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Summary: Very little survived the last great age of men.
Of what did, Benjamin most loved the song “You Can’t Hurry Love” by Diana Ross on dusted beloved vinyl. When she sang, his writing sang, and all felt right in a torn misbegotten world.
Through long nights of summer, Benjamin would listen to her in awe, fearful of waking the others, off alone in the loft of the barn. Safety in isolation, a lesson he’d learned at a much younger age, and people in moderation, the best thesis of another. After all, in his world a minority of men led lives of quiet desperation. Most just wanted a plow and a silent woman.
The cruel people of the township poked fun at him for his collections, but understanding culture made Benjamin proud, gave him a reason to live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
He didn’t have much. A medium-sized stack of scratched records, two or three compact discs, some DVDs, and a pile of degraded cassette tapes that garbled rather than produce sound. Little treasures. But most precious of all, next to his homemade whiskey in the box hidden under the floorboards so that mother would not find them and take them to sell, a cache of semi-used batteries. Forbidden and almost currency, if anyone learned that they drained away for music, William might very well kill him.
Benjamin would picture Diana’s soft young skin in a dark blue dress singing heartfelt soul music to a silenced theater of fans struck dumb by her glorious, sexual presence, the creation of music so sacred an act that no one dared speak when anyone of worth performed. Now and again Benjamin came across albums where people would cheer and clap before and after the musician performed, and he could understand that visceral attitude, but he believed in his heart of hearts they cheered because of the commonality of the music, often leading him to trade these albums for other artists when the rare random junk merchant rolled through town or a raiding party stopped to barter.
And though it killed him to do so, he sometimes used the sacred moments of time offered by each dying battery to write, because what came out when he did always looked a bit more elegant on the page, more refined, and a true man of words values this above all else. Benjamin would scribble in furious fervor, passages to the moon, the world, the intolerable, infertile dust below him, spread out like such a brand of madness. Poems to plows, plowshares, nights and word structures, people and cruelty. Stories of loss, of grief, of station. He’d ode, and the odes would ring through the days in his ears like music for the few moments of his life when he participated in that greater art, art beyond work, the nobler passions of poetry.
In mornings he rose to do his duties, all must, but in these small flights of fancy lie his living, in this heart remained the last hopes of a once-great nation, and in these awakenings he dreamed the lost dreams of a civilization gone. He dreamed of love. He dreamed of acceptance. |
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Author biography: Neal Bailey is the author of five novels, three poetry books, sixteen hundred poems, three feature length screenplays, thirty short stories, fifty comics, two hundred ignored query letters in the last year, a short-ran magazine, and over six hundred articles that remain on the internet. Yearly he writes approximately fifteen hundred letters to readers. In a recent bout of manic arithmetic, he figured out that he produces an average of fourteen to seventeen pages a day, with the fourteen a concession that perhaps you might not be able to call a poem a full page, but keeping the seventeen because he’s sure he makes up for it in instant messages. And boy, do his fingers hurt.
To date, he has earned about thirty dollars with his writing, and spent two thousand dollars trying to sell it. That means you can’t trust his arithmetic. But don’t worry. He’s more careful with the words.
He lives in Tacoma, Washington with a two cats, a dog, a guitar, and a truck. His waking hours are noon to four AM. He’s 26.
If you want to call him to talk about this book, or to read more of his work, he can be reached at |
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