Five Things Inglese

This is Five Things, Karl Guillen's latest work. It's a full collection of poems written within the latest years, and released by the Humanist publisher Multimage. Here you can see its cover featuring the writer's picture on the back (left), one of his well known roses on the front (right) and the poem The Snowman in the middle.
The material is wide, so it was necessary to split the manuscript into two small volumes, you can buy separately, featuring the original text and its translation on the front.
Five Things is also a quite new editorial product because it's part of the Multimage new pocket-book series called 100 Pages, available either in its electronic or traditional format.
The 100 Pages books, (size A5, pages from 70 to 130, two colours cover) are available on the Multimage web site as electronic books shareware, at the same time you can order the hard-copy format via Internet, easily receiving them at your home within few days. If you want to check out the book you can download the PDF file from the net. After reading it, if you think it's good, you can buy its electronic version, or order its hard-copy format.
The 100 Pages books, as all the Multimage issues, support the "10%" campaign, that's: at least the 10% of its price is intended for social or cultural benefit. Obviously as far as Karl is concerned, all the sales' proceeds are given to him.
Five Things price is $10 US dollars per volume (S.H. included). Suggested price of the electronic version PDF: $3 US dollars per volume, and it can be downloaded, and ordered via the Multimage web site.

Who read the previous work by Karl, The Grinder, knows that the writer is detained, innocent, in a special management unit in Arizona, and that he's trying to sell his books to be able to hire an attorney, thus hoping to get his sentence reduced, or he'll be trapped inside till 2013. Five Things is a collection of poems also born within these jail walls, from the despair of a man who found, in his daily tragedy, the strength to fight silently, discovering an unexpected talent, and a new passion which has grown into a new reason to live.
Thinking about poems you may believe they're something less important than the well-known and very appreciated The Grinder, but it's a wrong idea. Obviously this is a more intimate, and less cracking work, but the matrix it was born from is the same; the pain, and the involvement of the writer are the same, with the same excellent outcome. They're impressive poems, prompting reflection, and they perfectly support The Grinder in its fight against the death penalty and the violation of the human rights of the people imprisoned in the world; but here the tragedy doesn't strike the reader straight into the face, here the tragedy is checked out drop by drop like blood dripping from a wound which cannot heal yet. It's a slow painful ooze which risks compromising the mental and physical health of the writer unless his situation changes somehow.

The title refers to the 5 chapters dividing the poems. The first two chapters, present in the first volume, are: A Little Of Me, and Came To Mind. The main chapter is A Little Of Me, and it's dedicated to Karl's tragedy, from his arrest till the well known Last Words, the requiem closing The Grinder. Came To Mind is about his more intimate life: his birth, the relationship with himself, his family memories, and the daily life outside, full of things taken for granted by those who are free, but precious to the one who lost the freedom.
The second volume features the three last chapters: Her Thoughts In My Head; Two Sides Of Love: Together; Two Sides Of Love: A-Parting. Her Thoughts In My Head is a series of poems dedicated to the woman: the friend, the wife, the mother, the daughter. Here the woman is considered in a sweet and deeply sympathetic way. The writer loves her, admires her strength, and feels sorry for the pain peculiar to her feminine condition. Two Sides Of Love: Together is dedicated to the couple, to love, and eroticism. I Two Sides Of Love: A-Parting is about the loneliness, of course, and the inability to love, about the couple in crisis and split either by the death or by the lack of communication.

Karl Louis Guillen was born on the 25th of August 1967 in California. He's been imprisoned 7 years, innocent, in solitary confinement at the Special Management Unit Two in Florence Arizona (USA), and bound until 2013, unless his situation changes. He also risked being sentenced of death for a crime he didn't commit. In prison he started to write and grew into a first-rate writer with novels, arrangements and poems to his credit.
The Grinder was his first book, his biography, and was released in Italy by Multimage under the name of Il Tritacarne. This book features his poems' full collection. Its sales' proceeds, alike the other writings', will help him to pay an attorney. Currently the writer has no defence and can afford neither an appeal, or request a reduction of sentences.

And now you can read one poem from every chapter:

From, A Little Of Me: My Poem*

My poem
is the lost ship
that shall never again see the waves
or feel the splashes against its hull.
Never more to hear the cannon shot,
feel the puncturing of oaken flesh
and the compression of air and sea
as all hands fall below.
For upon this barbed rock
I'm ground.
The tide leaves me gently, like a razors slice,
the sea bleeding away,
surrendering my hull to the sky,
yonder blue beckoning...
to another sea, another home.

* This poem was picked out by the International Library of Poetry for a three album collection on Cd and cassette called
The Sound of Poetry that you can order here.

From, Came To Mind: To Live

Amongst the flowers,
roses and violets sweet in the air.
A lovers gaze,
fingers through your silken hair...
Breathing the fond smells,
hearing the traffic in the streets,
walking hand in hand along the shores,
smiling at people you meet...
Those touches, those scents,
simple things taken for granted,
like seeds left unsown, unwatered,
withering before they're planted...
To live is to blossom and grow,
to feel love, to be sad, or even cry,
for though we are blessed with all this,
to live, we all must die...
So live...

From, Her Thoughts In My Head: The Whore

She awaits him
entering, thinking herself inviolate
because the bills on the table
say she chose.
To be spread, vulnerable,
open to the chills,
arms and legs entangled,
viewed coldly, like some Picasso whore.
Such sweet butterfly wings,
burning out that which is once,
or maybe twice,
where love sneaks up on us all.
But love has fled, like the
angry hiss of a ship sinking below
the black seas, cold, constantly
touching...caressing...plunging...

From, Two Sides Of Love-Together: Je Ne Parle Pas/I Do Not Speak

I fear no man,
but what man becomes.
I fear no death,
but the loss of each day's sun.
I fear no threat of war,
but what war will make of me.
I fear not the fog that clouds,
but that I may not be able to see.
I fear not the malevolent forces,
but that angels may disappear.
It is too much within me I grasp
to know exactly what I fear.
I fear your words, your promises,
but bask in their mean.
I fear your captive face alight,
but not the pictures I see.
I fear of loving, and hope
of dreams and such.
I fear of knowing and loving you
and never feeling a gentle touch.

From, Two Sides Of Love: A-Parting: A Soil Of Less Than Fertile Means

I once held a rose,
so delicate, petals like the softest down,
a slight stem upon which my rough hands
laid, trembling, trying not to interrupt her beauty.
My toil and careful tending were not enough,
a keeper of too fragile a soul,
like aging castles in which bones dust,
whisps of cold winds scattering the chips,
of such fine spirit a time ago.
Before my eyes she was all,
the dew upon her soft skin,
my nourishment and my love,
a billion sunrises could not compare.
To keep her planted in my garden, I fretted,
fighting within my home far from her,
at night her sweet scents in my dreams,
each day my lonely nightmare
of frustration and self-pity.
Each soft touch of petals upon my skin,
a warm memory of an age ago,
and slower each day, my dying breaths come
as I watch her grow, more beautiful than the day before,
far away from me,
this soil of less than fertile means.

This poetry collection was published by Multimage with the collaboration of the Committee For The Defence Of Karl Louis Guillen, ande the Committee For The Defence Of Inmates-ONLUS. The sales' proceeds will go to Karl to enable him to turn back to be a free man.

Committe For The Defence Of Karl L. Guillen, c/o Daniela Annetta - V.le dei Mille, 58 Firenze - Italy

SECTIONS OF THIS PAGE:
INTRODUCTION - PREFACE - MY POEM - TO LIVE - THE WHORE - I DO NOT SPEAK - A SOIL LESS THAN FERTILE MEANS