John Philip Johnson
is a poet & writer.
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May 2008:
Recent acceptances include Rattle, Ruminate, Chicago Quarerly Review, and a little zombie book called Poems of the Dead which will pay me genuine federal money for a poem, which I can then resell to reprint horror mags for More genuine federal money.
Southern Poetry Review will soon be printing a poem about listening to baseball on the radio, Imagine Crowd Noise. Coming in their spring issue.
Euphony has recently printed a poem sort of about Barney Rubble's disappoinments called Mea Lithos.
New poems with enticing titles, currently circulating amongst the editors:
Star-Eyed Orca
Voodoo Zombies (my other zombie poem)
and
Springtime for Hitler
Newsy title:
Metaphor Default Swaps: "which is about the despicable way poets review each others' works."
Vocab, grammar, art, science games .... Do Good – Play! 
excerpts from a novel
from Hard Lights of Eden:
What was it? It was to awaken a little, then sometime later, to be awakening again. It was like waves breaking on a shore, waves of light, of dark, breaking on a shore that didn't quite exist yet. Waves of on breaking on a shore of off.
And then there was light and dark, now clear and distinct. Not waves. Now it was more like a river. A river of shapes. They were changing, passing by. There were other things, too, in the background, but those things were barely over the threshold of what was noticeable. For the most part, it was shapes. And wonder. Wonder that there was anything at all. The shapes themselves, the light and dark, it hadn't occurred to her to wonder yet what they were. It was just a wonder that they were, that they were at all. It was amazing.
How long this went on is hard to say, because she was not counting time, or marking time, nor did she know yet that there was time. Increments to the pace of change. It was just change. In a way it was a static thing; a thing of changing.
And then, later, the other things began to be noticed over the threshold. Sound. It was like static, or rain, or applause from the unseen hands of angels. It, too, was like a river, and it, too, was moving, though it seemed not to move.
The all-at-onceness of things, rushing and immediate.
She began to discern more and more things. The two rivers, light and sound, were separate things, but they were related. She could think of one and forget the other; and yet, as she forgot it, it was not lost. For she could turn to it again, and - such wonder - there it was. And if she kept them both in mind, it was a strange harmony. Two separate things, yet related.
After a while it became a moment. After a while she began to notice that here and now changed a little from here and then. There was no holding it. It just moved. And she noticed differences in the shapes. Some were long and thin, some were round and bulky. Some moved yet were the same; they were the same even though they changed.
Some of the shapes she began to think of as things. Some of the shapes were the background.
Then she began to notice colors.
Then she began to notice textures of light, and textures of sound.
And so it went for a long while, of noticing things, noticing sounds, colors, shapes, and the way things were connected. Noticing, not noticing, noticing again, and accumulating in memory.
And then something very strange happened. She noticed she was noticing.
She noticed herself.
This was the strangest thing of all. You might say it was like discovering a huge, empty door behind you. A door you couldn't see. A door you didn't know. And to notice with strangeness that the door was you, and yet it wasn't quite there, and all the beautiful things you had been exploring, they were no longer quite you. It was kind of like falling. It was the first shadow, the first bit of separation.
And that took some getting used to.