Howie Good Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Others see my writing as containing overtones of surrealism or absurdism. I don’t. I see it as a realistic depiction of the mad, violent, disjointed times we’re living in. If my writing is a kind of cracked mirror, it is a cracked mirror that captures our conditions with paradoxical accuracy. - Howie Good
Disco Demolition Night
Someone on the street said, “The disco is burning!” When someone says, “The disco is burning!”, you need to take it seriously. Worried residents began gathering clothes, cash, jewelry, medicines in case they had to flee. A man strapped for money offered to sell me his virgin daughter. It was just luck that I had downed a Tramadol, a couple of cannabis gummies, and a pint of Guiness in quick succession. Today, walking on the sand, I heard what sounded like heavy bombers. I stared up. White swirls of smoke hung suspended in the crystal ball of a daytime moon.
Ashes, Ashes
The warning cry from a seagull, a series of short, sharp squawks, goes unheard. You enter dreams and museums, a thousand miles of history. On the back of your T-shirt is a list of the venues that were on God’s farewell tour. It takes junkies rustling in the shadows of archways to alert you to the lingering taint. You are seized then and tied to a chair. An electronic sign, “Radiation in Use,” glows red. When you get home, if you do, there is a package waiting with your only sibling’s ashes.
Elegy for the Ephemeral
I plopped down in a fake-wicker armchair on the balcony of our vacation rental. It was 2025, a fraught time for air travel. Desert palm trees with glossy green fronds loomed over the building. A bright white scar of snow extended along the tops of brown wrinkled mountains in the distance. The artist Basquiat, just days before he Od’ed, punched a hole in his bathroom window. Near it he scratched the words Broken Heart. He was 27, 28. His face was covered with sores. He hadn’t painted anything of consequence in years. On his tombstone they should have put one of the hobo signs he frequently incorporated in his work, maybe the empty circle meaning Nothing to be gained here.
Let Me Explain
I don’t feel like I’m leaving the place. I feel the place is leaving me. People should be concerned over what will disappear next. I can hear them talking outside the door but not the things they’re saying. The thesaurus lists the following synonyms: slavery, enslavement, servitude, subjugation, oppression, domination, exploitation. All it would take to reverse conditions is one person asking, “What if there’s a fire?” I have explained this time and again, and still an old, balding, ruthless woman with sharply filed teeth sits like royalty amid a pile of human bones.
Waka Waka
I had abruptly stopped taking my mood stabilizer – with predictable results. The police were called. Fire department, too. Passing motorists slowed down to gawk or shout abuse. The lower half of my left ear was wrapped in a blood-soaked handkerchief. “Guard this,” I said as I gave it to a young woman cop. Years from now, when butterflies are extinct, our children’s children’s children’s children will experience before the image of one a new feeling somewhere between disbelief and grief.
The Incurable Jewishness of Being
A red Christmas envelope arrived with no return address. I tore it open, eager to see who had sent the card. A floury white powder spilled out. Anthrax! The cops came. “Shouldn’t mess with women who are into ritual bondage,” one jokingly advised. I mumbled something. Ghosts of the gassed remained by me. There is no darkness darker than the darkness of man.
Hunter Gatherers
We are grasping and ambitious, and we pursue tawdry objectives with the relentlessness of an aggressive cancer. In our typical slapdash style, we have worn ruts in the sky, turned oceans into garbage dumps, latrines, morgues, just to make an extra dollar. We have drugged and date raped the planet, and when it pushes back with wildfires and superstorms, we claim we are the victims. If you allowed yourself to think about it (you won’t), you would swap with the prehistoric stick men preserved on cave walls.
Gratuitous Text
Summer dances were held under the lights on the tennis courts at the park. The music was played over a crappy loudspeaker system. My friends and I would smoke a joint before going. We were too confused by girls to show up straight. They seemed to belong to another species entirely – self-aware, supple, unattainable. There was no way to know at our age and from our meager experience that they were made, like us, of dust.
Howie Good (B.A., Bard College; MA, University of Iowa; Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz, where he taught journalism for close to 40 years. He has published several poetry collections, including Akimbo (Sacred Parasite, 2025) and the award-winning The Loser’s Guide to Street Fighting (Thought Crime Press) and Lovesick (Press Americana). His poems can also be found in numerous online journals. He lives in Cape Cod with his wife and their dog, both of whom put in occasional appearances in his writing.
