King Grossman is an award-winning poet, novelist, and writer of short prose. His poems and short prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Round, Licking River Review, Crack the Spine, Forge, Tiger’s Eye, DMQ Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Qwerty, Burningword, Ignatian, Drunk Monkeys, The Paragon Journal, Pennsylvania English, SLAB, Slag Review, Midwest Quarterly, The Borfski Review, Carbon Culture Review, and Nebo. Letters To Alice, his current novel, in 2017 received The Independent Press Award as the Distinguished Favorite in Visionary Fiction, was a Finalist for Literary Fiction in the National Indie Excellence Awards, received the Gold Medal for Inspirational/Visionary Fiction from the Global Ebook Awards, and won two Royal Dragonfly Book awards, for Literary Fiction and Cover Design. A longtime fugitive from the worlds of Wall Street and Capitol Hill, these days he also regularly participates in nonviolent public actions to address climate change, economic injustice, institutionalized racism, inhumane immigration policy, oppressive violence and militarism. He lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with his wife, Lisa, dog, Bogart, and sun conure parrot, Sunny.

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Growing Younger As The Sun Goes Down

Blithe sliver of curvilinear orange glow
              Cleaves to the faraway azure line then vanishes,
                              And I reach without hesitation or stirring from my place

Beyond the last limits of make-believe importance
              ’Round the dogs running unleashed along the sand,
                              Applause evanesced at another ending that begins

Everything with approval at first glimpse of a slender pearlescent moon
               Accompanied by Venus as the lone diamond tossed into this magenta eve,
                              Fierce with creation in looming opacity like Arundhati Roy with her

Sparkling little nose stud just to lend a mischievous hint of unbending truth
              From a bank without the vulgar austerity of money for trading currency,
                              A free exchange of art because what else must a poet do than rhapsodize

Into a burgeoning night of accumulated horrors from the tipping-over world
               And, yes, also delights, cypress trees’ gray-armed green-canopied sculptures,
                              Their silhouettes like geishas spilling alpine apothecary for the crisp air,

Lo, the invitation for bellows breathing, our fingers fanned overhead,
               Hailing the gods, lost but not forgotten misadventures, my wife of tarnished
                              Angel’s wings, her knowledgeable thatch of blue-black feathers shining

From the undersides in these last vestiges of red-rimmed gloaming
               Until there is only the owl inside my chest hooting for its mate,
                             Calls for her to come onto the branch with him if obliged by tenderness,

To another unveiling, the trees and geishas and stars and moon and even Venus
               For dramatic effect have vanquished their shapes with the darkness of clouds,
                             Absent any lit candle, but for seeing flickers of us as precious children.

 

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More about the author:

King is the host of Artivism-which explores the intersection of writers and artists with social justice activism-on Your Town television program broadcast throughout the Monterey Peninsula, California area. All royalties from King’s work are contributed to Occupy the Word Foundation, a nonprofit organization King founded to offer writers residencies and publishing opportunities to fresh, radical writers of poetry and fiction.