BIOGRAPHY
After dallying in the Appalachian foothills and surviving the coal halls of the University of Scranton, Gabriel Sebastian, gill-stuffed enough to have something to write about, began the Westchester Writers Workshop circa 2012.
Out of this local laboratory, confetti got born, and this collaborative literary endeavor suffers Sebastian as its editor-in-chief.
Sebastian is a bold wordsmith, and after a bare-knuckled brawl with the Beat Poets, decided this dystopian world sorely needed more absurdity and surrealism.
His guilty pleasure is fantasy, and he is currently pounding out a novel chained to his desk, one of the infinite monkeys of yore.
INTERVIEW
confetti: What sparked your interest in poetry, and who was your earliest influence?
Gabriel Sebastian (GS): Music. No doubt. I grew up immersed in music and reading lyrics whenever I could. One might say Jim Morrison was the first poet I’d admired but you certainly cannot discount the Beatles. I brought “Horse Latitudes” to my sophomore English class. Outside of music, the first canonic poet I discovered was Andrew Marvell. My young libido latched onto the idea that poetry might be a good way to charm. Schooling also forced Shakespeare upon me early, so the bard, no doubt, is also responsible for my poetic antics.
confetti: How would you characterize your writing style? What are you working on currently, and what can readers expect from you in the future?
(GS): I’ve gone through a few poetry writing phases over the years. Two “styles” I’ve had a penchant for are “dystopian” and “surrealist.” I wanted to write poetry like Salvador Dali painted – absurd, multi-perspective, psychedelic. My master’s thesis developed the idea of dystopian critical theory and while immersed in that project, I wrote poems reflecting the genre and exploring our own dystopia. Currently writing a fantasy novel and looking to publish the sci-fi anthology, The Möbius Sequence.
confetti: Who is your favorite poet and why?
(GS): Charles Bukowski. Why? Read him and find out. As a caveat, I think the best poet is Wallace Stevens, but Bukowski, favorite. Bukowski proves poetry can encompass real life. If you haven’t seen the movie Barfly, you just don’t know.
confetti: Is poetry still relevant in our society? How? How do you think poetry can be used to challenge or subvert societal or personal norms or expectations?
(GS): Yes and no. Again, I think poetry lives more in music than anywhere else. Perhaps unrelated, but to answer how poetry affects society and in what form, I think in terms of wordsmithing, subversion, expression – poetics now resides in comedy. Comics are the new minstrels, bards, and jesters, taking on hidden meanings and ironic satires and control of language.
There exists a huge community of poets online, certainly, but I tend to think everyone is giving poetry, rather than reading it. We’re all actors in search of an audience, and these days, readers are in short supply. Poetry and poets need to overcome the belief most people I’ve encountered spout: “I don’t get poetry.” I won’t go further down that rabbit hole, but unless we reconcile education, tech, and attention, poetry and reading are both dying.
confetti: Favorite poem or style of poetry?
(GS): Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” A close second is Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!” I love poems that make me work, puzzles to be solved. We’ve recently added the ability to share audio here at confetti, and after listening to William S. Burroughs’ Dead City Radio, why everyone isn’t making audio versions of poems is perfidy.
confetti: What are you currently reading?
(GS): Numerous submissions to confetti. This monopolizes most of my free reading time. Though my nightstand bedtime reading is Steven Erikson’s series “The Malazan Book of the Fallen”. I am currently on book eight, Toll the Hounds. Fantasy is my guilty pleasure.
confetti: What are your three favorite books?
(GS): Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Gardner’s Grendel and Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Lies.
confetti: What are your three favorite movies?
(GS): Caligula. How can you not love Malcolm McDowell in a movie that has it all? War, sex, corruption, intrigue, comedy, history.
Frankenhooker – satiric re-imagining of the “horror” classic. Pure high/low comedy.
For writers – if you have not watched Henry Fool, do yourself a favor and make Hal Hartley’s cult classic your next movie night feature. If you’ve ever thought your work publish-worthy, this film is must-see.
confetti: What is your favorite song of all time?
(GS): I used to find it hysterical that any poet or author who had difficulty choosing one favorite song would find this question difficult. But now in the face of this singular conundrum I feel ashamed of my previous bemused derision. But here goes!
Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick.” There I said it. I pulled the trigger. I committed. Ian Anderson’s Masterpiece. Rock, folk, classical, lyrical – ultimately this song defies genre classification. The album jacket claims the song is an adaptation of a poem written by 8-year-old genius Gerald Bostock. This fabulation had teenage me captivated right from the start. An epic 44 minutes long, “Thick as a Brick” takes listeners there and back and I all can muster to say without rambling on is “emotionally audacious.”
confetti: What advice would you give to young writers/poets?
(GS): Submit to confetti. And read.
POETRY
(from the Book of) Virtual Revelations, (the) Digital Apocalypse:
(An) Automaton’s Epiphany
So it all goes bad.
First, the cattle quit the pastures,
their milk soured.
No witches left to blame,
their numbers long claimed
by pyre and flame
spent on neurotic extinction, charring addiction, fire fetishes.
What idea is carpenter bee?
Bore hole.
Wood groove.
Hayloft beam.
White milk house on red barn.
Planks and bounties, floating farms, main mast crucifix hayfork.
Sunken ships of state,
federal case, writs, arguments
all hold no water.
Narwhal skewers liferaft
believing itself a unicorn
and Gilligan and Skipper are drowned.
Where’s the first mate? Queequeg’s dead.
Celebrity heads on pikes line the avenue,
walk of fame.
Tourist paint digital portraits, vanity shots,
posing with decapitated pretenders
purple and bloated.
The capitol’s burning.
Gross comedians are put to death for fear of the second coming.
Jester incarnate. Laughable salvation.
No one dared speak of churches or brick walled clubs.
Libraries became hot spot victims, suffered rapid oxidation, too.
So much for the digital age, then,
when eyeballs were all plucked and used for marble games in the virtual dust.
Virtual treasure filled virtual vaults and the keyboard clacking poor had no virtual coin to spend.
Not so funny anymore. Does X still mark the spot for pixel pirates?
In the end wasn’t the word and the word was nothing.
The subtext is lost.
The end is digital hell.
01110000 01110010 01100001 01111001
Who’s left?
Hairless pygmies and mud men
engaging in muted fornication,
bellowing impotence
the dying breath of us,
ghost gasp of aphasic animals
carnal conjugation to abject extinction.
Who else?
The last winners, owl worshippers, dragon riders, butterfly slayers.
When the tide rushed in to fill absurdity void,
they struck out for the stars.
Riding phallic space rockets for to impregnate the moon.
They erected New Babylon, New Sodom, and New Vegas.
She cracked like an egg.
And so, the seed having spilled upon space, humanity spent,
no tears were wept,
and out of earshot,
the pulsating universe never missed a measure.
Of Suns and Stars
At the center of the universe
four interdimensional suns
dancing in war
caught in cyclical apocalypse and creation
of all.
The first, Phallux Allegro Draconius,
white hot and blue, pulsing devil
furious dervish, forcing bleach light into cosmos
needing to cleanse shadow by
sheer force of will and heat
He is the youngest, with everything to prove.
Black Stjarna,
swallowing, collapsing, pouring in and pouring in,
in upon herself,
ever greedy, the open singularity empty massive.
She is past and future and never now.
Omega Majoris,
the ancient one, ponderous,
churning slowly drunken
grinding halting energy, fat with saturnine power
full in time
and red.
His story lost.
I am, the fourth.
pyre mind, metaphysical ontology personified in sphere
screaming in the solitude of consciousness,
looking upon myself as other looking upon myself.
Am I all there is?
Möbius Universe
choking on my own tail
suns and moons inside
indulge me choking
A sea of dust
huddled leprous bedouins scavenge the night sky…
(What’s a star but a sun?)
Galactic tidal forces push a sea
of suns and moons.
My perception stabs a wheel inside itself,
looking both ways.
Down,
Down,
Down,
your atoms,
your protons and neutrons,
are the suns of this galaxy
are the whirling nuclei of your atoms.
What you do to universe you do to yourself.
Time’s pulled inside out
folded in on itself
inside itself
moving sideways in time is not just stepping aside.
We perceive it linearly because our faces face forward,
future ahead of our past back
but if we had flounder faces
eyes on the sides
Time would be an endless plain – future above and past below.
If we had chameleon eyes that swiveled
Time would be a sphere.
Up a bone or down,
non-linear is just too dirty
so we’re stuck in a line.
T I M E
I M
M I
E M I T
Crucible Embrace of the Stellar Forge
beneath the flames of the sun
lies a globe of metal dearly won
one machine belching out an inferno
spewing forth radiating near eternal
inside the works
live the monks
who don’t know
why it works
make it work
make it work
one machine
we don’t know how to fix
they all cry in their sleep
as the works
turn and grind
all the fears
of the monks
how the worlds will all weep
if the globe
in the sun
had been freed
from its works
make it work
Futility in C Major. Or, This Purgatory Earth
See operatic deviltry in robot precision. Use your opera glasses.
Tune overtures of impending malaise and,
take these satyr dreams
hidden in the corners
of shame eyes.
Sacrifice without prejudice or malice
in supplication
of monotheistic notions of virtue.
Drink of this absurd chalice and sate
abject desires of redundant circles.
Ain’t they just,
just like
afraid?
Ain’t they distracted? Where’s the playbill?
Sacred bled out
of wrist wounds
self-administered in helpless hope
of nothing
sacred.
In a world where God is dead
anything goes.
But might don’t make right now,
do it? Just try and dissent.
Whim and whimsy are kissing cousins in incestuous
slippery morality. Order and therapy are the new bully police.
Cred and Credibility – a ghetto thug Jane Austin best seller.
Tragedy plays best in poor neighborhoods.
The masses are opiated. Lingering junkie joneses
on screen and off. Chattering recitatives go unheard.
Naked emperors shame populace for
dirty mouths. Sewn mine shut in anticipation.
The mostly peaceful city burns.
The aria’s already written, the fat lady spent,
just an aside
and bit parts
of this our pointless melodrama, pointed.
“To Hear” Artwork by Donald Patten
They say the heavens are clockworks.
They say the heavens are clockworks.
Stars spin and nebulas whirl in syncopation. Set your watch by the cosmos.
A trick of twirl and nimbulous.
starlight directly in your eye.
Billions of lightyears to travel and in this instant, space-time hits your pupil.
Madness.
Professor Richard Elsewhere,
eye in the aperture of the Greater Lower Valley Mountain Observatory
bombastic Gideon Mega Electron Telescope,
a lone tear upon his cheek,
knew exactly then his place
in this
immeasurable, insensible universe.
And so what?
Madness.
“Retract the dome, Professor, and head on home for a beer or two on your couch.”
Poetry © 2025 Gabriel Sebastian. All rights reserved.
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