False Positives

By John Michael Flynn

False Positives is not a collection of poems or prose poems, but 65 of what author John Michael Flynn likes to call “uneasy hybrids,” each one started and refined and abandoned in one day, the whole collection written in 65 days while the author was under strict C-19 lockdown in Turkey, unable to leave his apartment. As an attempt to respond to the psychic demands of the lockdown, to achieve a rough and immediate sense of honesty, closure and truth during a time period when the author learned of his father’s death, each of the hybrids stays as close as possible to one page in length, written as a form of what Flynn deems “anti-poetry,” without artifice, a rejection of the stale trappings of a diploma-driven corporatized erudition, its Woke fascism, its brutishly cliquish IM’d, Snapchatted, Facebooked, unnuanced, cowardly, workshopped and generally dishonest and mediocre stabs at truth that he believes have come to define and marginalize what poetry now sells itself as in the West. These hybrid pieces reject staid conventions, showy frills and pretense, seeking to communicate story, each a visceral examination from the inside out, a release into timelessness and soul. They are made of the broken and the joyous, of reminiscence and confession, Flynn’s voice speaking in the moment to the moment, with an open nod to the influence of Breton’s surrealism, the pious Meditations of Donne, the prose poems of Baudelaire, and the energy of a mind unleashing itself and then pulling back to shape and sculpt hour by hour, from morning until day’s end, one work after another, each worthy, ultimately, of abandonment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Michael Flynn
• Release date: Aug 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005884420

John Michael Flynn

John Michael Flynn was the 2017 Writer in Residence at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara, in North Carolina. In 2015 he completed a one-year English Language Fellowship through the US State Department in Khabarovsk, Russia. Poetry collections include Restless Vanishings, and Keepers Meet Questing Eyes from Leaf Garden Press. (www.leafgarden.blogspot.com), and Blackbird Once Wild Now Tame translated from the Romanian of Nicolae Dabija. He’s published three collections of short stories, his most recent Vintage Vinyl Playlist from Fomite Books (www.fomitepress.com). Fomite has also published his second collection, Off To The Next Wherever. His collection of essays, How The Quiet Breathes, was published in 2021 by New Meridian Arts.( https://www.newmeridianarts.com). He’s earned awards from the New England Poetry Club, and the U.S. Peace Corps. Visit him at https://jmfbr1.blogspot.com/His books can be found from these publisher websiteshttp://leafgardenpress.blogspot.com/https://publerati.com/https://www.fomitepress.com/https://www.newmeridianarts.com/https://jmfbr1.blogspot.com/https://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Michael-Flynn/e/B0C6V89VVVHere is a sample of some comments from readers:“John Michael Flynn’s language dazzles to a very real end: the exploration and delineation of the free-floating breakdown known as ‘America.’ The range of tones and locales he uses is impressive but more impressive is the feeling invested in what almost inevitably slips through time’s fingers. Anyone wondering where the Whitmanesque impulse has gone need look no further.”—Baron Wormser, former poet laureate, state of MaineFlynn’s prose at every turn is crisp and evocative; he has a gift for description of cities, landscapes and characters – the latter seem so real one could almost touch them. I have for years enjoyed his short stories, poems and translations, and I’m delighted he has brought his considerable powers to a wonderfully vivid collection that crackles with energy and insight.-- Geoffrey Clark, author of Wedding In OctoberThere’s something dazzling about how Flynn evokes beauty and isolation, tragedy and triumph, in language that sings and begs us to sing along, too.-- Alyson Hagy, author of BoletoThe work is concrete, seductive, and dramatic in its intensity – drawing the reader in.-- Jack Smith, author of IconFlynn is an author who pays attention to the details. Vivid and engaging, it’s a pleasure to add Off To The Next Wherever to my shelf.-- Kristen-Paige Madonia, author of Fingerprints of You

Book preview

It’s Time I Lease And It’s Scars That Own Me

Money, numbers and balance sheets determine prosecutions in the debate regarding whether or not I should bury myself alive. Again. These nagging fiscal exigencies, but I control – a frightening thought – their realities. I’m less than individual, I’m rust, a vassal adrift, an order taken to maintain course, once again learning to drown or else fawn at the absurdity of it all. So, a new day. So, no baksheesh. But two eyes. Contemplative moments of thawing. Extreme losses recalled, evaluated, filed away, many so broken like peanut shells littering bleachers after a ball game. I run my fingers over serrations in the arid scars that dignify my flesh, thinking I don’t need ink, that these raised pink zippers will do. How they soften my anger as they bloat and weep in the sun-tides to finger the coastlines of my cerebral unease. These magentas deified, denied and undressed – what I thought I was, what I wanted to become. Conscience holds me back from dawn crusades, makes me a cantering gammon without a crest to achieve. Plasma rummages in a bacchanal through my cells, dermis windows forcing phagocytes to blunder inside new membranes I’ve reduced to fantasy and miracle. Each chromosome a journal entry in my blood’s florid argot. My dismissal confessions scratched into a graphite sky on clouds as white as egg albumen. I pick at my scabs, each durable enough to resurrect my dead. It’s absurd to nurture losses like they’re flowers left to dry between pages where they can be removed and unfolded. Born with it all, I’m defined by my specious failures. I’ve learned to accord the vine and noose their graces. I expect to fall from most ledges. Yet I don’t. I’m not a delinquent wastrel due to these scars or any other hardened signs in me of laceration, victimhood, incarceration or malfeasance. I’m an ongoing argument. I’m a stiffened back.

Mug Shot

Pulsing, blinding, flashing energy and tasting his blood and mucus and the wormy stink of failed ambitions, boots denting his skull until he blacks out. His wings clipped. His body slumped on the ground with a copy of Genet in his back pocket. Oh Momma send me back into my amniotic cocoon where I’m embraced by soft delusions on a rippling strand. The dreams are not his fault. They simply come. They cannot all be understood, nor can they be the source of inspiration or blame. He still craves experience and it has come to him through the smell of a moment in which he has no fear. He knows this smell just as he knows that he will, one day, lengthen like a late afternoon cloud and burst into rainbow-laden showers. He will delight in play. He will be his mother’s child. He will observe the wretched drunk reaching to steal his wallet and he'll stop that drunk and give him ten dollars and tell him to spend it on drink. He’ll see old crones struggling to cross the street and he’ll carry them. He won’t fear the subway roaring under sidewalk grates, nor his fantasies of water towers collapsing. He'll embrace them. He’ll observe, blend in, choose, create, take any form of action. There’s a spark inside worth assuming. He’s not lost his identity with the death of his mother. He’s found instead a mask and he’ll use it. No matter how rat-like he feels in this maze, he’s still capable of motion and intact. Dancers and painters are sculpting what’s already been said and done a million times before and none of it matters when he lies in his bed and drifts off and all needs for definitions blur. He loses skepticism and fright. Mother, is this love? He remembers nothing while he discovers glowing inside of himself a colossal city, not an eroding behemoth, but winged messages about his beauty, his ability to survive, notions and certitudes he must share with all the others.

Karma Avenue Central

There’s no dust to salvage here among the homeless asleep near ATMs where they can eat paper receipts off the sidewalk. The suffrage in their fumes doesn’t lie. Each one opens legs toward me that fork out like roads of remembered sins. I had, once, such super-fine wine. A calm moment. The aerial assaults cease in my head. Sunlight wheels down from maroon hills. Tree lines of conscience part. Maroon crows cross fields of maize. My breath smells like newly mown hay. Tonight, we’ll get us some hellfire-bourbon. Miasmal October light. The dank essence within like tilled soil and to walk here is to know I’m more than human now, I’m all the strange moods of my useless gorilla-sized compassion. I rest my eyes. When I roll here, I think of it as coastline. I have to forget I exist. The trick is to stay in motion without any excessive concerns for somebody’s God telling me to care. I watch the well-dressed cogs pass by and wonder what they do all day in their glass cylinders. We’re all actors who crave more stage, managing our ploys and spoils in the milk-light. Hard to believe such an avenue exists. Such a noose, castle and flop. A show to remind me that the value of liberty is that it allows one to fail as a downtown breeze asks, Where’s all the