john bennett | let it all fall away

Let It All Fall Away

Surreal is an overlay. Sir Lancelot is a curly-haired lady’s man. Surly will surely lead to confrontation. Shirley Temple is an emotional wreck. Surcease is dirt on the coffin. Let’s all hold hands and sing Dylan songs to show those tanks we mean business. To surrender is to skim off the top. It’s lonely up here on this ten-storey ledge.

Down on the street a cross-section of what we’re made of. The ones shouting jump, the woman with tears in her eyes, the hipster on his smart phone, the shifty-eyed pickpocket. The cabbies pulled to the curb, sensing fares. The firemen and the cops, the popcorn vendor and the shrink. From up here they all look the same.

The shrink is finishing his Starbuck’s latte before he takes the elevator up to talk with me. He scans the note I left. “Hmmm,” he says. He’s looking for egress into my state-of-mind. He jots words down on a pad: surreal, confrontation, emotional wreck, tanks, skim off the top. He thinks he sees where I’m coming from, crushes his empty latte cup and drops it to the ground.

A plain clothesman escorts the shrink to the building’s entrance. A stray dog runs after them, barking. A cop steps up and whacks the dog with his club. The dog yelps and runs back into the crowd. The crowd laughs–comic relief.

They enter the building.

The window I stepped out of is still open behind me. The office door to the hallway is open. I wait until I hear the elevator ding, and then I close my eyes, spread my arms, and let it all fall away.

click the Hcolom Press logo to visit the web page...HCOLOM PRESS is the heir to Vagabond Press, which began as a main player in the Mimeo Revolution of the Sixties and continued publishing right into the jaws of the new millennium. HCOLOM PRESS embodies the spirit of Vagabond Press, retooled for the times we live in.

Hcolom is Moloch spelled backwards. Moloch is an Old Testament deity to which children were sacrificed, a practice society still engages in with increased enthusiasm. Consumerism is the new Moloch, manifesting itself like cancer in war, politics, the arts and religion, in every nook and cranny of human endeavor, draining the intrinsic beauty out of life and mutilating the innocence and magic of childhood with its commercial meat hook. HCOLOM PRESS intends to publish books that by their nature repudiate this pernicious force–novels, poetry, children’s books and books that transcend genre.

Our launch book, in June of 2006, was John Bennett’s novel, Tire Grabbers, a fable of sorts, a reality book rooted in the fantasy of our times, the story of the coming of Moloch and the children who rise up in rebellion against it.

Books of kindred spirit will follow close on its heels. Go for it by clicking here… or hit the Hcolom logo above… or just hit any of the following covers…

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