Unlikely Stories Presents

this is not a real home.
the walls are so thin
the neighbors listen in.
keep the noise down,
they're complaining.
--John Lydon

I was not born to be a second-hander.
--Ayn Rand

When you have to shoot a bullet at someone just to say hello, that's pretty weird, isn't it?
--Captain Beefheart

For those of you that feel that reality is a waste of time and surreality requires no inebriant to conquer the consciousness, I have a suggestion. Enter the mad, violent world of Luke Buckham. With crazy and vile imagery, that nonetheless gets its point clearly across, the epic poems of Luke Buckham skewer society, viciously tearing apart our perceptions and value system.

Luke says, "I live in a cantankerous automobile in Podunk, New Hampshire, writing prophetic jokes on the dashboard with a knife during the night. During the day I walk through towns cluttered with unbearably boring architecture, occasionally annoying the tiny-minded denizens with my disdainful laughter at their empty, false patriotism & their emptier conversations (& lives). I work at a liquor store about 12 hrs./week to keep myself well-stocked with music, books, & food. Most people I have known, and even those I like, believe that this particular culturally-deprived period in history is a bad time to be me, since my beliefs cannot usually be summed up by bumper stickers. I couldn't disagree more. I am unequivocally thrilled at the challenge, and more than equal to it.

"And my shivering lover, Poetry? She's not dead, just recovering from several unsuccessful suicide attempts without the aid of health insurance. I myself enjoy art from all cultures, time periods, & viewpoints. I love Blake, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Dante, Bei Dao, David Lerner, cummings, Sexton...but most af all I love to read my own poetry fresh from the pen. I have forced D.A. Levy & T.S Eliot to sit next to one another on my bookcase, and I don't think that they are actually that dissimilar. I listen to everything from Public Image Ltd. to Debussy, & have as much respect for the Wu-Tang album "Liquid Swords" by Genius as I do for "Notes From the Underground" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I have very little patience for the severely limited thought and the lack of humor (replaced until recently by careful cynicism) that populate pop culture and this turgid continent in general. But that's old news. The important thing is to find the gold beneath society's compost heap.

"Current poetry, despite the fact that living people like Charles Simic & Sapphire have recently published great work, has become cluttered with cowardly, cliched, unmemorable verse. I would like to say gradiosely that I have come to destroy it, but history will take care of that, as it always has. One of the most admirable features of the American people, and humanity in general, is that while the general public does it's job to keep fads & their advertisers comfortably alive, the counterculture usually manages, by virtue of it's considerably longer attention span, to preserve art that is superb, to pass it down to future generations so that it outlives that which is facile, ingratiating, & untruthful in the "mainstream". This is why I am able to access work by my favorite painter, Hieronymous Bosch, even though he died nearly 500 yrs. ago. Still, even in this country, the work of great poets like Jack Micheline & Harold Norse has gone out of print, and this is shameful. It means that the counterculture could be doing a much better job.

"As for me, I have recently turned 21, and decided that it is time for my voice to be heard. I suggest that you do the same." Check out some of his other works at The Best of San Francisco, ImproviJazzation, and Concrete Abstract, or write to him at aworminmywall@hotmail.com.

Luke's works here at Unlikely Stories are: