Did you miss me? I was with Benjamin, see, and Foucault, Fannon, Bhabba, Crane, Hinojosa, and Trumbo, and together we spent our evenings uncovering privilege, panopticons, and simulacras. I reveled in these until my skin went from brown to green and I realized I could drop the mask and dance the mambo good. Now I shuffle for the masses until they forget about skin and focus on my kickass Dancing-With-the-Stars moves.

Watch out for my pirouette, now. Might just be good enough to make the whole world dance.

– And then she grasps with an unpleasant jolt of consciousness like licking the posts of a nine-volt battery, which she did once on a whim when she was ten, that she has never pushed herself to do anything, not a single solitary goddamn thing. – Jess Glass in Requited

– He no longer resembled her lover. The room, with the shades drawn, appeared to be cast out of the depths of Dante’s hell and the walls breathed a combination of flesh and metal like a living Giger painting. The floor moved like liquid lava. – Alec Bryan in PANK

– Aaron’s mother’s voice is demanding, too loud. It pricks at Ann’s eardrums, making her want to dig them out with a sharpened spork. And is she really asking her this? Too hot heat creeps up her neck and across her cheeks. Margie apparently wants to know if Ann’s screwing her son regularly. – Nicole Wolverton in Black Heart Magazine

– But, no, I’m not too religious though I do have a beautiful plastic replica of the Virgin of Guadalupe standing about four feet high in my backyard by my fig tree and to the left of my enclosed Jacuzzi. No Mexican can get through life without the Virgin even if he’s an atheist, agnostic or a born again Buddhist. La Virgen. Dark like los indios of Mexico. – Daniel Olivas in La Bloga

– It is 00.51 and I have kept the light on. It is 00.51 and I have kept the light on and I feel sick because I have eaten too much. – J.D.A. Winslow in Fleeting

Now through the end of August, Dark Sky Books is offering a two-for-one deal on Hunters & Gamblers and Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City.

$15 for both.

Listen to the King: VISIT THE DSB STORE RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND AND ORDER SOME COPIES OF THEM TWO HOUNDDOGS

Irene’s coming in my dreams. She’ll probably just brush my cheek a little, but that great notion is still barreling up the Stream. We’ll be okay, but it’s the first touch of a hurricane in the past few years. And, if history is any indicator, this weekend will be a nice time to peruse the bookshelves. Some poetry, perhaps? The New Yorker looks back on Arthur Rimbaud’s short career, and Martin Amis reflects on the novelists’ poet, Philip Larkin. Perhaps, you’d like to thumb through Alfred Kazin’s journals? Scandal is always fun, so you might take a gander at Malcolm Gladwell’s former defense of the tobacco industry. Finally, Big Think weighs in on Amazon’s new venture into publishing. Good night, Irene.

Based on the poem by Maurice Ogden written in the early 1950s, “Hangman” tells the story of a hangman who comes to a quiet, small town and kills its inhabitants one by one until nobody is left to defend the narrator who is then hung.

Les Goldman and Paul Julian directed the short film in 1964 and it is narrated by Herschel Bernardi. The film was co-winner of the Silver Sail Award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1964.

Hangman

by Maurice Ogden

Into our town the hangman came,
smelling of gold and blood and flame.
He paced our bricks with a different air,
and built his frame on the courthouse square.

The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
only as wide as the door was wide
with a frame as tall, or a little more,
than the capping sill of the courthouse door.

And we wondered whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal? What the crime?
The hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.

And innocent though we were with dread,
we passed those eyes of buckshot lead.
Till one cried, “Hangman, who is he,
for whom you raised the gallows-tree?”

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye
and he gave a riddle instead of reply.
“He who serves me best,” said he
“Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree.”

And he stepped down and laid his hand
on a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for anothers grief
at the hangmans hand, was our relief.

And the gallows frame on the courthouse lawn
by tomorrow’s sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way and no one spoke
out of respect for his hangmans cloak.

The next day’s sun looked mildly down
on roof and street in our quiet town;
and stark and black in the morning air
the gallows-tree on the courthouse square.

And the hangman stood at his usual stand
with the yellow hemp in his busy hand.
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike,
and his air so knowing and business-like.

And we cried, “Hangman, have you not done,
yesterday with the alien one?”
Then we fell silent and stood amazed.
“Oh, not for him was the gallows raised.”

He laughed a laugh as he looked at us,
“Do you think I’ve gone to all this fuss,
To hang one man? That’s the thing I do.
To stretch the rope when the rope is new.”

Above our silence a voice cried “Shame!”
and into our midst the hangman came;
to that mans place, “Do you hold,” said he,
“With him that was meat for the gallows-tree?”

He laid his hand on that one’s arm
and we shrank back in quick alarm.
We gave him way, and no one spoke,
out of fear of the hangmans cloak.

That night we saw with dread surprise
the hangmans scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
the gallows-tree had taken root.

Now as wide, or a little more
than the steps that led to the courthouse door.
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
half way up on the courthouse wall.

The third he took, we had all heard tell,
was a usurer…, an infidel.
And “What” said the hangman, “Have you to do
with the gallows-bound…, and he a Jew?”

And we cried out, “Is this one he
who has served you well and faithfully?”
The hangman smiled, “It’s a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows beam.”

The fourth man’s dark accusing song
had scratched our comfort hard and long.
“And what concern,” he gave us back,
“Have you … for the doomed and black?”

The fifth, the sixth, and we cried again,
“Hangman, hangman, is this the man?”
“It’s a trick”, said he, “that we hangman know
for easing the trap when the trap springs slow.”

And so we ceased and asked now more
as the hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night
the gallows grew to monstrous height.

The wings of the scaffold opened wide
until they covered the square from side to side.
And the monster cross beam looking down,
cast its shadow across the town.

Then through the town the hangman came
and called through the empy streets…my name.
I looked at the gallows soaring tall
and thought … there’s no one left at all

for hanging … and so he called to me
to help take down the gallows-tree.
And I went out with right good hope
to the hangmans tree and the hangmans rope.

He smiled at me as I came down
to the courthouse square…through the silent town.
Supple and stretched in his busy hand,
was the yellow twist of hempen strand.

He whistled his tune as he tried the trap
and it sprang down with a ready snap.
Then with a smile of awful command,
He laid his hand upon my hand.

“You tricked me Hangman.” I shouted then,
“That your scaffold was built for other men,
and I’m no henchman of yours.” I cried.
“You lied to me Hangman, foully lied.”

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye,
“Lied to you…tricked you?” He said “Not I…
for I answered straight and told you true.
The scaffold was raised for none but you.”

“For who has served more faithfully?
With your coward’s hope.” said He,
“And where are the others that might have stood
side by your side, in the common good?”

“Dead!” I answered, and amiably
“Murdered,” the Hangman corrected me.
“First the alien … then the Jew.
I did no more than you let me do.”

Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
none before stood so alone as I.
The Hangman then strapped me…with no voice there
to cry “Stay!” … for me in the empty square.

***

I’ve never understood the concept of four seasons. They are a myth. A slight chunk of world experiences them. Where I live, we have summer and not quite summer anymore and then two weeks of something colder than you can wear a T-shirt in. That third thing is not a season. It’s a splinter of a shiver. A glimpse at something foreign.

I’ve moved many times in my life. My father was a minister, and he was always getting bigger churches, until he didn’t get churches anymore. Most of my life has been lived in Texas. I’ve spent nine months away. In Vermont. From April to December. I moved away in a blizzard, packing my things in a U-Haul as snow flicked my nose and tongue, my feet slipping on iced stairs as I hoisted furniture aloft uneasily. That day, it was two degrees. Your breath froze into the forms of animals that begat more animals, and the generations danced away into the grayness of sky. But I wasn’t all that uncomfortable. In fact, the work was refreshing.

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