The July Special Guest is Joe R. Lansdale

Please feel free to visit Joe at: http://www.joerlansdale.com/

OUT THERE IN THE DESERT

Out there in the desert,
lost,
you think you see,
far on the horizon,
a dark hut.
It hangs there,
on a ridge,
like a black cancer
seated on sand-yellow flesh.
And beside it,
a pool of water,
blue and clear,
and clean looking,
but as you near,
you see,
clearly now,
there is no water,
but instead a mirage.
The hut,
that’s real,
until you startle it,
and it breaks apart,
takes flight
on many vulture wings,
rises high in the sky,
leaving the remains
of a large horse,
mostly bones,
and a withered head,
without eyes,
to lie there,
hot and bleached,
like you’ll soon be,
beneath the yellow sun,
without complaint,
on burning sands,
a smorgasbord
for ugly birds.

SOCK PUPPET

I had a sock puppet,
his name was Jim,
and he called me names,
because I jacked off in him.

LATE AT NIGHT

I heard them late at night,
my next door neighbor
and his dates,
banging against the head board
and the wall,
screaming with pleasure,
and I envied them,
until they found
bones,
and lots of skulls,
buried shallow,
in the flower beds,
in his back yard.

MY HAT

Who has my hat?
I want it back.
My head is in it.

TOMBSTONES

Tombstones are not pillows,
but they smother faces,
already dead,
down in the dirt,
buried in white satin,
or one of those suits
with the back gone,
and your ass hanging out,
but no one smart
wants to dig you up to see
that withered part
of what used to be.

BLOOD WILL WASH

Blood will wash down the drain,
but sometimes if you’re not careful,
it will leave a tell-tale stain,
and then the cops will come,
and they’ll get some of
that DNA stuff.
No way that’s good,
because then,
they’ll find the bone saw,
and the acid,
and the hammer,
and the wood chipper,
all in the basement,
all too clean with alcohol
and bleach,
and an eyeball that rolled under a bench,
and those dirty magazines you collect
along with posed photos
of naked ventriloquist puppets.

Joe R. Lansdale is the multi-award winning author of thirty novels and over two hundred short stories, articles and essays. He has written screenplays, teleplays, comic book scripts, and occasionally teaches creative writing and screenplay writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. He has received The Edgar Award, The Grinzani Prize for Literature, seven Bram Stoker Awards, and many others.

His stories Bubba Ho-Tep and Incident On and Off a Mountain Road were both filmed. He is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan, and has been in the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame four times. He lives in East Texas with his wife, Karen.

Visit Joe R. Lansdale HERE.

See all of Joe R. Lansdale's books HERE.

EDGE OF DARK WATER: May Lynn was once a pretty girl who dreamed of becoming a Hollywood star. Now she's dead, her body dredged up from the Sabine River. Sue Ellen, a strong-willed sixteen-year-old yearning for something greater than what she's been given, decides to take May Lynn's ashes to Tinsel Town and place them on her favorite actor's grave. It's the least Sue and her friends can do for May Lynn. But first, they have to figure out how to get there.

ALL THE EARTH, THROWN TO THE SKY: Jack Catcher's parents are dead—his mom died of sickness and his dad of a broken heart—and he has to get out of Oklahoma, where dust storms have killed everything green, hopeful, or alive. When former classmate Jane and her little brother Tony show up in his yard with plans to steal a dead neighbor's car and make a break for Texas, Jack doesn't need much convincing. But a run-in with one of the era's most notorious gangsters puts a crimp in Jane's plan, and soon the three kids are hitching the rails among hoboes, gangsters, and con men, racing to warn a carnival wrestler turned bank robber of the danger he faces and, in the process, find a new home for themselves. This road trip adventure from the legendary Joe R. Lansdale is a thrilling and colorful ride through Depression-era America.

DEVIL RED: In Lansdale's rollicking eighth Hap and Leonard novel (after Vanilla Ride), the East Texas crime-fighting duo, Hap Collins (white and straight) and his partner, Leonard Pine (black and gay), look into a two-year-old unsolved murder.