Description

This month, semantikon published its 9th e-book, F. Keith Wahle's poem, The Invitations. Excerpt:

If I invite you to cover my body
with mashed bananas, I don’t really mean it.
I don’t even like bananas. I really mean,
let’s take a ride out to the cemetery,
and look at the black angel. Have you ever
seen the black angel? When I invite you
to snooze on my bathroom floor, I really mean,
let’s stay up all night together. Let’s talk
about art, and music, and women’s liberation.

Let’s stay up and talk. Let’s take a walk
in the park. Let’s go out for a pizza.
Let’s make an omelet. There’s a Preston Sturges
comedy on television Saturday night. In fact,
there are two --The Lady Eve, and Unfaithfully
Yours­--but they’re on different channels
at the same time. Can you believe it--
two different Preston Sturges movies on the
same night? Cable television is really amazing.

The work, originally published in book form in 2006 by Apologies Press (Cincinnati) also featured the photographic works of Brad Austin Smith. Sailing along in 9 line stanzas, the work captures the inner talk of a character smitten with another, indeed, saturated by a barrage of thoughts some of which are bright and shining, some catalogs of other things desired, some confused, and by our reading---all being practiced words before the meeting, of course, always inviting. The Three Fools Press Edition of Wahle's The Invitations marks the web debut of the work itself---also marking Wahle's first full length book in electronic format.