christopherbollinger
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Detestable
In the gallery, under spotlights ages wood and plaster painted with the colors of royalty, of the bourgeoisie and the wannabes. It was the expensive sample platter. I could see the deepening of time in the creases of the folds of wooden drapery and smell the quaint fastness of France under King Louis who soon…
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Sketching A Civic Center
I love architecture. The envisioning, design, and construction of buildings fascinates and excites me. I am a student of the form though I have no official education in it. I remember that my love affair started as a child looking at the buildings in my hometown of Long Beach, California…especially the French-Gothic wonder that is…
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Poe in a Flash
This story was composed live on Twitter as a sort of “flash fiction” test. I think it turned out well. He shrugged off his black overcoat and turned to peer at himself in the looking glass. “This is what I have become,” he mutters, “dead.” He pushes back his thinning black hair, the high…
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Da Vinci’s Folly
She hides, huddled behind packing crates wrapped in muslin, jarred from riding over the one-two thrusts of cobblestone road. She’s on a hide out from Hitler. How many journeys has she been on? Several – some shorter than others. Slipshod movement from one room to another, minor fingerprints leaving trace oils on her desperately dry…
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What is in a Place? (Audio)
The writer was old. He existed on the planet of his birth for over ninety sweeping orbits of its sun. Transitory was his life, specular, reflective, but also burning with his own light like that sun. Doing the impossible on a Monday, or a Tuesday, erecting stiletto monuments of flashing silver thundering out from his…
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The Beautiful Rituals
Arms flash tiny bits of skin under coats or long suit jacket sleeves – skin white, skin dark rhythmic in the regularity of forward swinging momentum. Humans walk into a building, arched entrance regimented angularity from Art Deco applique the lobby smells like arthritis cream and Irish Spring. Chatter echoes around the communal space mother…
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A Poetry Reading 3
Here is a recording of me reading “Funeral Train.” Time travel expenses are all paid for.
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A Poetry Reading 2
This is a recording of me reading my poem, “Australopithecus: an Evolutionary Link.” This is one of my favorite works.
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Yet Galileo Still Moves
“I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.” -Galileo Galilei
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Pity the Stones
Pity the stones that stand to see here, where once was the cradle of civilizations, the toddlers that have walked away for a few thousand years and have grown to be adults of renown. Multiple times men have come out of the desert to claim a god has spoken to them. Saying that they had…
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ET Calls Collect
This essay is in response to the open letter recently published by several luminaries in many diverse fields regarding active attempts at communication with ETIs . You can read the open letter here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/meti_statement_0.html First contact. This two word sentence can birth evocations broad and diverse: horror, fear, hope. The meetings between one society less advanced than another have…
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music=magic
Magicians play fools, using prestidigitation and axiomatic misdirection to create two legs out of a box, twitching as their body’s head goes on smiling, complacently unaware that they’re missing something down there. (possibly even something on top) its not worth worrying over. But real magic comes from musicians who play chords, scale up scales to…
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2015: A Choice of Futures
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book titled 1984, Spring: a Choice of Futures, similar in format to his earlier nonfiction book Profiles of the Future about mankind’s options for that hallowed, once future year. I yanked the title for my essay as it is most apt to describe our current state of flux here on planet Earth. We have…
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The Future Past Due
My new book, The Future Past Due, is now available on Amazon.com and other distribution outlets! As the back description states, “The future is long past due. Inside this book is an equal mix of mystery, history, imagination, poetry, and science fiction. From worlds long turned to ash, to ashes reborn into worlds; find within…
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Arthur Charles Clarke
How many fathers can one child have? You have your biological father, sure. But, if you were like me and that man was not present in your formative years, who would take his place? I was raised by my grandparents, and while they provided a roof over my head and an education, they did not…
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Dark Dream
I recently had one of the most vivid dreams of my life. I was standing on a boardwalk in what may have been a city Like New York. Out in the bay a cascading series of nuclear explosions occurred. To say it was startling is an understatement. Here is a poem about it: In the…
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Mars 3
The sun sets on the lowest tide Mars had ever seen. Small creatures clung to the basaltic rocks and waved tiny flagella at that distant star, almost as if that plaintive gesture of goodbye would allow for one more perfect day. Now, the ebb and flow of the stinging, salted seas was waning. Their dark…
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My poem “Lone tree: Nature communes in a dream-like landscape,” is up at Quail Bell Magazine today!
Originally posted on Jennifer MacBain-Stephens: http://www.quailbellmagazine.com/the-unreal/poem-lone-tree-nature-communes-in-a-dream-like-landscape Poem: Lone Tree: Nature Communes in a Dream-Like Landscape Words by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens Image by Julia McGlew http://www.quailbellmagazine.com
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Gordon House
My wife and I recently had the privilege to visit the only “open to the public” Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Pacific Northwest. The home, known after its original owners as the Gordon House, is located at 869 West Main Street in Silverton, Oregon. The house is located in a public garden where it was…
The Numinous Cosmos 