Seraphemera Books is excited and exhilarated to start off 2012 with:
Tad Caldwell and the Monster Kid
Written by Kurt Amacker Illustrated by Karl Slominski
The year is 1989, and Nathan and friends are having another night sitting around throwing old horror movies into the VCR. Except this VHS tape, is different. With no label and no title, the grainy video looks like one more no-budget shocker--a wannabe snuff flick shot on video and sold on the black market. But, Nathan realizes the tape may be more real than he thought, when he sees himself yelling out a name...
“Tad Caldwell!”
Determined to understand the horrifying video, Nathan learns that Tad Caldwell is an elderly science-fiction writer whose son disappeared 20 years earlier under mysterious circumstances. For two decades, Caldwell has claimed that a UFO took the boy in exchange for knowledge of their forbidden science. He poured what he learned into his final book--a cult bible of extraterrestrial lore called The First Revelation.
Nathan searches for the reclusive Tad Caldwell, learning along the way that the truth often has many sides...
That there may be more to Tad Caldwell than a man who believes his fiction is science... And, that the tales about Tad Caldwell aren’t even close to telling the entire story.
***
Kurt Amacker is also the author of Immortal:60 and Dead Souls - about which Alan Moore proclaimed, “Even with Eastern European heavy- hitters Vlad Tepes, and Erzsebet Bathory as the deathless vigilantes of the title, the main character that emerges through this narrative is that of New Orleans herself - a Gothic beauty who moves to the rhythms of trad jazz, wearing her bruises and bereavements, her steamy history, and her wild voodoo nights with pride, with passion. A fascinating debut that delivers much and promises a great deal more.”
Somewhere there’s a lawn that is begging for bare toes to sprinkle diamonds across the earth, cascading down from the tall grass-tops of ant redwood forests. That somewhere is the front lawn, while the rest of the world is still hovering in dreaming, stumbling over coffee, seeking the warmth of the night before.
Yet, out here, before the sun has properly risen, and headlights still wink at us, and streetlamps still flicker with a bzzap and a nod before taking their leave of the day to get their slumber (or go wherever the spirits of the light-trees go when their work has been called away for the day) there is a hum that can be heard - not of the click-brr-roar of the air conditioners, not the click-whrr-grrrr of the garage doors opening their giant maw and burping out all of the cubicle workers, not the clack-whomp-braaahhhh of the garbage trucks clearing away the discarded remnants of an overly-consuming and weighty life...but of the something going on, the somewhere, the here and now, the what is to come, the hustle and bustle dissipating behind a curtain that reveals that there is, in the distance, a reachable destination. The journey? Sometimes needs to be all but over - for at the destination, where we can all meet, is calling us loudly to plan a course (of course) of action.
or so they do tell a they not yet met a they that would bring out a worst in me that does not need to be brought forth
turned over and around - (as if being spun will dizzy me!) we stumble (our best impression of drunk from all that we have seen drunk for we have never been ourselves)
yet, lean close a secret when you spin when they spin you when you are being spun... focus on the same spot in the distance a wall a door a bird sitting as your guide through each revolution your head remains clear brain fooled into believing stillness reigns inside
they will tire their arms, legs, weary (for you have not fallen) it will be for them to recover breathing heavy worn down to the nub for you, nothing but long ago, in bliss
and when it ceases when the spinning is no more you might even raise arms in triumph - you have been spun right round (baby) like a record? yet you walk away without trouble an arrow home...
when shadow and light do fight it is only due to the ignorance of shadow for without light there can be no shadow.
thus...
while i love the dark i will never tell its story. there are plenty who will. we are here, to tell the story of light
from the moment we're named
swaddled in parchment
spine (still) uncracked
no watermark in our veins
sheathed to the before come after
signed and wax sealed on each numbered volume
designed and concealed on each numbered page
until our last steps reveal
the texture with which the cover is bound
and its dark face, engraved
of our lifeline...but this, seems all that is destined to remain
no more than ephemeral passengers in the public domain
the faces of a family for what it is worth
when nobody remembers the joy or the shame
or rather everybody who would have...
...touched their hand
...tasted their lips
...exchanged words
...fought for dinner
...laughed with abandon...
...is dead
now but unnoticed and unpaginated history
untried and unmarked nostalgia
buried in deep from the unrecoverable days
so...when the valuables are divided
the possessions sold to
the auction house
the antique dealers
the junk peddlers
everything doled
the trail goes cold
yet, on this occasion they wind up in these hands
to be remixed and retold
without thought
(and this is where we must be bold)
of whether or not
these pages
will once more
be proffered into gold
yet, on this occasion
one glance
one unwitting pose
one gentle moment
burns into an empty frame
hung on the skeletal walls
that guard the caves of the mind
caverns of the brain
protecting all that we are
from the voice of another writer
the vision of another poet
the poison of an informational age
we begin in lust
em-dashes to pixel dust
from the moment we're given our recycled name
until passing into our paper-lined grave
the fur has been removed from the runway and it has grown fashionable to go cold
in stories, angels do not always succeed in tales, villains seem to win in moments, we expect better moments to follow without discipline, or dedication, or desire
is this the story-line that has been written passed down from door to door (generation to generation) all foreshadow of hope to be false all allusion to a better day an illusion the predestined and preordained coming of a saviour a delusion which precludes the fact that nothing will dam the deluge of devils (the anti-diluvean antichrists, eh?)
thus murder is a way of living and theft is a way of life and blindness is self-induced so as to ignore the fact all creatures rely on the same resources as you...
...and so you ask what keeps this pen flowing the sword-sharp tongue training for battle darkness hiding the pleading for understanding
why we, who are not religious keep burning the flame of angels who may or may not exist in the form my mind dreams
the answer is simple - that there must be lineage of hope in this world and unbroken line that may wind to infinitely fine but is woven from the twine of something well beyond the convergences of time, life, and mind and thus is stronger than any blade you can find
if all it took to heal the world were a touch of your hand would you absolve your enemies and grant them peace?
we are the bearers of the last threads of purest hope
waiting for a finishing before replying hearing as much in collisions of silences as utterances escaping lips one might make a life from bathing in these sacred moments held together and torn asunder by the motions of voices with nothing to say
yet there are places still further from here down beneath the depths we reach as youth as if tumbling out the other sigh of the sky landing upon the untouched beaches of sand and glass left waiting for those jaded by thoughts of time and remarkable dreams (from schoolroom textbook fiction fantasy - social studies)
there are few who walk these ramparts those unwilling to swim waters so charted and crowded and chowdered with the upstream violence of life prefer to me the forced motion of stoic agony of glorious struggle toward death
that these visions that do partake the mind as last gasp heresies are safe behind trembling eyes as there is not enough left breath to speak them is a fallacy
yet this, too, will fall shallow in moments of cold where warmth of familiar breath meets air creating words which take form while silences dance distant disappearing stars halfway, already on their way, to someplace entirely new
when truth is close so close too close to feel anywhere but inside and the violence of alternating sound and silence is heard in this forgotten song our heresies meet in the shadow drawn by sight and right and might and fight light and causeless night while undisturbed bright colors cascading down a mountainside of clouds in an early morning remind of campground awakenings nothing more cozy than a sweatshirt and some hot chocolate the million miles from home illusion with but a couple hours left to live and then, must succumb, to the sunshine worshiped by so many yet just a touch too late to keep Ra alive in a state of mind where god-like happenings are still be an option instead of the mythology status that has reduced him to tears
here, we serve, in small glasses with ch(i)ant(i)s a purification ritual mixed, with the blood of a time that stands timeless, unbound and naked calls out to be called to by the few who understand not to betray all it is they seek for the sake of ease but seek to say that for all they have sought and all things discovered still more remains to be seen
out somewhen on a highway in an era throughout which communication crosses were the norm milestones were just that: of stone graves to the places alive only to be passed through dying as the big cities renamed and realigned with the golden stars
in travel time flickers past and present linear motion ceases to run waterfall and what is shoehorned into a year of life breathes with release in the scribblings of a day or two as if even when following the serving suggestions of seventy miles an hour the arteries of america are launching pads to the infinity of relativity
some of what is spoke be illusion in the debate that the day has not ended until to bed on pillow rest head midnight the delineation to those spun on the hands of time - to the wanderer even the sun willingly holds off for momentaries when nightfall continuation is requested with the proper authority
this is the only magic realism conjurable here in the western lands when satellites transpose roads and global positioning systems (while poetic in name) keep us too encased in found and afraid of the consequence of lost
if this is true, then our collective cartography is to draw a map to the hidden places where mystery remains not shrouded as such but to landmark the places where possibility still stretches its wings and breathes a distilling fire even if only to remind us that the sun sets in the west and time need not be any more accurate than even an untrained eye toward the sky might portend
this too shall we do: transpose what we see into a key of modernity without nostalgic grace for the era that has long passed but add a flourish of fantasy in the choired harmony of how each of us sees the changing of the landscape from that which is held on to for so long it is only at death that change may do us part from the past
there isn’t all that much to learn about me - i have not divested my portfolio of interests so if i am to change my mind there is a goodbye which must be made with the past and a change made for the future.
what is present is just a present from someone else, wrapped up in the papers that will only be recycled and have been so before -
i am dealing only in grams of presence a substance that keeps you coming back only to yourself for more.
this high is one that keeps going up as long as you wish it to.
this high is not dealer dependant.
this high is not for profit
although it is from the land of a prophet, once tired, having rested, regains wings.
beamed across the planet in flick-instants that do nothing but spawn debate and distract those with illusory desire into believing their belief will advance a cause
was there ever a utopia when what was not truth would combust the pages before they reached binding the ink held fast and would not print the sheepskin enough life remaining to close the pores so that no receipt of the deceit of man could carry forth after the liar had passed from the earth and their students found someone new to follow
in an age when nothing is to be believed not even our eyes what is it then that can determine where to place our faith
(a momentary aside turning forth from soliloquy and breaking through the fourth wall - in a rare occasion of definition it seems necessary to make clear that faith requires neither religion or divinity for validity)
fallen icons you who have served so well and guided the voices of countries through eruptions of murder we do not hold you in disdain for your meanings for although we do not agree we believe that what you spoke was only meant for quiet corners inner sanctums tiny populations that would not grow to raze the earth
thus to you expired icons we lift a glass drink and keep your lifelines burning slowly weakly so that you may feel the pain not only of those dying by your extended hand but that which comes from the bastardization of your body and blood
there, the car parked humming to a well-deserved halt we stepped out of the vehicle closed the doors removed our hats left the shoes behind and began to talk in the reverenced silences that only one temple might ever deserve
with no doubt this was the building that will touch neither sky nor molten core but a point on the horizon that dissipates into the doorway the soft places the borderlands between and amongst and amidst all spaces
these are the fields where we are allowed to walk as the angels walk where the guardians of that which is divine may let down their guard and reminisce of the joy that led them to the palace of protection millenia ago
these are the fields where we are allowed to walk as the angels walk not as with feet just above the earth but with toes in the grass slivers of heaven that bleed across the earth with nothing but a desire to feel
here if one listens the song that reverberates in the key of an individual echo can be gleaned from the limestone that catches all tunes and holds them storehouse for moments such as these
had we driven from the archipelago sunrises of Severnaya Zemlya to the penguin rookeries of the Bay of Whales we might not have reached this doorway yet here in our own backyard was the gateway to another way of thinking all together
it is here in this field that if we are well-timed destiny (not one's own but that of the universe) will turn face toward us look us in the eye and, pausing for a moment open up a doorway that we have but milliseconds to stick in a foot and block from closing take up the robes of retiring seraphim and learn the recipe for turning fire and wings into fiery wings
these are the fields where we are allowed to walk as the angels walk and breathe as the stone breathes in rhythm in conjugal lung in the synthesis of anti-diluvean and undisturbed with mechanistic and unlearned
