From The Ongoing Life

• TWEETS FROM HELL: PART THREE

  Feb 19, 2010

  J. P. Sartre & J. Goebbels drink ape-piss tea in fetid bistro, wondering if they might’ve done differently without a walleye, a club foot Swore by Stalin, mollified Hitler, Che & Chamberlain bake together in a low-temperature oven: damned if you do & damned if you don’t Those who died demented in a nursing home think they’ve simply moved down the hall Robert Olen Butler types away in a tiny, dark room alone with his unconscious & unable to avert his eyes: this is Hell, but it is Heaven too I have to speak fast: Hell as untweetable novel officially available. ...

• TWEETS FROM HELL: PART TWO

  Feb 12, 2010

  There are no animals. Seeing balcony railings, park benches, window ledges in the Great Metropolis, everyone aches at the memory of birds Montezuma stuffs tacos for throngs at Taco Bell, wearing flayed skin of Cortés, the rest of whom waits hopelessly nearby for golden fries On tube, “The Genghis Khan Factor”: the Mongol & Rush Limbaugh utterly agree & wink & are wed on air: the consummation is Hell’s reality TV In the cleric’s bar: Khomeini regrets his fatwa getting Rushdie laid 1000 times; Jimmy Swaggart regrets the ayatollah not going after him Hoa the Saigon bargirl died by drug-addled American’s jealous hand, now drinks Hell Tea alone, longing for the way he tonguetipped her spine Bronx tagger Scat 164, with can of cobalt blue, can’t tag on empty wall: it was always about who he is: still got Scat but he got no street A host of Holy Men here, unaware religions are performance art & their truths metaphorical: when metaphor turns into dogma, real sin begins Hell’s Great Metropolis is ringed in mountains where,

• Tweets From Hell: Part One

  Feb 2, 2010

  When you ask a publisher what sells books, he or she will hem and haw and say that they do a lot of things to try to sell books, but honestly they don’t know if any of that works. ...

• My companion on the recent leg of my Hell book tour

  Nov 17, 2009

  A few weeks ago I noticed a green anole squeeze into the driver-door outside mirror of my car. ...

• How I Came to Hell

  Nov 3, 2009

  Any writer who, midway through his publishing career, makes his way to Hell, the straight way of his life having been lost, must go there in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and his man Virgil. ...