Jon-Paul Smith

  THE PHRASE “BUKOWSKI KICKING DOWN WHITMAN’S DOOR” IS TAKEN. YOU CAN’T USE IT. A warning for anyone out there trying to get published in the poetry world. The phrase “Bukowski kicking down Whitman’s door” is taken. You can’t use it. Not because it’s mine. I can’t use it either. That phrase was AI generated. Which kinda sucks because it’s a cool phrase. Here’s how it went down. I wrote a poem called “Ode To My Cock” in a kind of lilting Whitman style, ran it through an LLM for feedback and when we got to the line “I’ve got a snake in my britches” the AI had this to say: “This is not a tonal error. This is Bukowski kicking down Whitman’s door.” Keep in mind this was all part of a broader conversation, a back and forth that would probably fill volumes in its own right. And now you can’t use it whether you’re writing about my cock or not (although I strongly encourage you to - it’s a gripping subject. Really. I looked it up.) Anyway, I liked the phrase so much that I u...

Elmore Leonard’s Night Before Christmas Author’s Note: This short story is the result of a writing challenge.  A close friend of mine, who likes to throw these challenges out there to his writer friends, asked me if I would be willing to do a rewrite of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” using the writing style of a favorite author.  I told him that one of my favorite writers was Elmore Leonard.  He said cool, do that.  Hemingway was already taken anyway. He showed me the Hemingway version that someone did and it was pretty much a straightforward rewrite using Hemingway's prose style.  That was way too boring for my tastes so when I got home I sat down, started doodling, and when I was about four hundred words in I sent my friend a message on Facebook letting him know that I hadn’t even bothered to re-read the source material yet. That’s just how I roll, ya’ll.  We both thought it was pretty funny. Anyway by the time I had the story more tha...

When I turned fourteen my step dad came in one day, stinking of weed and beer, loosened his tie and said “you’re fourteen now, we need to get you some pussy.” My step dad worked at the time for Burroughs Corporation selling check signers.   Those are machines that sign checks.   Yeah, I know, it sounds like something from Mad Magazine these days, like a cartoon profession or something, but I swear on everything that’s holy it’s what he actually did.   Apparently, and I didn’t know this at the time, if a company has to issue a large number of payroll checks they don’t actually sign them all by hand.   They use a check signer and the machine they use contains something called a signature plate - which is a watermarked metal stamp used to print the signature on each individual actual check. He also smoked a lot of weed. According to my mom he has also had a little dick. If you think that’s too much information then we park our cars in the same garage. My mother was neve...