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Shipwrecked (A Poem About Being Shipwrecked)

January 8, 2018 By Bradley Weber

(image from http://flashlarevista.com/content/in-boat-sea.html)

“No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”

— T. S. Eliot 

The challenge was self-imposed and wholly unnecessary: Write a poem with only ten lines per stanza and only two words per line, any length on any subject.

Here’s the result.

(It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that this piece takes an ugly turn early on then steers into it.)

Enjoy!

 

SHIPWRECKED

By Bradley James Weber

FIRST DAY

Nine men

One lifeboat

First Officer

Now Captain

Eight passengers

One oar

Zero rations

Endless horizon

No compass

 

SECOND DAY

Air: equatorial

Sun: blinding

Tongues: parched

Lips: cracked

Water: none

Less food

Nine men

One wounded

One malcontent

 

FOURTH DAY

No land

No ship

No respite

No rescue

Sunburned eyes

Stomach cramps

Fata Morgana

Madness brews

 

FIFTH DAY

One captain

Eight men

Nine straws

One short

“Why draw?”

The malcontent:

“Kill him.”

The dying:

“Yes, lord.”

 

DAY SIX

Eight castaways

Seven sated

One abstained

“Pure savagery.”

Bloody work

Bloody hands

Bloody sea

One lifeboat

Attracting sharks

 

DAY SEVEN

The malcontent

spreads dissent

“Land ho?

Ship ahoy?

Not likely.

Hunger returns!

Cowardly ‘captain,’

who’s next?

Decide already!”

 

DAY EIGHT

Abstainer dead,

stolen overnight.

Seven straws

Become toothpicks.

Offal overboard

Sharks return

Selene’s crown,

Luminous, enchanting

Storm’s harbinger

 

DAY NINE

Glorious downpour!

Quenching rain!

Huzzah! Huzzah!

Relief stillborn.

Savage lighting

Heavy gales

Rudder useless

“Grab something!”

“Hold fast!”

 

DAY TEN

Three lost,

Four remain.

The malcontent,

Two lickspittles,

The captain––

Badly wounded.

“Die choking.”

The malcontent:

“You first.”

 

DAY FOURTEEN

Sundown, starlight

Waxing moon

Pensive sea

Restless sharks

Three men––

Forward, aft,

Amidships crouched––

Ever vigilant

Entertaining hunger

 

DAY NINETEEN

Human bones

Thrice gnawed

Cracked, sucked

Gnawed again

No avail

Futile, exhausting

“Like prayer.”

The malcontent:

“Abandon hope.”

 

DAY TWENTY

Two remain.

One astern––

Tearless, broken––

Overboard slipped

Midnight’s suicide

Alone together

The malcontent

The other

Battle sleep

 

DAY TWENTY-NINE

S. S. Duneeden

“Captain, sir?

Lifeboat spotted,

Port bow.”

The captain:

“Anyone aboard?”

“Unknown, sir.”

“Best investigate.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

Word spreads

Doctor ’roused

Idle crew

Crowding rails

Captain’s command:

“Engines stop.”

Duneeden drifts

Distance closes

All hands

Holding breath

 

Hopeful silence

Woefully broken

Curses, prayer

Revulsion, despair

Bones bleached

Bloody thwarts

Hunger, madness

Souls abandoned

Horror’s Testimony

Witnessed, notarized

 

Everywhere, everywhere

Fleshy strips

Salted, drying

Nearly cured.

Asleep astern

The malcontent

Charon’s helmsman

Meat–surrounded

Peacefully cradling

Someone’s head.

Filed Under: Writing

Avenge-0 — .38 Caliber Discount

December 31, 2017 By Bradley Weber

Having finished the first two pages of Avenge-O The Crimefighting Robot only to find that Supermarket Action! wasn’t happening killed my enthusiasm to finish the rest if it.

A few years later, I contracted San Diego cartoonist Jorge Pacheco to tackle the second part of the story. He did a nice job.

(Click on the first image to view the gallery.)

Story by Bradley James Weber

Art by Jorge Pacheco

(Copyright 2007 Bradley James Weber)

Filed Under: Comics, Writing

Avenge-0 the Crime Fighting Robot #1

December 31, 2017 By Bradley Weber

Way back when the Art Sunday gang was the Fine Arts Guild, somebody came up with the idea of doing a group comic. Everybody would get five pages. The title and theme: Supermarket Action! I thought this would be a fine showcase for the crimefighting robot idea that I’d been kicking around for a while.

For one reason or another, Supermarket Action! never got off the ground.

Here are the first two pages of my five. You can read the other three at the “.38 Caliber Discount” post.

(Click the first image to view the gallery)

 

Filed Under: Comics, Writing

Noble Failure #9 — “Big Trouble” (Full Version)

December 30, 2017 By Bradley Weber

Originally, “Big Trouble” was posted in five PDFs that needed to downloaded to be read. No longer. Just click on the first image below and flip through the gallery.

 

 

 

Filed Under: 24-Hour Comics, Comics, Writing

Is this Bat Country?

April 2, 2012 By Bradley Weber

It was a nightmare, getting out of L.A. . . . The desert would be bad enough all by itself. 
     Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again. 
     To the squares, this was Damnation Alley.

 

Damnation Alley is a really awful book with an impossible cult following. Published in 1969, it went on to be made into an even worse film staring George Peppard, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Jackie Earle Haley which as gained an even stronger cult following than the book.

How I acquired first-hand knowledge of these matters is a story too horrible to tell, at least right now. All will be revealed when I’ve made my millions and adoring fans hang on my every word. Meanwhile, I have to wonder if this shitty little book was in some way an influence on Hunter’s conceptualization of Bat Country and the fearful run from L.A. to L.V.

Zelazny’s novel is a post-apocalyptic version of the 1925  “Great Race of Mercy” — when 20 sled dog teams raced 1085 miles to bring diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska. This time it’s a suicide run from the nation-state of California across the nuke-ravaged, monster-filled wasteland with some Haffikine anti-serum — because they gots the plague way over in Boston.

Leading the a three-car team of recidivist goons is Hell Tanner, last of the West Cost Hell’s Angels. (Seriously. I wouldn’t make that up.)  Tanner is a hard core sonofabitch who’s been in jail for any number of dirty deeds — including smuggling candy to the Mormons. The carrot for Tanner and the rest of the screw heads to make the trip is that they get full pardons for their crimes. . . .

This plot synopsis is somewhat beside my point.

Like with B. Traven’s Death Ship, John Bainbridge’s Super-Americans and a few other texts I’ve run across, Damnation Alley feels like it might have suggested something to Hunter and in some way informed his writing.

Everybody knows about the influence of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Donlevy on the good doctor’s work. But Hunter’s approach to reading seems to have been , in the best sense, a shotgun affair. There is a list of books in a 2006 Harper’s article by William Kennedy (that I can’t link to because you need to subscribe in order to view it), that only hints at the breadth and depth of Thompson’s literary tastes.  One might be inclined to think Hunter was indiscriminate, reading at random, but that doesn’t seem to fit. Omnivorous, certainly — with a purpose.

Traven’s writing in Death Ship has amazing rhythms and a personal, wrong guy/wrong place/wrong time sensibility mirrored in some of Hunter’s best work; Super-Americans is about Texas being the last bastion of the American Dream; Damnation Alley describes the desolation, danger, gila monsters, and high desert weirdness between Barstow and Vegas.

What else is out there he might have read and pulled from?

It’s time to finish Gonzo Republic to see if Stephenson’s worthy examination of Thompson’s writing and themes includes any intertextual analysis of the canon.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fear & Loathing, Movies, Writing Tagged With: Bat Country, Damnation Alley, Roger Zelazny

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