Story edits and a new poem

My new sci-fi short story The Prototype is now on sale for $0.99. I went back and did another editing pass before putting it on sale to catch any last stray misspellings or other minor issues and also, there was one curse word I'd used four times that I'd decided to take out. So it's only in there once now. After all, my niece reads my work sometimes and she is very young, so I thought better of it and changed it.

I do not know what my new poetry collection will be called yet. It is still untitled but I have some poems in various stages of readiness. One in particular is nearly complete and I will share it here. This piece is copyrighted: All rights reserved.

The Trees of Lincoln Street

I remember the trees of Lincoln street.

Beneath their leaves I would sit.

A green isle of deep shade

on the merciless days of summer.

How grand they seemed

stretching from 4th to 1st avenue

like god-hands their branches were covering;

a refuge from a scorching sun.

But one day I came tripping by

and they'd all been chopped down.

Not even a mean stump remains.

Only rods, concrete and cones

and tracts of stinking mud.

No soft, green ivy underneath,

no place for the fluttering moths at night.

Nowhere at all to take in the breeze,

no place to sit and take one's ease.

The trees that were tall and great,

old and standing since forever,

they are gone with nothing left but dead land.

There is no shade from the heat on gray concrete,

which is why I no longer go down Lincoln street.

This poem was inspired by my experiences going down S.W. Lincoln St. in downtown Portland. I once hada white van and the engine blew a gasket so I had to walk to work in the mornings. This was when I had a schedule that required me to be at work before the buses were running. I would pass down Lincoln and see mice (and rats) running under this vast isle of trees down the middle of the street. There would also be moths that would flutter around these trees as well. During the summer, when I had to go back to work in the afternoons (I work split-shift) and the temperature would be in the 90's or hotter, those trees gave wonderful shade. I and many other people would sit on the benches near the isle and the trees were so big that they would shade the entire street on both sides from their isle in the middle of the street. Sometimes, walking down that stretch of Lincoln was like walking into a magical forested place; a different place. It really was magical. But progress demanded that they all be cut down. every last one. Progress, funny enough, demanded by the organization I work for - which shall remain nameless. But it really saddens me that progress and nature cannot seem to exist side by side.

Nature seems to always lose. In the short run, anyway.

New micro fiction!

Inspired by my old writings as a teenager, Grimm's Fairy Tales and JK Rowling's The Tale of the Three Brothers, I wrote my own fables, three of them. It's my latest story. It's now available on Smashwords, Scribd, Amazon and Feedbooks. I also have other titles available on Obooko and getfreebooks.com

Micro book of fables

Well, I've nearly finished a micro book of fables I've been working on for a few days. One I wrote when I was in high school. It was such a delight to find. It's called The Cowboy and the Pebbles. I dug it out of an old chest. The other two I wrote this week, inspired by that first one, Grimm's fairy tales, which I've been thinking on quite a bit because of my book series and by J.K.Rowling's fable The Tale of the Three Brothers.

All I need to do now is finish the book cover.

Update: You can download 3Fables, my micro-book of fairy tales and fables, for free, from Feedbooks, here.

See what I did there? hehe. . .