RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Downtown Treblinka”

Downtown Treblinka

Hemmed into hamlets by awesome tower guard posts

The weary and beaten stagger into marbled Calcuttian black holes

To be transported up the gleaming shafts to prosperous futility

Only marred by the unhappily assimilated

Stomped over through the lack of humanity

Lined up against the wall of self enforced humility

Or

Cutthroat bestiality

Experimented on by cleaver human resources wizards

Soothed by the taxed juices and coloured flashes

That numb

Bringing “round the clock relief”

To voluntary prisoners

And the arthritic strickened

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: Oceans are the Key to it All (Herman Melville)

“And still deeper the meaning of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.

RKS Literature: All the Difference Between Paying and Being Paid (Herman Melville)

“And I always go to the sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid-what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851.

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds):”Personalized Rubrics only after”

Personalized Rubrics only after

Initially a friendly glance

But in the early morning you can never tell

But there’s more

As the steel rips through your soft belly

Mocking Thanatos

Has conquered Eros

Who

Weeps

In the silence

Of red flashes

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Misogynist Night at the Disco 1976”

Misogynist Night at the Disco 1976

So much Rod Stewart recovering from Jeff Beck shame

You I see

Mascaraed

Glossy pink lipped

Silver spooned

Corvetted

Deodorized

Sanitized

Mindless at least you’ve inspired a thought

Based on your unattainability

You piece of

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: The Temporary Joy of a Successful Operation (Yury Felsen)

“I was recuperating after a successful operation. The joy, such that convalescents experience was long gone and had given way to neurotic boredom of interminable waiting. Those who are often ill know this impatient reckoning of days and hours, the alarm if the time of discharge is again discharged, the irritability brought on by the slightest inconvenience, the distrust of doctors, who seem to want only to cash in.”

Yury Felsen, “A Miracle”, 1934.

RKS Literature: Post Morphine Blues (Yury Felsen)

“I would awake towards morning (already prepared for the requital) with the anguish of an unhabituated drunkard emerging from inebriation, but tenfold and irremediable. A fierce cold penetrated my body, no matter how warmly I enswathed myself. The pain would return, fortified by bitter comparison-just moments ago I had dropped off so serenely. The day ahead seemed enormous, that vespertine joy almost unattainable, and yet those long diurnal hours were spent in sheer enervate anticipation of the evening. So as to deceive time, to foreshorten it, again and again I would take to counting up to a thousand, call to mind verses from memory, but found it impossible to attain peace.”

Yury Felsen, “A Miracle”, 1934.

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.