Mad Swirl

"I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable." Richard Avedon ••• The Mad Gallery ••• "On the Clock" ~ Howie Good To see all of Howie's mad collages, as well as our other resident artists (50+ and counting!) take a virtual stroll thru Mad Swirl’s Mad Gallery! ••• The Poetry Forum ••• This past week[read more]

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! The Best of Mad Swirl : v2021 is available right HERE! 2021 has been yet another extraordinarily challenging year. Thru it all, Mad Swirl was there, every one of the 365 days of it. We didn’t miss a beat. Those beats are what you’ll get when you dig into 2021's best[read more]

I Garden Weeds by Ethan Goffman Cyberwit.net (October 25, 2021) Available at Amazon Imagine a wry resignation to the inevitability of death, time, and change. A calico moment of enlightenment when cat jumps in lap at the strike of a gong. Imagine a morbid fascination with spirals; the spinning of galaxies, hurricanes, dishwater circling the drain. Imagine[read more]

The mascot for the Apopka Spuds baseball team was helping the team prepare for the season opener. The hated Zellwood Zephyr was in town. Irwin “Sport” Cotes, a twelve-year-old fan, was the mascot for the upcoming 1905 season. He functioned as the batboy, errand boy, and did whatever was asked of him. Team manager Hiram “Ducky” Dooley took roll call in the dugout. There was no answer when he called out for third baseman Twiddle Johan. Dooley eyed his seventeen players and his assistant coach, “Do any of you rusty guts[read more]

Monday Without warning, the box explodes. Birds pour out, flood the room, then settle. I prod one; it whirs, re-settles. Not birds at all, but yellow, fist-sized drones. Kathy dashes in. “What’s going on, grandpa?” Her eyes light up. “Hey, Dronedogs!” A latecomer rises from the box and lands on her head. “Dronedogs?” My ten-year-old granddaughter rolls her eyes. “Flying sheepdogs. Do you live under a rock?” To her I am Methuselah. “Are they for Fuggles and Dot?” she asks. The mists clear. Responding to a call for Amazon reviewers, I flexed the truth: my urban back[read more]

I clean psych wards. That’s my job.  Once a week, I depill. For four separate wards in the county. I go from room to room and look for pills. They’re everywhere. The patients hide them in plants, behind the toilet, under the toilet cover, in gum stuck under the toilet rim, in every single crevice of their mattress. I’ve shaken a mattress and practically had a meth lab fall out. They put so many pills in their pillows that I started to wonder if that’s how pill-ow got the name.[read more]