RKS Literature: The Initial Bliss and Joy of Morphine (Yury Felsen)

“After my own operation I had experienced unremitting, unbearable pain, and over the course of ten days, every evening before sleep, that same Margarita would inject me with morphine. I cannot recall another so blissful and happy state that could compare with what you begin to feel several minutes after the injection. Somewhere inside there slowly spreads a sweet warmth, your head is enveloped by a clairvoyant drowsiness, pain seems to dissolve, and purposely you try not to fall asleep, so that inimitable condition might endure without end.”

Yury Felsen, “A Miracle”, 1934.

RKS 2026 BRITISH COLUMBIA WINES: Mission Hill 2022 Reserve Merlot

When Canadian provinces vint wine Ontario and British Columbia rule the roost.

Aged 15 months in French oak.

In this case from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, we sample a Mission Hill 2022 Reserve Merlot.

Aroma: A lush, plush and floozish wine. Lazy and sultry on the nose. Plummy. Creaminess strongly suggestive. Blackberry, cassis with secondary notes of cedar, black cherry and dates.

Palate: Grippy and a bit brackish which gently “smooths out”. Restrained acidity. Blueberry, cherry liqueur with some date square and tar. Mile long finish.

Personality: A bit of Daniel Webster a bit a bit of the devil. Don’t be completely “taken in” by a lazy nose. The wine has strength and fortitude like Canadians struggling against “no more war Trump”.

Food Match: Langoustines a la Bursara.

Movie Pairing: “The Fortune Cookie”. Walter Mathau as a bumbling Whiplash Willy is more formidable than his moniker may suggest.

Cellarbility: Drinking fine now and has until 2029 to maintain its profile.

Price: $33 CDN.

RKS 2026 BRITISH COLUMBIA WINES Rating: 91/100, Sara D’Amato Wine Align 91.

(Mission Hill Family Estate 2022 Reserve Merlot, VQA Okanagan Valley, Mission Hill Family Estate, Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, 750 mL, 14.5%).

RKS Literature: After a Southern Lynching How Does Mike the Mob Participant Feel? Part 2 (John Steinbeck)

“He walked around the side of his house and went in the back door. His thin petulant wife was sitting by the open gas oven warming herself. She turned complaining eyes on Mike where he stood in the doorway.

Then her eyes widened and hung on his face. ‘You been with a woman,’ she said hoarsely. ‘What woman you been with?’

Mike laughed, ‘you think you’re pretty slick, don’t you. You’re a slick one, ain’t you? What makes you think I been with a woman?’…..

‘Was it the nigger?’ she asked “Did they get the nigger? Everybody said they was going to.”

‘Find out for yourself if you’re so slick. I ain’t going to tell you nothing.’

He walked through the kitchen and went into the bathroom. A little mirror hung on the wall. Mike took off his cap and looked at his face. ‘By God, she’s right,’ he thought. ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’

John Steinbeck, “The Vigilante”,1938.

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “The Empty Ballad”

The Empty Ballad

Basking in the spotlight

An angel

Feeling so proud and omnipotent

Throngs surround

Shout for more

Critics rave

Only Time knows realistic nothingness

Words of a passing era

Face on an album cover

Actually, they hate as nothing like they ever will be

A star reality crushes their dreams

The lyrics their fantasy

Nothingness

But for one moment they believe

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: After a Southern Lynching How Does Mike the Mob Participant Feel? Part 1 (John Steinbeck)

“Mike shied away from the contact. ‘It don’t make you feel nothing.’ He put down his head and increased his pace The little bartender had nearly to trot to keep up. The street lights were fewer. It was darker and safer. Mike burst out, “Makes you feel kind of cut off and tired, but kind of satisfied, too. Like you done a good job-but tired and kind of sleepy.”

John Steinbeck, “The Vigilante”,1938.

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Mother T Go Home (Tropical Bunga in Reverse)”

Mother T Go Home (Tropical Bunga in Reverse)

Necessary victims of the freeze dried

The white ice of deadly progress

No harpoon redress

Trust only hastened the inevitable

Amongst mineral rights and the Sovereign

And commercial Arctic Ventures

Spouted from dollared dentures

Accompanied by expanding markets

Fishing guidelines for the sub 49er’s

Searching for char

Presents of sealskin dolls

Fabricated at venerealized encampments

Foistered by fiats of ministerial hacks

White sympathy

Tempered by budget allocations

Remainders from ministerial vacations

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Job Interview”

Job Interview

Yelps and barks of circus seals

Tenuously balancing sparkling balls

Adequately

But

Not dangerously ostentatious

Don’t ruffle the placid master

Your audience

But then don’t underplay

Even though

Regulations and conventions dictate a certain humility

Statutory interpretation on the trapeze act

The tumble can be wicked

Return to delaying promises and options prudently promised

Optionally false for the survival of the dream bureaucracy depends on that illusion

And the salaries of the wizards and silver haired corporate beggars

Rattle tin cups against the rages of the market

Discretely of course

The pounding on the door louder of nespotitcless victims

Who contemplate the tragedy thought personal

Yet almost universal

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: That Oft Used Parental Expression “When I’m Dead….” (Georges Simenon)

“This was the first time since I’d been with you in the room where you were slowly dying that you spoke, even indirectly, of death. When I was a child and then a young man, you often spoke of it, I’d almost say with satisfaction. ‘ When I’m dead children…..’ Or: ‘You’ll understand when I’m gone……”

But that was more than fifty years ago. Now that death is lurking in your room, so as to speak, you don’t say a word about it. You don’t seem to fear it. I imagine that you accept it and that sometimes you’re even a little impatient to find it so slow in coming.”

Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970.

RKS Literature: What Else Could it be But Hatred? (Georges Simenon)

“When I speak of hatred, I’m not exaggerating. True, I wasn’t there. But when a husband and wife living under the same roof get to the point where each does his own cooking, each keeping his provisions in his own locked food cupboard, and one waits for the other to vacate the kitchen before getting his own dinner, what other explanation is there?”

Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970.

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds):”Casino COVID”

Casino COVID

Caught in slot machine blur

Praying for the jackpot of herd immunity

Big Pharma legislated impunity

The three cherries of hurriedly tested vaccine untested for the long term

Could be worse than the germ!

RNA concoctions messing with our genes

Holy shit where are the simpler days of captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans?

Displaced by the politico-medico teams

Opening, closing, duplicating and replicating surges and waves

Killing and maiming more?

Similar to an infected whore

Misjudged again and again

Ruining the economy and the health of all

Crazy focus on a virus but in a casino you know who always wins?

The house

Robert K. Stephen