Afternoon Hero explores the exquisite tension between self-image and what’s left of that image after a healthy dose of societal scarring. You see yourself one way, society bitch slaps you into pretending to be something so foreign you no longer know yourself. Sometimes you get music out of that awful dissonance. Sometimes you just go mad. The songs are funny and odd and angry and sad and sweet and rock as hard as anybody has a right to rock. Five song EP. Total length: 27:11. Available from Amazon, iTunes and Spotify.

Enemy Glory Darkly Blessed is a progressive rock concept album based on incidents in the first two books of the Enemy Glory trilogy. It is a rewritten, rearranged version of our 1996 release, Enemy Glory, with several new songs. 14 songs and two spoken word pieces. Total length: 50:53. Available from Amazon, iTunes and Spotify.

A virulent, hard, progressive-edged rock odyssey through the myth cycles of Apollo and Dionysus. Shattered gods, fallen heroes, and music that rocks with the tension between reason and passion. This hard, beautiful, and uncompromising album contains rock paeans to the sun god who watched his lover buried alive because he couldn’t bear loving a woman more beautiful than himself, to Dionysus the eternally unrecognized dark in the spaces of Carnival, to Hypatia the last Pagan philosopher who was violently destroyed for her great learning, and to many other figures out of Greek myth and legend. An extended Homeric rock meditation on the loss of heroes and the meaning of the ancient myths to an age of disbelief. 10 songs. Total length: 56:16. Available from Amazon, iTunes and Spotify.

Enemy Glory is an art rock / adventure rock concept album based on the first two books of my fantasy trilogy of the same title. The songs convey selected emotional experiences from the characters’ various points of view. Come, lose yourself in a world of hard, progressive-edged rock, strange tales, and bardic magic. 13 songs and two spoken word pieces. Total length: 49:46 Available from Amazon, iTunes and Spotify.

A compilation of live spoken word performances from the Boston poetry scene, recorded at The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge MA on November 1 and November 8, 1998.

The Lounge was a bastion of bohemianism, Beat poetry, and mid-century jazz (all still thriving there in the late ‘90s) – where a decades-old underground scene that had all but passed into history was having an extended encounter with its newest (and possibly last) incarnation. Point of Ares played there occasionally, hosted by the Jeff Robinson Trio (the pairing of hard rock with Charlie Parker influenced jazz could only make sense at the Lounge). Both bands back poets on Spoken Live! I also contributed a spoken word piece called “Track” from a section of Enemy Glory in which Llewelyn describes a hallucinogenic experience he has while listening to Ellisand play the lyre.

Spoken Live! went dark for a long time, but it has now been resurrected by Elaine Maria Shelton Speller (aka E), whose dynamic performance of her poem,“Picasso the Bohemian,” creates the sensation of slipping and falling into a modernist painting made of words. In the spirit of bohemia, E has made free downloads available on her trippy, hypnotic, multi-media, reality-bending immersive website, trenchpeople.com.

Here be charm, street charm. Here be poets and broken lights and broken tongues in the street language of divinity, in the splatter and dash of words rising out of the underground as words always did and always will. All is language, all is buried, all is the primal urban street speaking now and again and always. In all ways. We are whispering and screaming the ancient holy names of the City. All of them. Or they scream through us and our tongues catch them as they can. Four thousand years back from now we are chanting out of the fire and mud temples of the beginning, when the spoken word made the first City happen and the underground staked its claim on history. Indo-European into Greek into Roman into American into whatever is next. And now from a stage of dusk and whiskey in the open throat of Boston we catch the language again as it moves here and out into the next energy space of the next millennium. It was the Word that said “let there be light” and so the Word was God. From Sumeria 4000 BCE to Boston 1998, the Word continues in the holy stream and rush of poetry, the rushlight of words that here, now, o my brothers and sisters, burns like another heaven insistently into ours.

Not a Point of Ares release. Of No Importance is my reading of a short story I wrote in the style of the literary fairy tales of Oscar Wilde. In this tale-within-a-tale, a fictionalized version of Wilde relates a strange story over tea to his famous character, the Happy Prince, and to another, decidedly unhappy, companion. It is a tale of magic and intrigue and concerns a young princess who danced so well and so beautifully that envy and ignorance destroyed her. Or did the princess dance to destroy herself? 

Opening lines:

And so Oscar Wilde is sitting on one side of me and the eyeless Happy Prince with his broken heart is sitting on the other. Our little table is fierce with roses – the kind of roses the nightingale pierced her heart and sang for as she died into dawn and her life’s blood colored them red. We are drinking arsenic and lead and discussing the nature of want. There is a dead swallow on the Happy Prince’s plate with a sapphire in its bony beak pointed towards Oscar. It is that kind of day.

Audiobook. One short story. Available from Amazon.