Words & Music

by Mike Power

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  • The Fire Next Time

    Anger has its uses. It can be a spur to confronting injustice or a vent for righteous frustration. Anger is like lust: it’s an honest emotion. There’s no time to overthink the impulse. The best you can do is control it and try to deny how insanely good it feels to let it off the… Read more

  • The Garden of Eden

    if you’re out there in the ether somewhere listening, looking, absorbingi want you to know that I know you have entered the garden of edeni was there once myselfisn’t it the most wonderful place?you can’t stay forever but when you’re there a moment can feel like foreveri hope you get to live there and love… Read more

  • A Joke

    I got a little dark yesterday. School shootings can do that to a person. Today I’ll share a joke from a book I’m reading, The Evenings by Gerard Reve.   Gerard Reve, joker         At this school they were going to take a photograph of the whole class, but the little poor boy wasn’t allowed… Read more

  • Gun Control

    Seventeen people were killed yesterday in a school shooting in Florida. Next week there will be another school shooting, and this one will fade into the past for those of us lucky enough to not have our lives turned inside out by this all-American carnage. We have become a nation controlled by cowards. While every… Read more

  • Happy Valentine’s Day – Fools In Love

    I was introduced to Joe Jackson’s music in my freshman year of college. A friend told me that he wrote better unrequited love songs than The Beatles. Being an obnoxious 18 year old Beatle freak I tossed my friend’s Joe Jackson cassette out the dorm window.    My friend was right, of course. As he… Read more

  • Giovanni’s Room – Sex

      Sex is a difficult thing to write about. Too graphic and it reads like porn, too tame and the writer seems inexperienced or, worse, fearful. The Literary Review gives out an annual prize called the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for lines like this one from 2017 “winner” Christoper Bollen: The skin along her… Read more