It’s distressing when somebody says something offensive. Your face flushes; your heartbeat goes up; it’s like getting mild exercise, or drinking coffee. Here’s a song for those occasions.

The fifteenth issue of The Black Scat Review is out! This one is subtitled “More Utter Nonsense,” and includes my poem “Pan and Kettle,” as well as my translations of two monologues by Charles Cros, “The Man with His Feet Turned Around” and “The Man Who Made a Discovery.” The other contributors are Edward Ahern, Paulo Brito, Giada Cattaneo, Norman Conquest, Falconhead, Farewell Debut, Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe, Michael Leigh, Jason E. Rolfe, Mercie Pedro e Silva, and Carla M. Wilson.

It’s available from Black Scat Books: $18 for a print copy and $5 for a digital.

A piece for viola and piano; an octatonic theme harmonized and turned into a canon.

A drowsy little piece for piano, recommended for nap time. The title comes from Keats. Thanks, Keats.

From my conservatory days, an idea for a graphic score notated on flipbooks. I did this for my freshman composition class, and it made a cheery racket.

I think that if I’d lived in NYC any longer, I would have ended up gouging out someone’s eyes. Here I can purge those fantasies in a song.

A plea for tolerance: remember, someone who disagrees with you may simply have his head up his ass.

A song about the universe.

Sleepytime Cemetery is now available! In the words of Black Scat Books, “In this new collection of short stories by the author of The Doug Skinner Dossier, you’ll discover a world of ostensibly human specimens behaving in peculiar and unpredictable ways. However, they are often recognizable in a manner we dare not admit. Skinner’s dark humor is deceptively playful and childlike, and that makes our bursts of laughter all the more disturbing. These 40 tales are guaranteed to disconcert and astonish.”

Available from Black Scat Books, or from Amazon.

When I was a kid, I had a picture book of prehistoric animals, and was fascinated by the Paraceratherium (or Baluchitherium). It was the largest land mammal known, a long-necked ancestor of the rhinoceros that stood as high at eighteen feet at the shoulder. I finally made one into a cartoon character, named Papi. Here are some sketches from the sketchbook.