Jedediah Smith

From pulp horror to avant garde poetics, writing that hits hard by Jedediah Smith

Tag: poetry

  • Only 2 More Days! Kindle Countdown Deal on Esau’s Fables

    First: Huge thanks to those who have already purchased the book during this Countdown. I am honored and full of hope that you will enjoy the book.

    Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems by Jedediah Smith now available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.

    Details:
    Publisher‏: ‎ Mount Diablo Books
    Publication date: ‎ January 23, 2025
    Language: ‎ English
    File size: ‎ 2.9 MB
    Print length: ‎ 111 pages

    Working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”

    From Esau’s Fables:

    The Last Manson Girl

    A news report states that the last Manson girl surrendered to authorities today.
    She had been married to a police officer.
    She had become a grandmother to sixteen, a great-grandmother to four.
    She had hosted a public-access talk show for ferret owners in LA.
    She smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg.
    She decrypted the Voynich manuscript which gave her the gift of powwow.
    She raised organic vegetables in an urban garden and chanted to keep the gophers away.
    She had been seeking a return to the Edenic among the butchers of living flesh, a paradise under the red and black flag of the ax.
    She has kept a journal since 1970 which runs backwards toward the Fall.
    She might save us all.

  • Starting Today! Kindle Countdown Deal on Esau’s Fables

    Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems by Jedediah Smith now available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.

    Details:
    Publisher‏: ‎ Mount Diablo Books
    Publication date: ‎ January 23, 2025
    Language: ‎ English
    File size: ‎ 2.9 MB
    Print length: ‎ 111 pages

    Working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”

    From Esau’s Fables:

    Triton’s Trumpet

    A man’s wife mailed his daughter a box of seashells from the ocean. Cupping them to her ears, she loved to hear the waves crashing and roaring, each in its own pitch, loving best that of a Triton’s Trumpet, bigger than both her hands together, gripped around it intently.

    That night she took it to bed with her. Hours later her father was awakened by her crying. In the girl’s room he sat on the side of her bed and told her, There was a girl crying. Her head ached with sound, and when I cupped her mouth to my ear, I could hear waves. Did you see her? She was here, I’m sure of it.

    The next night, the girl closed Triton’s Trumpet in her dresser drawer. Hours later her father was awakened by the house creaking as it tipped like a ship. In the girl’s room he sat on the side of her bed and said, There was a girl choking. She lay on her back while saltwater sputtered and plumed from her mouth as if she were a beached whale returned too late to the sea. Did you see her? She was floating still on the water’s surface.

    The next night, the girl smashed the Triton’s Trumpet into small fragments. Hours later her father was awakened by the sharp scent of rust on the water. In the girl’s room, he sat on the side of her bed and said, There was a girl being razed. Sharks swirled through the currents of water and air, whipping their heads from side to side in a frenzy of teeth shivering her into fragments. Her eyes met mine while it continued, and there was disbelief. You believe me, don’t you?

    In the morning, he placed all the fragments of his daughter he could find into a box lined with crumpled papers and mailed them back to her mother in the ocean.

  • 2 more days until Kindle Countdown Deal on Esau’s Fables

    Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems by Jedediah Smith will be available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.

    Details:
    Publisher‏: ‎ Mount Diablo Books
    Publication date: ‎ January 23, 2025
    Language: ‎ English
    File size: ‎ 2.9 MB
    Print length: ‎ 111 pages

    Working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”

    From Esau’s Fables:

    The Enormous Whisker

    Feeling the need of increased stature among his peers, Pepkin decided to grow a beard like those of the great philosophers or Tolstoy or Brahms, and so he stopped shaving. When his beard came in though, it came not as many hairs but one enormous whisker. It grew just above the jawline of his right cheek and resembled a tree trunk. Since it lacked the look of a conventional beard, he thought about shaving it off but decided to give it some time and see how it developed.

    As it grew longer, it continued to thicken and soon grew quite heavy. He found himself tilting his head to the right most of the time, as one with classic paralysis of the fourth cranial nerve, and people thought it gave him a contemplative air. In fact he found himself being given considerations he never had before. Friends would listen attentively as he spoke. Strangers would ask him to opine on matters of the day. Clergy sought his advice on matters both theological and lay. Pepkin noticed other men adopting what had come to be called the Pepkin Tilt.

    He worried this imitation might dilute his uniqueness, but it was about this time his enormous whisker began to sprout fruit. At first they were just small green nuts clustered at the end of the whisker, but over time they blanched until they looked like pulpy white berries. The weight of the fruit and the still-growing whisker itself caused it to bend down, and the fruit would sway and slap against Pepkin’s chest as he walked. While some men tried to mimic this look as well, with beaded scarves or lengths of pasta, the consensus was that Pepkin had taken his innovation too far. He found himself shunned.

    So, he stayed in his apartment more and more, then retreated even farther, rarely leaving his bedroom. Finding the open space of the vast room vertiginous, he constructed a canopy over his bed and brooded inside. After several weeks within this crib, his fleshy berries began to split and ooze a viscous liquid. From within, little baby snakes emerged, each with a face identical to Pepkin’s. When all the snakes had hatched, he took a razor and shaved off his enormous whisker. From its fine-grained substance, he built a boat and sailed it out to sea. The snakes sunned themselves on the deck while Pepkin steered the wheel.

    Those who saw them go tried to tell the story of their departure, but few would believe them. So, the storytellers formed their own clubs and societies. They would take turns retelling the tale of Pepkin. They called it “tilting.”

  • Monday Composition: Dragstrip B-Movie Big-Tit Queen    

    It’s you baby.
    I want you dropping the red bandanna between
    	our headlights pointed toward the cliff beyond
    I want the lacy edge of your push-up bra pushing
    	up beyond your low-cut top to be
    	the last sight I see before I pedal to the metal
    	this hot rod toward oblivion 
    But you’re no Natalie Wood sweetheart, you’re bad
    I’ve seen you in 1000 movie matinees, an afternoon cinema slut
    	the gangster’s moll
    	the hoodlum’s squeeze
    	the vampire’s wife
    	the creature feature monsterbait
    	number one slit in the lesbian biker pack
    	the razor chick in the all-girl gang
    	the tough broad sidekick
    	not the heartthrob but the handjob 
    	not the heroine but the hard-on
    with lips cherry red
    	kohl-ringed eyes
    	stiletto heels snapping castanets
    	hunks of skin under your nails
    	cleavage heaving beneath reptile hands	
    	Tura Satana’s legs, Kitten Natividad’s jugs,
    	Bettie Page’s ass, Ingrid Pitt’s fangs
    	honey skin thigh jiggling giggling 
    	sweet hole sticky lipped
    You’re my personal Jayne Mansfield, head intact
    My puberty’s centerfold dream realized in panting flesh
    and I’m still in the third row, ordering
    	another jumbo popcorn, feet
    	propped up on the next row, waiting 
    	for a flash of pink that never quite 
    	makes it past the cut of the American 
    	International Pictures’ censor
    I’ve seen you play the sweater girl opposite Steve McQueen,
    	saving the world from aliens while
    	making out in the back seat, civilization 
    	hanging by one bra strap
    Lounge back in white trash splendor, lit up in the glare
    	of a stag film flickering on the fake 
    	paneling of a basement rec-room.
    Pull the switchblade from your beehive baby, the one 
    	you stuck in Jeff Hunter’s back when he 
    	fell for you like a schoolboy but you were 
    	a dropout tired of a diet of white bread
    You’re not a nice girl and I never wanted you to be
    Smear the popcorn butter Bettie, 
    	right across that swell looking mug
    Swing your Fender Telecaster as you and Wanda Jackson
    	pound the shit out of Jailgirl Rock
    I’ve heard your pumps clicking down a wet brick midnight 
    	alley the hitman on your trail
    I’ve seen you punch out the sorority girl at the sock hop
    	then get belly shot by the friendly cop
    	O’Malley in the end
    keep riding that Harley mama, till the blood runs down 
    	your legs
    keep tossing that dynamite
    	blowing the side panels off Continentals
    keep tossing back bourbons neat while 
    	the college boys cough on crème de mint
    keep your nails long and jungle red clawing 
    	your way from the cheap sharecropper’s cabin 
    	to the hard grit sidewalks of LA
    keep shaking that wild bikini, squirming in the painted-on 
    	leather, and shimmering
    	the cheap porno tinsel on the stripper runway 
    keep dancing on the edge of that cliff 
    	as I race my souped-up Chevy
    	out into the dread air
    keep loading the passion, both barrels blasting, sending 
    	me over the cliff for one last look of that lacy bra,
    	one last look on the screen. 
    But you’re real baby,
    	no mere 2D projection of our desire on the silver screen
    	of the mind.
    You’re all 3D – 
    no glasses necessary.


    A selection from The Gunslinger in Technicolor, published by Mount Diablo Books and available in print  from Amazon.

  • Tuesday Citation: Short-Order Cook by Jim Daniels

    An average joe comes in
    and orders thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries.

    I wait for him to pay before I start cooking.
    He pays.
    He ain’t no average joe.

    The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three.
    I slap the burgers down
    throw two buckets of fries in the deep frier
    and they pop pop, spit spit. . .
    pssss. . .
    The counter girls laugh.
    I concentrate.
    It is the crucial point–
    they are ready for the cheese:
    my fingers shake as I tear off slices
    toss them on the burgers/fries done/dump/
    refill buckets/burgers ready/flip into buns/
    beat that melting cheese/wrap burgers in plastic/
    into paper bags/fried done/dump/fill thirty bags/
    bring them to the counter/wipe sweat on sleeve
    and smile at the counter girls.
    I puff my chest out and bellow:
    Thirty cheeseburgers! Thirty fries!
    I grab a handful of ice, toss it in my mouth
    do a little dance and walk back to the grill.
    Pressure, responsibility, success.
    Thirty cheeseburgers, thirty fries.

    From Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems by Jim Daniels. Originally appeared in Places/Everyone. Copyright © 1985 by Jim Daniels.