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GOODSTONE

Fred Voss

 

Bloodaxe Books

ISBN 1-85224-198-5

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West Coast poet Fred Voss guides you deep within the bowels of Goodstone Aircraft Company, into an atmosphere as abrasive as oil-soaked shop towels laced with metal shavings. Like raw telegrams from a front-line war correspondent, spiced with the vernacular, the profane and the profound (and certainly not for the faint-of-heart), these poetic vignettes are as American as Harley-Davidsons, beer bellies, Vietnam Vets, job layoffs and Just Say No. The characters in Goodstone are real indeed: they are our friends and neighbors, our relatives, ourselves—captured unawares by the candid pen and perceptive wit of machinist-writer Fred Voss. Powerful, thought provoking and highly entertaining, you'll want to devour this special book in one reading, and then read it again and again to yourself and to others.

Publisher's Blurb

 

Shortchanged
People are told
all their lives what is good for them who to vote for
where to go and what to do as they march
to work and up and down the streets buying things and yet
Dostoevsky
in 4 great huge novels barely scratches the surface
of what it is to be a human being.
People are told what to think
and what it all means and what
to give their lives for by politicians
and bosses and bureaucrats and experts and
teachers and traffic signals and laws
and electric shocks and 30 days in County Jail and armies
that kill millions of people and yet
Shakespeare
barely shines a few rays of light
into the mystery of the human soul.
People use up their lives
thinking they are worth nothing as they follow other people's directions
while the genius of Tennessee Williams
in dozens of plays moves our understanding
of what is really inside us
one fraction of an inch forward.

Winning
No reason
to get up each morning looking and hoping for love
that you will never find no reason
to spend your life wrenching words out of your heart
writing novel after novel after novel that will never get published,
no reason
to leave your heart wide open to a child or parent or lover
who will never love you or to
enter that race and run it over and over when
you will never win or to stare up at the stars night after night
wondering
why we are here when
you will never get an answer no reason
to keep trying to say something in a poem
or painting or song that
can never be said,
except
for that thing inside of us that must never stop trying.

Why I Will Never Stop Writing
These words I write my poems with
have picked up the broken lives of thousands of men
on concrete factory floors
and my own broken life on those concrete floors
in their hands and lifted them up to some kind of light
and transformed them.
They have given me
a way to go,
the only
way I could ever have gone and the only way
I will ever be able to go, the way
I was born for and had to bleed and vomit and weep and
moan and go crazy and want to die for because I didn't
have it,
away
that can never fail me and that is really worth so much more
than fame or money
or immortality.