Mel C Thompson: 9 books

These love poems were inspired by my admiration for three people who had been, in the early 1990s, regular performers in the Café Babar poetry scene, but have since passed on. The book was inspired by my profound sense of loss when the news came in from Michigan that Dominique Lowell had passed on...

Like countless millions before me, I was quite fascinated with Eliot's "Wasteland," and his "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and I sought to do a kind of tribute and parody of it. While I barely even quote more than a few words, here and there, from the poem, and while almost...

Guilty Sinner has a problem with his homeland. His homeland could have been some version of Orange County in the 1970s or the Bay Area of today. It's an inhospitable place, an emotional desert, where only economic victory is rewarded and where no excuses are allowed for failure. It's a humorless,...

You are always in some combination of medieval Japan or modern Los Angeles. At every turn there is someone leading you either to the highest transcendent state or into inexcusable vice, or some combination of both. In the final analysis, ancient Kyoto and current Santa Monica are one reality. Inebriation...

An anxiety-disordered poet sedates himself with multiple glasses of chardonnay and boards a nonstop flight from SFO to YEG and writes two cycles of short, spontaneous poems as he scours the greater Edmonton metro area for phenomena that will inspire his unruly and jaded mind. This collection of five-line...

A crippled, anxiety-ridden, precocious, apostate youth minister leaves his ministry to become a motel desk clerk in a sometimes tacky / sometimes upscale tourist motel in suburban Orange County. He lumbers around in a full-length walking cast as his fragile leg-bones are resistant to healing. His...

Wage Slave is born deformed to a family of heavy drinkers. His mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. He is mentally ill and disabled, but he is can't afford good enough doctors to make his disability case, so he lives in the netherworld between unemployment and disability. The pressure of not being...

A naked Jain holy man is brought back from the ancient past, and a half-discredited Los Angeles Zen monk is transported from the future. They arrive at Joshua's military encampment just before he is to cross the Jordan and conquer the Holy Land. However, since no such destructive invasion, such as...

In this fantasy, "the gods" allow the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to go back in time to fulfill a wish that had been denied him when visiting the U.S. The original plot was the brainchild of a history buff who said to me on the phone one night that it had always bothered him that...