Selected Work by Wayne Crawford SUGAR TRAIL Released September 2007 Cost: $14.00 (includes shipping) by check, payable to Wayne Crawford 3710 Shalem Colony Trail, Las Cruces, NM 88007 To Order SUGAR TRAIL with a credit card, click below. Cost is $14.00 U.S. dollars including tax and shipping. You can pay by Paypal, or Visa, or Mastercard through Paypal. About Sugar Trail-- "Absolutely Beautiful," "Recommend Very Strongly," "It's Gorgeous" --Monica Gomez, host of "State of the Arts," KTEP (NPR-affiliate, El Paso, Texas). "Sugar Trail is three books in one. . . leaves deep furrows in our imagination . . .leads to renewal."--Joe Speer, Editor, Beatlick News: A Poetry and Arts Newsletter. Jenny Kander reads Wayne Crawford's prose poetryfrom Sugar Trail, Tuesday, Dec 18, 2007, five-min, part of The Poets Wave, WFIU --The Poets Weave is a weekly five-minute program of poetry reading produced at WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, hosted by Kander. Jenny Kender Reads Wayne Crawford Following is a video made by SoulVerse as part of New Mexico State University students' "Open Room" open mic series, 2007-08. .. About Wayne Crawford's Poetry and Performance "Glory to the new-born king" An excellent masterpiece if i do say so ...10k poets editor,Glen Still, 9/23/08 Ahhh got me... love your work. Christian, Sep 21, 2008 Ref: "America, He"-that's raw, & refreshing, Allen, Sep 14,08 I very much love "dancing at the totem" for the combination between music and poetry ..poetmaa(Jamendo) review of Roswell Incident Good, I like much this manner of composing, and for "dance at the totem," the voice is suave, pleasant, the flute which accompanies tres well as well as the voices which follow. Lionel Morello, France, 3/17/08 "Dahling"--Dahling, was selected to appear in the Windy City Times Pride Literary Supplement. "Response this year was greater than ever, and ultimately we were only able to select twelve pieces of out of hundreds, so I highly encourage you to feel especially satisfied with your accomplishment, including all of the requisite strutting of your stuff.[6/07, Ed. note]. I really love your poem "The Burning Man". It is so sublime... Mr. Rene Bautista Ruiz (translator). The Corner of Clark & Kent is the best poem I've ever read, Michael Ford. I really enjoy the Dancing at the Totem cut you and Randy created. You have a good reading/chanting voice that fits well with the beautiful rhythms. I hope you two have more such collaborations in the future. Louis Ocepek, June 15 08. Wayne, Totally blown away by your reading last night. Nadine Lockhart, July16. 08. OASIS BOUND Released March 2009 Cost: $13.00 (includes shipping in the U.S. only) by check, payable to Wayne Crawford 3710 Shalem Colony Trail, Las Cruces, NM 88007 To Order OASIS BOUND with a credit card, Click on CDBABY below. Carl Jung Interprets Dreams Carl Jung came over last night to interpret my dreams. Gondoliers of Henry James sleep in my bedroom. A stained glass crucifix hangs on the wall above my bed. Initially, he was interested in the crucifix, wanted to know why I had selected stained-glass, if I had purchased it in Venice, was it the highest quality, why had I chosen a cross without the figure of a man-god stained within its leaded profile? I answered, you enjoy stained-glass, don't you? Don't you agree that Venice is a very beautiful city? Is not Venetian glass among the highest quality produced anywhere? Eventually he became more interested in the gondoliers than the crucifix, then more interested in the gondoliers than me, asked them if they had worked out in a gym before they became gondoliers, if they were required to learn Italian arias in order to operate a gondola, did they consider themselves neo-romantics or anti-foundationalists? He wanted them to take off their pajamas so he could inspect them further, but they refused. They were not figments of his imagination. They were fragments of mine, my desire to have someone steer me across the unknown water, sing to me in a voice I could follow through the Grand Canal. Produced by Bruce Holsapple, Wayne Crawford Reads, includes 17 original poems on one CD. Cost is $8.00 including shipping in the U.S. only. Some favorites include The Corner of Clark and Kent, The Triumphs of Motion, You Wrote the Book of Love, Flowering Judas, and Lawsuit Against Superman. Aftermath There has never been a Department of Creativity, Secretary of the Arts, a Narrative Surgeon General. Never an empire dedicated to peace, a nation unified by love. We've always lived in the After: After the Department of Defense. After war budgets. After war. After the most powerful governments of the day become the most prolific arms dealers of their time. II. A steel door is a trick: A litter of Golden Retrievers, eyes bright, tails wagging, scamper out. A raised deck, plain-surfaced except for a half-dozen embedded shower heads, a trap. I'm watching a "Special Report" on chemical warfare. These pups breathe the spray: tails stiffen, faces sink, bodies tremble, one leg and then another collapses. Bewilderment glazes their eyes during their thirty seconds before death. We could be next. The single-engine dustcropper we see through our kitchen window circles low over our homes at 7:00 a.m. We could be dead before the eight o'clock news. Or we could sit on our east-facing patio while morning warms us, our coffee steams, and our creamy Danish sugars our appetite for another day. III. Our current leaders approve so large a war budget, they threaten to bleed dry domestic programs that pump our economy with human resources. Maybe: They are drawing up a list of our first born, our most famous, our intellectual leaders, scientists. They already ban poets from the White House unless they promise to speak well of the president's policies, or say nothing at all. I read that we are enemies of their holy war--their war against us, whose lives are less valued than oil fields, landfills, the quarter acre on a nowhere cul de sac to be developed by a sleezy investor, who will, like strip miners of the past, turn land into dead holes, leave a mess no one can redeem, and move on, pockets full of paper on which is printed, "In God We Trust." Of course, we know their God is green. Our leaders say, there are no innocents among us. We are with them or we are wrong and must be silent. The only true patriot is a capitalist investor. Poverty is sin. IV. The carpenter aims his magnetic tool at a plaster wall to locate its studs. I wish it were that easy for archeologists to identify and unearth the road to peace, but that road is buried deeper than memory, beneath one civilization after another that reigned and waned. We can't return to the infancy of Cane and Abel: Before there were marked men. Before we needed gurus to tell us peace was within ourselves. Before governments determined who would live in peace, hired and holstered citizens as peace officers because there was no peace without them. Hired and holstered citizens to soldier because there was fear and insecurity without them. V. It's normal to burn forests, flood land, claim what is ours for ourselves and what is others for ourselves too. Genocide is our most recurrent activity. It is normal, military capabilities that, in seconds, can kill yellow labs, destroy green crops, ignite natural disasters one hundred times worse than Katrina, rocket Earth into a black hole. It is normal when you live in the After. In the aftermath, there are no never-neverlands. VI. Sitting on the patio this early evening is almost perfect, cool autumn, slight breeze, no mosquitoes, fish playing in their pond, hummingbirds on Honeysuckle blooms, butterflies on Zenias. I wrote checks this afternoon for my estimated taxes, one for the state, another for the U.S. Treasury. I no longer credit peace as a possibility. Mornings, I sit in my chair at my table on my patio, eat my sweet Danish with my imported coffee, the mix I clearn off my plate, part sugar, part salt, part compassion, part greed. Our leaders are correct when they say, there are no innocents among us. There are only subjects and objects. It takes a revolution to turn objects into subjects. Many children die before they learn about sentences and the placement of nouns. When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross --Sinclair Lewis. Wayne Crawford lives in Las Cruces, NM, where he manages Lunarosity, emcees a monthly open mic at the historic Rio Grande Theatre, and is co-managing editor of Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders Journal. His poetry has appeared in, among others, Las Cruces Poets and Writers, Eureka Literary Magazine, Language Arts, Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, Sage Trail and Concrete Wolf. Online, among others, at Moongate, New Verse News.com, Shampoo, Mannequin Envy, Fickle Muses , and Zygote in My Coffee. His most recent chapbook, "The Corner of Clark and Kent," was published by Mesilla Valley Press (2004), his book-length collection of poetry, SUGAR TRAIL, Sin Fronteras Press (2007). His spoken word recording, OASIS BOUND, was completed with musician Randy Granger in March 09. Their collaborative, "Dance at the Totem" made it into the top twenty of the New Age charts. You can hear an interview with them about their collaboration with the Hang Drum and poetry on KTEP 88.5FM (NPR station) with host Monica Gomez. Listen: www.randygranger.net/ktepinterview.html A recording of Crawford's poetry, Wayne Crawford Reads, was released in October 2009 through Vox Recordings. Crawford has completed two additional chapbooks and one additional full-length book of poetry, if anyone is interested in publishing them. Coming: Crawford's Calendar of Literary events, and Crawford's CV.