Hello, I am G.M.H. Thompson. I have been published in a number of different publications that few people have read or even heard of. I have a chapbook out entitled Yard Sale at the Devil’s Petting Zoo that perhaps 30 people have leafed through. I was nominated for a Pushcart once, but didn’t win it.

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. When I was eight, I moved with my family to St. Louis, Missouri. I then received my Bachelor’s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I learned little. Then I learned how to play guitar in empty rooms in St. Louis. I currently teach English in Hà Nội, but come August, I will be teaching in Beijing, if all goes right.

I enjoy the poetry of Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Plath, Tennyson, & many, many others. I also enjoy music, especially rock ‘n’ roll. I myself play music and have written a number of songs and albums that no one has listened to. Yet I enjoy playing music live, and have traveled to a few different countries to do so, even playing a few sets in small bars in Tokyo.

     A Bite of Bitter Dark Chocolate

blonde wood
snapping
the earth
rocks breaking
crumbling monuments
a slate tiled roof
tectonic plates
tilling the fields in march
a mud slide
a river in Africa
a Nordic beach—
barren, haunting, & desolate.

Civilization & The Barbaric Art

The first cave paintings all are of animals
which our prehistoric relatives hunted
& now nothing lives in the Saharan caverns
that house many of those primitive images,
for long ago, the Sahara was green & lush,
& perhaps that's what the Garden of Eden
really means-- an ancestral memory of when
giraffes & antelope roamed these harsh sands
& magicians made their shapes upon the wall
to conjure the beasts into the hunters' hands,
& some say Shakespeare loved poaching deer,
& that a Sir Thomas Lucy often beat him for it
& may have even forced him to flee to London
where he joined the Theatre, changing English evermore.

To   S.    F.  ,

                          whom I never met properly

You always stared at me as though
I was some strange, infernal brute,—
a monster or your father’s ghost— :

waiting to hear the man who wrote
The House of Sand & Fog, your eyes
like moons or headlights tripped on mine,

like when I climbed the stairs & you
were there;—  you were Chief Editor
yet startled when I mimed knocking

and I recall when you confessed
to have no one with whom to dance
as awkward silence drank the class— 

I said nothing although I shared
that depressing state of affairs.