Tuesday, April 28th, 2009...10:21 am

john dorsey & s.a. griffin | the dead zone trilogy by todd moore

I’ve heard

it said that the body is mainly comprised of water. I’d add to that hopes, dreams, tears, and a masculine and feminine energy so ingrained that it’s what we might refer to as spirit, whisper as a constitution of muted American daydreams, silenced by the light of morning in a corporate reality, all this is what you’ll find in the writing of Todd Moore.

Make no mistake about it, Todd Moore is the real outlaw poet of our day, his pen dipped in gunslinger magic; happy big time Valentine’s baby. First time I ever laid my eyes on Todd’s Dillinger material, it ripped my lid off – still does, that’s why he got his very own section in the Outlaw Bible, his shit killed. I had never experienced anything like it before or since. After reading “Dead Zone” on the heels of several other pieces of this epic, it is apparent that Todd was born under the sign of a smoking gun and has latched on to some streaking star from a yet to be discovered universe.

For readers not familiar with Moore’s work, for years he has received the poem, the novel, the word, through the lips of 1930’s bank robber/desperado John Dillinger. Searching for his face on the silver screen, through sex, love, death, fear, fame, wisdom. . .by becoming your mother, your brother, your sister, and turning all of them into myth, a bloodbath, a tribal love-dance, by parting the Red Sea boiling over inside and out of our culture, inside the collective human mind, bleeding in our dark places unburied by the shadow of experience.

Channeling Dillinger since 1973, Moore’s outlaw opus has generated somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million words. His dreamlike fantasy becomes machine guns in the hands of automatic killer language, a flickering black & white noir shot full of good old American myth. Todd shoots the characters onto the pages with the story, as Dillinger supplies the blood. & just like one of the bank robber’s blondes that sheds her skin and sticks her tits out like six shooters in the darkened movie theatre, Dillinger won’t let the reader go.

Todd has been heralded by some, ignored by too many and yet to be experienced by the rest. His Dillinger fits right into the western canon of poetic legend established by the late, great original master gunslinger of verse, Ed Dorn. Todd Moore’s Homeric outlaw odyssey is that of our present cultural flux and collective nightmare translated from the not so distant Tommy gun G Man past into the phallic explosion of a corporate gangsta pop present, blood & sand baby, are ya with me dawg?

The words inside of “The Dead Zone Trilogy” are blessings, keepsakes, chapters of saga greater than Mario Puzo’s most violent wet dream. Is Moore writing a poem, or simply channeling the oral tradition of a dead language soaked in blood and cum stained love-letters to a greater truth, the pulse of the mind, a nation made internal?

Hell, I can’t tell. I don’t care really. I don’t know what’s real, “or is that johnnie?”, that’s a good question. This book rattled my cage. Lawrence’s flesh became mine, became the other, whispered the meaning of bullets to monsters, in a pre-Dorothy era outlaw America that was never Kansas, that will leave your head spinning, dizzy, afraid to go outside, afraid to be locked inside, afraid of the hitting, silenced by strong words to find the meaning of our song, we all share it. Pick up this book anywhere you can find it, come sing for your dreams, before their motives are flooded in darkness, Todd will take a bullet for you, in fact he’s been taking them for yrs, his name, your name, our name America . . . Dillinger!

John Dorsey & S.A. Griffin

THE DEAD ZONE TRILOGY by Todd Moore, St. Vitus Dance Press, 2005.