Puck

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

“Go,” I told you, “and make yourself available.”

Your scowl doubted me, but I pressed gas money into your hand—a hand already outstretched. Your trembling hand, your bare feet, your salt-encrusted tee-shirt, your heart weighing the wood of the past.

We were at play in the fields of the vertical. The sun shone through the groves of orange magnetism, but it was the smudge pots that attracted us. You were chased by the lion of the maelstrom. My hands were covered with soot. With pockets full of rocks, we went home to the cliff-hanging house where we were erratically rebuffed. You gave yourself ample reason to panic at life’s seemingly deliberate obscurity.

“Available to what?” you scoffed.

“To the chance you seek,” I replied, but I was too tired to be convincing. Gas money, a skull made of stone, bare feet, you stood in the door, hand outstretched. “Open to the possibility,” I tried again.

Smoke from a lung, the cadence of the magic circle, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak—to these forces add aleatory.

“Go,” I told you. The abyss, so prone to earthquakes, couldn’t hold you anyway. “Make yourself available,” I added, “and it will come.” Here is the very meaning of the word—any word; abduction, for example.

Skull and bones washed up by waves of bleach in the tenantless heat. There is no arrow because time is a puddle. You were bare foot. You opened the door and became available. Upon your lips, the fuel of chance. I held the vial in my hand, poured the greasy ash into the palm of the other.

“Go,” I said, so close I could taste it.

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

I feel as if my penis is channeling an alien consciousness. Something alive, but inhuman. Or maybe I’m the alien, the “all to human,” and my cock channels the music of the spheres; it hears yoni sighs of longing, and cannot help but rise at the call for touch. Am I a Self or a Medium?

Either/Or, telepathy must remain undecidable. Epistemologically, telepathy is like trying to catch a butterfly with a net of dew. The fingers of analysis must pry intuitively. And blindly. For any light I shed on the subject only sends it farther into the shadows.

The image of gossamer. Shy thing. Heisenberg’s petals. Continue Reading »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

Novelist Michael Chabon, in a recent review of a new edition of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, concluded by stating “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Those lines could have been an epigraph for Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression. McLeod is a sociology professor and an expert in the study of popular culture—just the sort of academic over which right-wingers love to excoriate “liberal” universities. But Freedom of Expression justifies society’s investment in scholars like McLeod: his book is learned, ranges widely over key areas of the copyright and intellectual property wars, and (here’s something you don’t hear everyday in regard to a scholarly work) is damn funny. Continue Reading »