it been months since he’d even thought of suicide? Even in the abstract? Why was this (“What have I become?”) the question he asked. He didn’t know then, but he does now. Shall we ask him? Yeah? “Hey! James! Get in here!” “I think, to maybe amend something you said just now, that I always knew…. Even then. I just didn’t own it at the time.” “That’s a very big thing of you to admit, James.” “Thank you.” “So?” “Well…. It was a question I asked a lot those days. I thought of it, at that time, as ‘The Question,’ you know? I asked it because, at that time, the slightest slight could turn a friend of mine into an enemy. I guess…. I guess I had a lot of anger?” “Could you elaborate on that at all?” “Because, like, the most meaningless of transgressions, like not texting me back soon enough to seem ‘civil’ or respectful of the energy I put into my texting them was enough. It had me brooding in a mood of despair that seemed, at least to me, to verge on the bloodthirsty of all things. It was awful. When I was with her, broken as I was, my misunderstanding of her (and I’m sure it was a misunderstanding) led us both to some kind of promised land…. Some kind of vague Happily Ever Aftermath.” “And how (unless its too painful to get into) did it end between the two of you. You and Verona?” “I guess you could say I watched her walk away one day, knowing I’d never see her again. There’s a small room in me. Even now. It’s full of something like hope. Not hope for Us, but hope for Her, and Me, in our separate lives and lives-to-be. But that night, in this living room, alone, three years ago, that hope was in a coma, and midnight set aside some wicked list and slithered in through a hole in the ceiling of that small room in me, and the sad thing (the thing that made me ask myself who I was so much) is this: that I liked it, or thought I did, and rooted for the death of any hope I had ever entertained. I wanted to assassinate my hopes, one by one…. To learn how to kill them and to kill them. Each hope was like a head, far off, with a small red sniper-dot on it.”

Recent Mid-May Evening By James Daniel Bowman III 18 May 2012 C.E. Galilee presses her sister-in-the-Lord against the old stone ha-ha [1] and falls to her naked knees, in grass as green as sea-foam-in-the-mind, to kiss her belly. Shell’s light-blue eyes are bright, and seem to swallow all the dark around them in that long-shimmering instant. “Should the penalties I’ve been promised all my life fall all around me and on me,” says Galilee, “and attach, leech-like, to my arms and legs, I’d just keep sucking your sweet peach-fuzz as the dumb things sucked me bloodless.” Freshening wind-from-within comes out of Shell’s small, pale-as-a-hail-stone nose. “Goddess of my idolatry,” says Galilee, but is silenced (if she had more to say) by the immensity of her emotions. Galilee can count all the halcyon days she’d ever had on one hand…. Whereas Shell is happily hagborn [2] and misses her uncouth youth. Galilee’s small mouth, with its wafer-like and now-numb tongue, leaves a sticky bit of lip-gloss on Shell’s belly as it (Galilee’s small mouth) moves away and is brushed by breeze, which slips from the glacial womb of the North, slithering southward. “Do you know what I see in the intricate hydrography [3] of your eyes?” asks Galilee, “Or do you even think you’d like to know?” What Galilee sees there are all the maledictions (of all the fools who’d condemn them) falling into water and sinking and drowning unto death, whacked from a star-spangled sky like bothersome bugs by the hand of an irritated goddess, who doesn’t condemn their love whatsoever but instead the foolish hate of their hecklers. Shell laughs as Galilee tells her this and hides her wild eyes behind their glittery-eye-shadowed lids, growing silent, putting her wet, warm palms on Galilee’s cool, pink cheeks. Shell thinks Galilee’s haecceity [4] is in her little mouth. Galilee thinks Shells haecceity is in her saint-like eyes. Shell’s mom called her an “indigo child.” Galilee’s mom called her a heathen. “Let me feel this wilderness,” says Galilee, standing, and runs her hand like a comb through Shell’s disheveled hair. Endnotes [1] A recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier while preserving views. The design includes a turfed incline which slopes downward to a sharply vertical face, typically a masonry retaining wall. Ha-has are used in landscape design to prevent access to a garden, for example by grazing livestock, without obstructing views. In security design, the element is used to deter vehicular access to a site while minimizing visual obstruction. The name "ha-ha" derives from the unexpected (i.e., amusing) moment of discovery when, on approach, the recessed wall suddenly becomes visible. [2] Shell was raised in an all-female family, which lived for “many years in self-imposed exile,” researching Wicca and Paganism but practicing neither, practicing nothing other than unfettered, “anarchistic” freedom. [3] Branch of applied sciences which deals with the measurement and description of the physical features of oceans, seas, coastal areas, lakes and rivers, as well as with the prediction of their change over time, for the primary purpose of safety of navigation and in support of all other marine activities, including economic development, security and defense, scientific research, and environmental protection. [4] That property or quality of a thing by virtue of which it is unique or describable as “this (one).”

#short stories #james daniel bowman iii #love stories #flash fiction

From a novel-in-progress. Bit title: Hugh Ruminates By James Daniel Bowman III In mid-September, 2001, Hugh Hall “knew” that a showdown with Satan was near-at-hand. All his life, the religious leader of the always-growing Palm Branch Bible Church (allegedly non-denominational but really rather Baptist) had fought to save his parish, his community, from the encroachment of dark forces. And now The Devil, as a preliminary step in the direction of another cosmic battle, had dispatched troops, this time to New York. The forty-something-year-old pastor scrubbed pollution. He descended into his basement to seek guidance and inspiration from the Lord. Above him, in his modest but classily-decorated house, his wife, Fran, was. In a special spot in the basement. Pastor Hugh Hall promised God an offering. No more pornography…. For a while at least. A passing thought seemed to descend into his head like a fallen leaf, then seemed to ascend and move away, as if carried in a gust of wind. The passing thought was not linguistic in nature, but could be translated thus: “Will the recent attacks in New York change sex with my wife (the way they’ve changed everything else) and, if so, will I even be able to tell?” He hadn’t had sex with Fran for months. If a change did seem to enter into their sex life, there would be no way to know whether it was September Eleventh-related or not. In prayer, Hugh seemed to receive a vision of an America defeated, piece by piece, U.S. citizen by U.S. citizen, of many bearded men in turbans landing like grasshoppers into the midst of American day-to-day life, and tearing us (or, if not us, all we believe in) asunder. (He would need to share this vision with his parish at Palm Branch Bible Church on Sunday.) “How will we be ready, in Your name, Jesus Christ, for something of this scale? Good God in Heaven have mercy on is all.”

#hugh hall #9/11 literature

Bright Thing in the Night By James Daniel Bowman III

It seems to me my cousins are closer to Nature (or some idea I have of what Nature-with-a-capital-N is or, more pressingly, “means”) than I am. Why? The fact that they antagonize each other almost certainly has something to do with it, but also (and more meaningfully) this: That, looking down, out of my cousins’ windows (which are side-by-side, as their rooms are, on the face of the front of their house) into the planter beneath the pane-of-glass’s other side, at small, palm-like plants--the trunks of which seem to be made of many open and owl-like eyes--on bright nights, these plants lit in the green lights of my aunt’s choosing, I feel they must have access to something that I myself am separated from.

30 October 2000 (1) by Chamomile Demure I’ll brush their hair like little-girls do, Bringing my dolls to life. I can make the messy majestic. Can you? This tall doll is my wife. On old, shaggy brushes I’ll hone my knife. Many dead-and-gone dolls at my feet: Plastic cadavers in sawdust-sleet. Camera Flashes are a Hand full of ashes. Napalm and the trodden Jew: a myth like Splintered jerky (the pale nape of a Broken neck). The sun I see is murky. I choke on Father Raven’s eyes. This--your hair, and mine--let Be and--leaving be--let shine. Here’s where I keep my endless drive, My need to be been Queen of the hive, Which will be hushed by brine.

#kicking candles #chamomile demure #poetry #poems #poets

Untitled By James Daniel Bowman III A Rubenesque, pitch-black, armadillo-like femme fatale tows smoke from a cigar, examining the innards of a twenty-year-old fridge, which include a lump of animal muscle, around which an assembly of votive candles are arranged in what can only be described as an eerily ceremonious way. This attests to all Extinct mental illnesses. This attests to capital-A “Authenticity’s” meaninglessness. Yes, like ravenous dogs (consumed by rabies) that are bent on destruction, so the unrepentant wicked are bent on evil.

Stain Abel Versus Mankind By James Daniel Bowman III Feces has fallen and dried into a viscous crust on the rust on the hood of the car always parked in my next door neighbor’s driveway. I stare over the heads of dandelions in my own front-yard at the parched brownness of the poker-faced roses in his. My neighbor (who I’ll call Mankind, not knowing his name) is certainly the most sadistic person to come out of a woman’s womb in the last half-century. I can’t let myself to shed any more light on The Mess before I shed some shade on myself. I have, for a handful of years, been called “America’s favorite pervert.” You may know my name: Stain Abel. When Voltaire was dying, a priest came and said, “You should renounce the Devil,” and Voltaire said, “This is no time to be making enemies.” Every day, Mankind drags an animal by one of its twitching limbs into his lair. God-and/or-the-Lack-Thereof only knows what he does to them in there.

#short short stories #short shorts #short stories #flash fiction #stain abel

“Eat the wreath with jewelry,” the waiter says. We Play with a naughty little nincompoop. My monstrosities are slouching, mon amie! I’ll trade my CDs for your hula hoop. Let’s snort the powder from some Pixy Stix. For Heaven, you’d pray to me too, you dumb fuck. What are those tattoos you got, girl? Two dicks? I’m a football. You’re a goalpost. Luck can suck. “A regular beard wouldn’t sparkle like that! I think malpractice happened in his past.” “Some folks broke his beard with a baseball bat, It’s sparkled ever since they took off the cast.” By Chamomile Demure

An August 2014 Dream By James Daniel Bowman III Mom is missing. I swear a lot. I think I say “fuck” about a dozen times. Dad doesn’t even get mad. Aunts and uncles and cousins show up with Mom, who got stranded way out in “downtown Phoenix.” Later, while taking out the trash (and for some reason on the wrong side of the house), I leave the door open and a bird gets in (again). R. and I try to catch it and eventually see it in the den, perched on the folded-up treadmill. It darts out of an open window, though, before we have to decide what to do. Much, much later, B and L and Little D and Big D and Dad and I playing a game of some kind and Little D or maybe B asks me, “What haven’t you sunk?” meaning to ask, “What haven’t you drunk?” and I say, “I didn’t think the Titanic!” and hold my hands up as if to say, “Don’t put the blame for that on me!"

#short short stories #short shorts #short stories #dreams #dream

It is not that I take this lightly, and I could certainly never hate her, But I weep like I wept the night Tina and Bette were in the elevator. So I’ve taken you for this ride, To sing to you of the burdens I carry, Wanting to be by your warm side, But hating to hurt the one I chose to marry. Know how much I want to be yours. Understand how much I wish to hold your hand. The whole world is like a series of slammed doors, And I’m standing in circus sand.

#kicking candles #james daniel bowman iii #short short stories #short shorts #short stories #flash fiction

Immolation of an Untidy Husk (or A Million MPH) By James Daniel Bowman III

In the walker’s way (on a sidewalk as white as writer’s block) a smoldering Buddhist monk is sitting a million mph toward another place. The walker watches the self-immolation, sees this other human set The Self (in this case understood from the inside out, as just some untidy husk or other) ablaze. Does the walker understand yet (if ever) what will remain in his mind forever?

#james daniel bowman iii #short short stories #short shorts #short stories #flash fiction

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