FILM HEAD
after Robert Altman

Self-conscious merging traffic
through a Movieola's dissonant
sprocket-feed envisions a few
missing martyrs in a drug war
in Juarez. The border town is

trucker groan: cars and kidnapped
girls obscured by freeway rain.
Private imaginations are where grief
visits. And the sound is amazing in
the way the water dance an eaves

spout makes as it mixes with Annie Ross
singing Farmer's Market really becomes
its own damp counterpoint. So we listen
to the sprockets as poverty nibbles in our
pockets. All the while all these radiated

angels madonna the hair of whores,
and, as we matador strange bulls, they
congregate inside our skulls with a cast
of thousands. Whatever will be perceived
is a nihilist dissent in metaphoric dissolve

without mercy. It would seem as it is now
under queasy moonlight: a veiled attempt
to drown us ugly ducklings in the drear
blasphemous lake of very rich and utterly
whistling swans.

Michael C Ford is driven! sometimes we see him crossing the divider, crashing over a cliff, plunging into Rattlesnake Canyon, as the cameras roll.

-Edward Field (author of Stand up Friend With Me)

 

 

One salient feature of Ford's most recent title is that "the woman" whose star subjectively depicted on the front cover art is Chase Masterson: a luminous cast member of the continuing Star Trek legend: Deep Space Nine. This inspired the 1stedition published in Chicago by Pitchfork Press to earn considerable marketing, which leads us into our production of this 2nd printing. As was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Carolyn Kizer's title: Pro Femina, this volume is in a chapbook format.

-The publishers at Ion Drive

 

 

Ford's Chicago savvy love of Dream Land Hollywood's lost glory radiates a nostalgic pulse that moves through these poems like a burgundy cruiser taking Sunset Boulevard. You just have to relax, take in the emotional turf, enjoy the smoothness.

-Wanda Coleman (author of Heavy Daughter's Blues)

about the author

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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$10

 

buy the e-book $5

 

 

 

 

To Kiss The Blood Off Our Hands is filled with the same vintage noir imagery we see whenever we view a black and white crime drama, or psycho drama in the Film Noir tradition. it was designed to allow an audience of "readers" to experience visions of Yesterday, giving the chance to more clearly see the rather opaque paranoid times in which we live Today! There are also noticeable recognitions of images from films which have over time been credited with the brand name neo-Noir. Surely, these pages are populated with images of the amorphous "She." The admixture of guilesless heart-of-gold-honeys in combination with the royal bitch breed of parasitic vampires: those with primal urges towards almost Cloak and Dagger versions of yet another frost-bitten, neurotic, parentally damaged psycho with a hidden agenda; not always, during these cynical years portrayed by a Cosmopolitan magazine stereotype. To Kiss The Blood Off Our Hands is part two of a trilogy, the others being Nursery Rhyme Assassin (2001) and The Demented Chauffeur & Other Mysteries (2009).
Michael C Ford, a legendary voice on the LA poetry scene has produced a steady stream of print and recorded roduct since 1970. Ford received a Grammy nomination for his 1986 debut vinyl disk entitled Language Commando and a 1998 Pulitzer Prize nomination for his compilation of selected work (culled from 14 volumes: 1970-1995) Emergency Exits. Ford has shared the stage with Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins and Timothy Leary. He has been described by the LA FREE PRESS as an "American Media Outlaw." in the author's own words: "I keep naively believing that an essentially nasty indifferent and mediocre publishing arena can be neutralized by taking my notebook brain fragments and using the typer as a musical instrument, transcribing them into melodic lines and percussive jolts: but there's also the feeling that I'm in the middle of this battle between logic and fantasy: a sort of soldier poet out of uniform, anticipating some radical missile warfare fallout from Biblical holocaust retribution which will bounce this planet like a yo-yo."