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  David is a past president of PWLF, editor/publisher of Prism Quarterly, and assistant-editor of both PenChant and pwlf.com. With various others, Pitchford has published several chapbooks:
David has also had the pleasure of publishing chapbooks by other authors:
He assisted with layout and cover design:
Buckie Beaver built a big bungalow down on bayou banks for his big beaver family. It was blue and black and smelled of bluebells and blueberries. But Buckie wasn't built for boredom, and bounded down to Bad Bettie's Big Broad Bordello for bourbon and biscuits. Sadly, that's when he met Henry Hollow of the Harlem Hatters. Buckie Beaver awoke early this morning naked as a naughty jay with his tail gone and no skin on his bones. Buckie's wife Barbi beat his butt badly for hookin' with the johns and losing his hide to horny hatters in a whorehouse.
On my mama’s hip In church one Sunday Preacher-man Jones beat out on his pulpit like he was beatin’ a child gone bad and he went on about the sinnin’ world: "A day will come, my brothers, a day will come when we are called and the Almighty King of Heaven will call to account all that we have done and all that we have willed and all that we have thought and all that we have thought to do and all that we have done without thought. He will call us each by name and reward them that have done good, but punish with furious fire and great vengeance all who have perpetrated evil, all who have not done what was good, all who have sinned against His children, all who have sinned against His Word, and all who have thought to deceive!" But in the eyes of a kindly man, from the lips of a stoned out drunk, God told me one time, "I love even you, My son." And...I believe. T C Baylor
I bore it in mind nine hours for you unusual gestation for psychic offspring sprung from lines imperfectly formed but still it is a labor of wordlove and what is it you print in that pulp of yours if not imaginations’ children gone astray to play upon the page of mind and sight Publish this, my muse’s child with me, foster well her fragile hopes and dreams of one day becoming true poetry
unafflicted with beauty, these German women have a greater facility for pragmatic tasks amazing how they lack any sense of urgency like in the city where cutsie little ladies always seeming barely grown though wise – something like sixteen going on fifty; and yet these German woman cook their meals with a certain dignity more the deliberate creation of art than city fare with its mechanistic assembly the palate agrees on the point of art but argues sublimity in plain-faced women
All the symbols of our age sacrifice and naked man terrible judgement awesome retribution final conflagration Mercy on holiday
But wait, there’s more…
mundane meets divine within the flesh – the Spirit within judgement – condemnation & mercy crossroads heaven meets hell in humans’ being
Who would have thought to paint them in such light? Those far off harpies of the islands, those singers of sailors’ destruction. Only the Master would put them on a dry coast in vermilion seas, and render violet dolphins in the green Delphic waves. Only the Master would give them albatross wings and seafoam hair with kelp and blue conches braided down their naked backs. Who else would tip their breasts in lemon hue? Who but she give them shark-dead eyes and too-thin lips, or stubby noses, sallow cheeks like corpses and still paint them lovely, gay, and alive? Imagine! Some still call her colorblind!
Did I leave her for foolish errands abandon her to wolves of doubt follow myself astray beyond her border and forever sever our bond
On what more than sand foundation her? Words but the bedrock of thoughts and those less than the wind that blows seeds to grow next Spring
Did I lose her, or she me? Was I more lonely with her unrealized or am I now more destitute realizing that she was bubbles’ shadow?
When with faith, I knew nothing to ask; now, sans faith, I have nothing but questions
They stole my name and charged me to dance anonymous no justice garners itself in human company construct of minds too lost on compulsion to understand thundered declarations of empty sky and the born desolation of a waterless hostility whence wars and wars and rumors corporate stockholders in the business of government citizenry in the tax brackets, prisoners of the Reich demand to know where the moneys go Justify your continuing existence! EDUCATION Scolded on the shoulders of soldiers in red bomblight smoking like a camel in a Baghdad firefight on the lips of American troopers where they have no business but that of the Bush regime allowed by the poltroon citizenry to decimate the world for sake of oiling the wheels of commerce in a hyper-fucked economy gone south from forked-tongue Republican accountants funneling soft money from the stock market into illegal palm-tickling campaign financing schemes but that’s ok cause big daddy W’s gonna give us all a check for child-rearing just so’s we can all send em off to war in the name of God and the country for which Glory supposedly stood for separation of god and state but they’re republicans – there is no democracy outside the classroom fascisms of the American schoolroom. Truth ends on the Hill Justice for all – hides behind expensive robes
The American Way Regime change begins at Home Vote!
In the epiphany, Gabriel
came to me
I sing the moth electric in neon green and window pane I celebrate her victory over gravity and mastery of air Oh peasant of the prairie flyers, I give you amnesty You shall remain here unharmed in our presence less molested than the ghosts of ancestors whose words we tongue freely and frolic in from verse to song and on I sing you, oh moth, to the heavens by the muses beyond god and the dust from your wings rouses my passion - I sneeze oh but could I for a moment capture your grandness in this frame and flit about, but know that my divine nature is no less for that incapacity. I remember you to her in whom I deposit the milk of my passion and to all those who listen and heed and read these words carried on sublime nature’s winds through the frequency of phone lines strewn down prairie lanes where your cousins impregnate daisies and flowers and stalks of grain for winter wheat where once the corn, now harvested, stood its triumph under summer sky and drank of dew and suckled mother earth through roots buried in loam sacred as us and inundated with our ancestral past and dust to dust left from an hundred generations of great American men and their lively, sound limbed athletic lovers and wives and sisters bred to breed and sport and fish and hunt and the great beasts that ate of tall grasses here where prairie so long lingered nearer stared heavens under nurture of moonlight twixt down and dawn of sun bright or clouded. Oh, but moth of this hour what fine thoughts you think to me to write upon this screen electric and fill my veins with fire my mind with momentary freedom to wallow in universal streams of adverse consciousness within the limits of reason and beyond constraints of those who fear that moths come for just to eat of fine threads and corrupt what is good and valued. Oh, piteous great moth how small you are yet lovely in your stature and flight to so strike fear into the hearts of greedy rich who hide their finery in cedar to keep you out and away I sing you once more electric, oh butterfly of majestic night!
Oh That my Soul in Respite Find its Place
What bitter wind this autumn morn doth blow and stench of staunch decay – black day, black day and half the rotten morning left to go! Just lay me back to bed to sleep away this hellish indisposition. I rage at such momentous trivialities as milk spilt or the bending of a page in a book too dull to read. Reality’s too much a concrete bastion against dreams and my mind tortures itself to escape what traps it alone has built, all its screams internal dialogue of raging scrape
Please that such thoughts succumbed to greater grace Oh let my soul in respite find its place Back to the Index
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