A Look Back at 2018
I wasn’t very productive as far as writing [or marketing] goes but I made a few memories and I ain’t mad about that. 😀
Some of the books got a new cover, you can see them here if you’re so inclined, or you can look at a few of my pictures from 2018.
Man that flew by. Oh well…
Hasta la vista 2018, I’ll be back & here’s wishing all of YOU a HaPpY 2019!!
Three flights of stairs leave me winded
Still I light a cigarette, lean against the railing and look out over the salt ponds.
The Florida dew is still wet on my soles, mingled with imported white sand.
The grit clings to my swollen crooked feet like scared children.
It is early February and another spring like day at the southernmost point.
Roaming tourists’ cheerily fill the parking lot
A timeworn man with white hair tells a joke, refers to himself as a snowbird and the crowd cackles like the game fowl that live on the key.
Inside, the black girl from Jamaica pushes a cart loaded with towels and toiletries and yells toward the ceiling of an empty hall
Do you see my sweat!
I want to tell her yes,
Yes, I see your sweat!
Yours and every other soul’s that has bled life into this place! I see their tears and perspiration that filled the salty oceans and the ponds that surround us… that hold us here.
Instead I stare at my swollen gritty feet still wet with the Florida dew.
Remember Florida in her time of need... in the wake of Irma.
Note the portrait in the background. Sorry, I don’t know who the artist is but I thought it meshed well with the poem No Such Thing as Ghosts. I snapped this photo last February after a long ride through the keys with Ernie. 😉
No Such Thing As Ghosts completes chapter 17 in Unjustified Favor (Clan Destiny Book III) after an ordeal forces Lawrence Jeffcoat to rethink his beliefs.
… ghosts were manifestations of irrational fears and folklore. Ghouls, phantoms, spirits – those were make-believe stories invented for campfires and fiction.
Embedded images leave their trace
Like fossil shells have marked their place
Many share this tiny space
Though each in their own time
The essence of an empty room
The hint of a gardenia’s bloom
A peek in to the sixth sense loom
All treasures of the mind
Shadows catch the outer eye
Wind railed whispers cross the sky
Nothing ever really dies
They simply pass beyond
—
Okay, I might have been wrong in yesterdays post. We received [well] over 13 downloads of Getting Me Back. Thanks y’all. It wouldn’t matter if we got 13 million – we are sticking to the plan. We bought the ticket – we’ll take the ride. That’s my spin on a Hunter S. Thompson quote. 
This photo was taken in front of Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida. Of course it is now a museum. I look like I am either drunk or crying. I think it was both. Talking to ghosts sometimes has that effect on me.
Hemingway’s Beloved
Did you shake his hand –?
the hand of a man’s man?
Did you see how his eyes searched the space around him as the world grew smaller?
Did you learn the secrets of Africa or discuss his tomes over drinks?
Of course not.
You could not for we were mere children –
our wedding day marking the twenty second anniversary of his exodus… his rise to immortality.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year you were born – did you know that?
I was but two months in the womb when he placed the beloved twelve-gauge inside his mouth and obliterated the ciphering pheasants once and for all.
Did you see how he caressed her?
How her cold, soft metal against his finger was as pacifying as the perfect daiquiri… how she (his beloved) alas cured him of the demons.
In a flash she rooted them loose one by one from their hiding place – a place liquor nor currents could mole; a cavern so deep no joule or watt could grasp. Ahh, but she did.
She exorcized them, set them to flight riding on soft grey tissue laden with hemochromatosis and fragments of bone.
Christ might have offered the fiends a swine but not her or better yet not him…
A sacrifice for the Bay of Pigs?
It was all such folly — such unholy madness for a simple man and a literary saint.
~o~o~o~
*Hemingway’s Beloved was first published in the HWA (Horror Writers Association) Poetry Showcase Volume I.
So Getting Me Back (The Voices Within) will still be FREE April 18th through the 21st while we do this A Poem & A Picture by Me & of Me.
What else can I say about Ernest Hemingway that has not already been [acceptably] said?
This winter sabbatical thing is nice. Thank you Florida, Key West & all you ‘keysies’ that made getting older so much fun. The free roaming fowl and the cockfights brought back [old] memories.
This winter sabbatical is going much faster than I had hoped and it is time to get back to Texas and work on the poetry book due to release in April.
The Real Janna Hill 