Made for Pulp—It Came to Him in a Dream

 

This blog post exists exclusively because a friend posted on Facebook a nifty toy—a program to create your own old time lurid pulp magazine cover.  The opportunity was too great to pass up, even if the options were limited classic ray gun and rocket ship science fiction.  Not the best fit for the poem that immediately leapt to mind which seemed to cry out for the pulp treatment.

Here’s hoping that the folks at webomator.com’s Pulp-O-Mizer soon add other classic pulp genres—gothic, mystery, western, adventure, romance, and the one I really needed, hard-boiled detective.

It was like trying to pound a square peg into the proverbial round hole to make the sci-fi theme fit the poem.  But it was too much fun to resist.  See the results above.

As for the poem, it actually did come to me in a dream, or at least the catch phrase “Beckon the Night.”  Quite early one morning I woke up suddenly with the phrase in my head and headed directly to the computer to pound out some verse, which subsequently underwent far less than usual editing and revising.

It was directly inspired by film noir—but that genre had its roots and got most of its stories from cheap detective pulp magazines.  The two forms were meant for each other.

It Came to Him in a Dream

“It came to him in a dream!”

The urgent, rumbling voice intones,

architectural letters scroll the screen—

            Beckon the Night.

This gift of Morpheus

sticking, as almost nothing ever does

when brought bolt upright

by an insistent alarm.

I’ll need a double shot

of Dashiell Hammett for this,

pulled from the second desk draw

next to the snub nose

poured into a greasy tumbler.

And a dame, gotta have a dame,

ash blonde and weeping

wreathed in Herbert Tareyton garlands.

A snap brim hat and trench coat,

’41 Ford Coupe headlights

to glimmer on wet pavement,

a bluesy cornet riff.

What else ya’ gonna do with

            Beckon  the Night?

Write a goddam fairy tale?

—Patrick Murfin