Michael D. Grover’s Fatherless Children is an outcast’s plaintive wail to a lost father and a generation of lost kids. This long elegy comprised of bite-sized diary-like entries is an impassioned plea for love and understanding in a fatherless american hellscape where even Poets claw up each-other’s spines to be seen & lionized, to bask in the attention of their fathers.
The strains of american and paternal expectations on the black sheep run deep. Grover carries the lessons imparted by a father through words, actions, & absence. He comes to see the emptiness at the heart of things and finds a way to move forward, to break through hopeless ennui in the pursuit of Poetry & presence in the present.
At times confrontational, the Poet rails against a corrupt corporate police state. At times confessional, wondering if he could’ve been a better son. At times paranoid, Grover questions the past as well as the present—not to mention fluoride in drinking water. The Poet comes to question his very essence: his Poetry. The Poet readily admits the Poem is “way too fucking long,” but, like stubborn life, he moves forward, honing in like a shamanistic alchemist transmogrifying shit into Poems, chaos into zen.
The Poet finds himself fully in motion sitting in meditation under his Floridan trees; this after a lifetime of running at full-speed across the disunited states. Though “a stranger in a strange land,” the Poet finds himself the stranger with “many things to work on.” Though the world is steadily burning, the Poet finds a way to do his work of making words. Despite cancer, paranoia, capitalism, society’s crash & burn, and an unfixable broken relationship with his father, the Poet urges us onward: Be the light, be creation in the face of decline / Be the light, as dark as it may seem.
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A.S. Coomer is a writer & musician. He was commissioned a Kentucky Colonel for his social and artistic work. Books include MEMORABILIA, THE FETISHISTS, SONGS FOR LEAVING, SHINING THE LIGHT, & many others. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a “record label” for Poetry.
