April is Poetry Month!

Library Study Time

Don’t go there.

Don’t talk to those

giggling girls.

Come here

where it’s quiet

as standing water,

where poems

are swimming.

Come here, boy.

Bring the moon’s face

to this side of

the study aisle.

Charles Harvey

Americana--poems by Charles Harvey

Free on Smashwords and iTunes iBookstore

Also by Harvey

The Last Supper

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Bark Too

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Promise's Letters--from The Road to Astroworld

From the upcoming novel The Road to Astroworld.
Letters from Promise to her best friend Lakeisha Ann written from the insane asylum Rust Hills.
________________________________________________________________________________

Dear LaKeisha Ann:

I feel as if I’ve been in a valley of silence for a long time.  Yesterday morning I found myself lying in the palm of a gigantic hand and being lifted up.  I saw myself rising up to meet a brown skinny girl who had wings.  The girl had a face like my dead brother Jonathan’s.  I realized then I was going to meet myself.  I heard myself thinking.  The voices in my head were loud as the engines of one hundred roaring buses.  Pictures tumbled in front of my eyes.  You were in one of the pictures--black and skinny limbed.

I’m in some kind of a Hospital.  I’m sure you read the papers and saw my pictures all covered with red.  The red is supposed to be blood.  But I was cooking that day the picture was taken, so I’m sure the “blood” is food coloring. 
I think I have missed two years.  My tongue is so thick it fills my mouth and blocks my speech.  I see nothing but shadows.  I’m a bird in a cage and am very aware of the cage.  You should see some of the other birds here who are oblivious to the cage.  They walk in circles until the attendants herd them to the dinner hall.  After dinner, the birds walk some more.  They’re in constant motion until they’re strapped to their cots at night.  Even then, some of them move their legs as if walking until they finally fall asleep.
Evidently, I was not a walker.  I was a sitter.  My ass is as flat as a chair.  Dr. Bacon the psychiatrist here told me that nothing reached me.  Not the ice baths, electric shocks, nothing.  What woke me up was some man’s fingers up my snatch.  Those fingers traveled through my womb and tugged at my vocal cords.  The fingers propped open my eyes.  Someone inside me screamed for two solid days at monsters.
Child, the visions were something else.  A small boy in a gold suit lay in a casket.  His head was bashed in.  Blood gushed like a spring from his ear.  Headless singers in blood red robes swayed back and forth as if caught in a spell.  A man with legs thin as broomsticks slept in the middle of a big bed.  His penis was erect and large as a long barrelled pistol.  A white woman offered me strawberries from her breasts.  I bit into one and it was rotten and bitter.  But yet I yearned for more.  I was lured by the redness.  And then there were buses.  They were driven by drivers who bled from holes in their temples.  They drove toward me at high speeds as if they were trying to crush me.  But the buses went through me as if I were air.  The woman inside me screamed as if death was coming at her.  And there was not a Christ anywhere to save me.  Not a christ anywhere to save me from this torment.  But I’m so much better now.
Please come and visit me.  They say this place is called Rust Hills.  The trees are orange and red.  The grass is green as seaweed.  I’m sure from an airplane, this place looks like a nice salad.  It’s in a valley.  I can see cows beyond the fence.  The cows have more life than the zombies inside the fence.  The staff has stamped their motto everywhere: “Confront and cure.”  “Confront and cure” on the walls, on the dishes, on the bottom of your glass after you’ve drank your milk.
A man did come and see me yesterday.  He called himself my husband.  He acted as if he hadn’t seen me in a hundred years.  He grabbed my hands and kissed them all over.  I guess my silence had locked him out too.  I offered him myself.  But he said no. 
Now what kind of husband is that?  I’m standing on the table with my gown hiked over my ass and he says no.  But maybe I didn’t smell very good as a wife.  However the man with the far reaching fingers didn’t mind my smell.
Dr. Bacon, the woman who runs this place thought it would be good for me to write you.  They want me to remember things--go back in time and come up to the day I was found covered with the red stuff.  What can you do?  I don’t know.  I heard that you do have an education now.  Perhaps the plan is to surround me with an educated triad--you, Dr. Bacon, and the man who calls himself my husband.
I hope I have your correct address.  If and when you do come, don’t take the bus.  The belly of the bus like the belly of the whale, is full of rot.   As women and as my friend we’ll smell bad together if we have to.

Love,

Promise

PS.  Bring my child too.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Charlie:

 Why do I keep seeing our son as a corpse?  His head lies on a tiny satin pillow.  Why is he wearing a hat?  I’m ready for answers.  Am I not a good Mother? 

Regards,

Promise

__________________________________________________________________________________

Dear LaKeisha Ann:

Oh, child!  Green, green, green.  At first the scheme of things here was all blue.  Then I assume voices revealed to Dr. Bacon that green is better for a nuthouse.  So now everything in this place is green, green like the puke that ran out of Jonathan when he died.  I don’t blame you for not coming to visit.  You couldn’t find me anyway.  My green gown blends me in with the puke colored walls.  And the puke colored walls blend in with the green vegetable mush they feed us here.  All of this green dissolves into green shit we shit into the green water in the green toilets.  Then the green flies dance in this effluence.

So you see, girl, you cannot see me because I’m blended in to the green.  But if you see a green fly crawling on your pink silk curtains, don’t kill it.  You see it might be carrying parts of me on it’s feet.  And I’m not ready to die yet.

Love,

Promise

__________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Lakeisha Ann:

Hey, girl, what are you doing right now?  Listen at me sounding as if we are on the telephone.  I just got through watching some kind of political debate on the TV.  What a way to spend a Friday night--watching a man and a woman both with as much personality as biscuits talking about how they would ensure world peace.  Neither one of them mentioned lobotomy or castration.  Well that’s my proposal--"docilize" the masses.  After the debate, the host came on and said the usual spiel, “We would like to take this opportunity . . .”  and the word “opportunity leaped out at me.  I began to think about it.  And it seems to me that the pursuit of opportunity is what rules the world.  Civilizations have rose up, died, and gone to hell in the pursuit of the opportunity to grab land, wenches, or both.

A woman meets a man and sees opportunity for a movie and a cheap bottle of perfume.  (He sees a quick fuck.)If you’re real lucky, your “opportunity” might set you up with a million in mutual funds, a multi-layered house on River Oaks Boulevard, and platinum charge cards.
If you’re a simple woman, then a chicken dinner and twenty dollars is enough opportunity for you.
Opportunity.  All a little girl wanted was the opportunity to go to AstroWorld.  She relied on a man to drive her.  She did not want to be made afraid of the rain.

The rain.  Lord have mercy.  She did not want the rain to make her bash her doll into the side of a silver bus.  All she wanted to do was go to AstroWorld.

Love,

Promise

PS.  Pray for me and kiss those grand babies.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Dear LaKeisha Ann:

I’m bored.  I dream of nothing but body parts:  Nancy’s leg, my drooping breasts, other women’s breasts.  I wish we didn’t have these open showers.  Our bodies are so ugly.  The school girls we once knew are nestled in fat.  Stomachs stick out.  Backs are hunched.  All that we have left from our girl days are our fingernails.  You dab a little red on the tips and polish them until they look like a ruby crowns.  They’re there when needed to scratch an itch or keep time to a rhythm when you feel groovy.  Suddenly one day you look at your finger and there’s this ugly gray tumor growing underneath to your finger’s ruby crown.  In fact it’s pushing the crown away and taking over the whole head of the finger.  The finger takes over your whole train of thought.  It’s a new baby.  You poke it, suck it, wrap it in pure white gauze.  Your finger becomes a mystic man in a turban.  You ask it questions like why is a baboons ass like the rainbow.  Then ol’ Doc gets involved with you and your finger.  Here comes his needle.  You hold your breath.  Your lungs tighten like drums.  You scream like it’s the first time you got fucked.  Here comes, through a whole in your finger, nine months of yellow corruption, black thoughts of murder and suicide, and some little

child with his head bashed in.  When you’re drained you feel good.  You hum a little tune and stroke the Doc’s latex hands.  You look at your finger turbanned and mystical and healing.   You fall in love with it all over again.

  Love,

Promise

PS congrats on your third grandchild.

##########################################################

Please enjoy other excerpts from the Road to Astroworld on this blog and also free on iBooks, Smashwords, and Barnes&Noble. Your feedback is welcome and ecouraged. We hope to debut this exciting novel in early June.

Here is a wonderful opportunity to preview and review an excerpt from the novel. Click this LINK

Read an E-Book Week

Free titles on Smashwords this week only. Perhaps your book will benefit from the exposure. Click the picture above to find out more information. Enjoy our freebies on Smashwords. Please use code RW100 to enjoy all of Harvey's titles absolutely free this week.


Betty's House
The 520I
The Last Supper
Red Underwear
Cheeseburger
Coming Home Tomorrow
and Many More Smashwords Titles


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THE ROAD TO ASTROWORLD
The Video Story Click Here

The woman had come up to his car and leaned in the window. It was still daylight but the sky was going from light blue to cerulean. Her breath smelled of peppermints and shit. Pete had had to pull his face away from hers. In the distance, cars scurried along the freeway like mice. But in the “Bottoms” winding through the narrow streets below the freeway, men crept in circles in their cars, eyeing the girls who strolled and mingled next to the ruins of abandoned shacks near the projects. Pete had made several circles looking. His eyes were silvery and catlike. A misty rain covered his windshield and his eyes started to burn. He stopped his car and dug into the glove compartment for his pills and the drops. He found the drops but not the pills. The drops would calm his eyes, but he needed the pills to calm the whining in his head. He squirted the drops in his eyes and sat trying to blink away the haze that was blotting out the sky. Then she was there, all teeth, shining through the haze looking at him. Sometimes it was eyes, teeth or a thin chain around a feminine neck that caught his attention.

See The Novel Exclusively on Amazon
Warning: Graphic Language

Is There Room For the Literary Writer on the eReader?

  

I was reading someone’s “how to” blog recently. The subject was of course how to be successful (meaning $$) as a writer. The crux of the advice was write what people want to read. Well what do people want to read? Paranormal? Romance? Murder Mystery? Erotica? Thrillers? Vampire Stories? Science Fiction? Urban Lit? Chick Lit? YA Lit? Literary Lit? Oh oh, what’s Literary Lit?

I consider myself a writer whose work touches many of the above genres, but not in their purest forms. I find myself amazed at what Smashwords and a few other retailers categorize as African American Literature. The online stores blaze with glaring covers of us holding guns and cradling a big booty chick under such monikers as “Revenge on a Cheater” or “Getting The Man Before I Get Got.” Well these titles may be facetious, but you get my drift. I even have a couple of stories that fall near that genre..Betty’s House and My Manhood is Very Important to Me. I like earthy language and sex like anyone else. I just hope someone finds a little more to bite into when they read my stories. I admit my short stories receive very little readership. Maybe it’s the genre. Full length books do a lot better.

However there is more to literature (African-American or so-called mainstream) than genre fiction. For us African American writers and readers and to the retailers, I ask where are our new Toni Morrisons, James Baldwins, Ralph Ellisons or Richard Wrights? Why isn’t the digital atmosphere being lit up with modern day Kerouacs and Allen Ginsbergs? How would Updike or William Styron fare? Is there room on the eReader for the literary writer? My guess is in these troubled times the only concern for Black Folk is our no good cheating better halves. And the the mainstream readers, it’s all about a suave vampire who lives in the kingdom of Yawnyore and shape shifts.

“Discovery” is a big catchphrase is “new era” (another catchphrase) of publishing. A good portion of writers have decided they are not going to wait until near death to be found by agents and publishers. They are taking their writing lives in their hands and going forward to kindle kingdom. Many genre writers are doing quite well: Amanda Hocking, E.L. James, Darcie Chan, Joe Konrath and the list can go on. But what if you’re the kind of writer who decides his/her vampire character should do more navel gazing (introspection) than neck biting? What if your description reads “Blood burst from his neck in splatters of ruby exclamations marks” rather than “red blood shot from his neck”? Do you stand a chance of being discovered?

There are many men adrift and homeless these days. But what? No modern day “Of Mice and Men?” Sure plenty men are doing women wrong. But don’t we want to delve deeper and find out why? I’m not sure how it happened, but somebody had to discover our literary greats. Well I do know there were a lot more “little magazines” back in the day. So there were more Editors to discover and give a platform to say a Charles Dickens or a Charles Bukowski. But how does a Charles Harvey get discovered? Excuse my self-indulgence for a moment. In the mid nineties I had an Agent to shop around my novel and in doing so she shopped around some short stories. The stories found a place in some anthologies and a popular literary publication called Story. Well the Agent is gone now and Story is no longer published. I’m out here winging it in the sea of vampires and damsels (strong willed of course) getting swept off their feet. Wish me luck on my upcoming novel, The Road to Astroworld. There’s a serial miscreant in it but no vampire. You can read a few excerpts on the blog. And don’t let the discussion end here. Feel free to refute and dispute and point to your own or someone else’s success as a literary writer.

 

Charles Harvey

Website

Cheeseburger (an award winning literary short)

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Kirby Bob Understands Heaven

Kirby Bob Understands Heaven

by

Charles Harvey

 

 

            “’Father, I stretch my hands to thee,’ George Louse said before he gave up the ghost.  Now he was a bad man—had chopped off people’s heads and disemboweled their insides.  He bashed in a few baby’s skulls.  But in that ‘lectric chair—him the rankest sinner knew how to call on Jesus.  Now you tellin’ me, Kirby Bob, little five year old Kirby Bob, who’s just startin’ out sinnin’-- little tiny sinnin’ of pullin’ his sister’s hair and throwin’ her doll in the mud, and climbin’ over the fence when I’ve told him not to-- you tellin’ me this little boy won’t say the prayer his poor tired Mother taught him so he can get into heaven and walk with Jesus? Is you an imp that’s growin’ a tail, Kirby Bob?”

             Kirby Bob had the thought to touch his backside to see if he was indeed growing a long hairy cat’s tail back there. But he saw something in Gretta’s wide legged hand on hips stance that made him think she would think he was being sassy. He shifted his bunny slippers and said, “No’m.”

            “Well why won’t you say your prayers, son?”

            “I’m scared to go to heaven, Mama.”

            “Scared to go to heaven? What you scared to go to heaven for, boy?”

            “Cause you always say that bad man, Meany George is going to be there.”

            “So? What that got to do with anything? “

             The wheels in Gretta’s head turned as she tried to understand the notion that was turning in Kirby Bob’s head.  Her son had a strange way of processing the world, Gretta thought.  This was a boy who arranged rocks, painted them, and pretended they were planets--who said he was just like his big sister Grace, just turned inside out. This was a boy who had stayed inside her womb all day Sunday and didn’t come out until the moon was full on Sunday night almost five years ago to the day.  It was Kirby Bob who survived unscathed except for a purple patch on his left cheek, after eating a handful of oleander petals.

            “What’s Mean George to heaven got to do with you?”

            “Mama I just don’t feel like getting my head chopped off.”

            “Do Jesus, boy, he ain’t going to be choppin no heads off in heaven. He prayed to the lord to forgive him before they ‘lectrocuted him and the lord done forgave him his sin and made him an angel.  Heaven is a good place to go.”

            “Heaven is too far away, Mama. It’s just too far away.”

            “Well Kirby Bob it is for some of us.” She cocked her head slightly and thought of her husband in Miss Mandy’s yard way across town raking up the leaves that fell off her chinaberry tree and singing. Gretta’s sister had called and pulled her coat. The leaves, dead branches, and sharp dried berries from Gretta’s chinaberry tree just blew all over the yard and stuck in Kirby Bob’s and Grace’s feet.  But did Herbert care about his son and daughter, Gretta asked herself?  Hell no. Kirby Bob’s and Grace’s life and soul was left up to her.

            “You better get on your knees right now, young man and start to prayin’ ‘else somebody’s birthday cake for tomorrow in my stove is goin’ to be burnt to a crisp.” Gretta said in a sweet way more to soothe herself.

            Kirby Bob prayed and scooted into bed. He laid there, eyes wide as little glass jars. He listened to the water running in the bathroom and afterward heard Gretta ease into her squeaky bed. Kirby Bob sneaked out into the night through the window next to his bed.  He looked at the full moon and raised his right hand above his head as if he was measuring the distance above him. He jumped up and down trying to lift himself off the leafy ground.  His favorite tree shimmied and a leaf fell at his feet. A notion came over Kirby Bob to climb up the tree and put the leaf back. He sneaked very quietly into his window and walked down the hall past Gretta’s room, and past Grace’s into the kitchen.  He tucked a roll of scotch tape under his pajama coat, walked past his cake looking like a large hat cooling in the center of the kitchen table, and went back outside.  He grabbed a low branch and swung himself up.  He climbed and climbed and climbed until he reached almost the top of the tree.  He taped the leaf to a branch that he thought had the fewest leaves.  He stayed there a moment looking up at the sky  thinking of heaven. He thought of the silky glowing angels in Gretta’s big white bible. He closed his eyes and saw them flitting around lambs, lions, and people rising up through the clouds toward a golden fence.  The angels had wings just like birds’.  He thought to himself, why climb down?  He had never seen an angel or a bird climb anywhere. He spread his arms.

 

 

            The next morning as the sun and the moon sat in the same neon blue sky, Gretta was in her kitchen making coffee for herself.  She looked out the window and fussed for a moment at the pile of rags lying at the base of the chinaberry tree. She knew Herbert wouldn’t do a thing about it. Would just move his head side to side like a snake’s as he made up a lie to get down to that woman’s house. As she strained her eyes a little more at the pile, something jumped in her heart and made her legs tremble.

          “Herbert, come here,” she called softly just before her blue linoleum floor like a big piece of heaven rose up to meet her.

Charles Harvey
Website
Amazon

Christmas in The Bottoms
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How Long to Write a Book

From a Recent Kindle Forum Post



How about 20 years? lol No It hsn't taken me that long to wriite The Road to Astroworld. What has taken a long time is getting to this stage of almost ready to send to a prof Editor. The book was written by hand in 1989 or so. I dealt with my Mother's illness from 1990 until 1992. In around '93 or '94 I went to a writer's conference in Austin and met an Agent who worked for Jean Naggar. She loved the novel and some of my other short stories. She shopped them around. She had modet success with the stories getting them into anthologies. She shopped Astroworld until she dropped (hence the term shop 'til you drop--no not really) But She did shop it around for four years until she exhausted all of her avenues. In the meantime I wasn't putting anything out saleable, so I lost her services. I put it away for while. I didn't know how to read the clues in the rejection letters. The clues didn't say the writing was horrible or mention grammar and spelling errors. The overriding theme was "we don't know how we can sell this, or it's not right for us." Let me also say that it made it to an Editor at a major house, but she couldn't convince "the committee." In the meantime liffe goes on. I get a huge case of writer's block. I don't want to go through the daunting process of getting another agent or shopping the novel around, So i forget it for spells. I take it out and decide it needs some major rewrites. I spend some time trying to make it all first person--bad idea. Forget it some more. So here we are in 2012. I've grown somewhat in my skill and see that the novel does need some major tweaking, but not a rewrite. Thanks to this new publishing era, I expect The Road to Astroworld to make it's debut in early 2013--if the Mayans are wrong.

Now thanks to NANOWRIMO one can write a novel in a month's time during the month of November. However unless you are a literary genius, what you will produce at best is a gibberishy 50,000 word outline that should take you a couple of months (at the very least) to polish into a decent novel. I've written two books using this intense method. Are they ready for prime time? Not one bit. But it focuses you to the task and you can say you wrote a novel.

Free Excerpt from Road to Astroworld
http://bit.ly/S1EVCe

Free Excerpt from The Butterfly Killer (Written during NANOWRIMO 2011)
http://bit.ly/RvqCFt

NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month)
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
Of course it's too late to start now unless you drink coffee by the gallons

Harvey on Amazon
Christmas in The Bottoms
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