Reading the poems and short stories of Michael Phillips is like watching a porno movie.
Life doesn't get much more graphic and raw than the images found in his creations.
Skilled at the art of irony, Phillips writes with an undertone of cynicism and biting truth that has a way of staying in your thoughts the same way the taste of cough syrup lingers in your throat. Each poem is a photograph. Each story is like a ride on a ten-speed bike. You're sitting on the handlebars and Phillips, in his understated way, is doing the steering.
"I think of everything in terms of how I'm going to mess it up in a poem and how I am going to alienate whoever is involved by telling the truth in a poem or a story," says Phillips over the telephone from his home in Los Angles.
After reading his stories and his poems one conjures up the image of a true pessimist. Someone who is never surprised anymore. Someone who is standing back watching everything and then goes home to document the aftermath and divergence of what he has witnessed. Phillips never seemingly stands in front demanding to be seen or understood by the reader. He's the enigma who tells stories. His stories are vivid, there's not a lot of room for misconceiving his words. But you can't help wondering what his intentions are. And wondering always leads to analyzing...
"I don't put as much thought into writing poems and stories as you put into deconstructing them," he said after my long rambling about what I thought he was trying to accomplish with his writing. "I write so organically. I didn't set out to be a writer. I just type these things as they come to me."
Before he began writing, Phillips spent years as a musician. In his bio, placed at the back of his book alternative man, Phillips writes:
There's something very depressing to me about musicians in their
mid/late thirties The ticking of the clock gets too loud, and it throws
off your rhythm. Besides for me, the romantic allure of sleeping in a cold,
stinky van full of cold, stinky musicians evaporated a long time ago.
I went from being a 1 7 year old in a punk band, all the way to being a
30 year old in a reggae band, and I didn't see anywhere to go from there.