Dan Schneider' writings have been published in a number of magazines, journals, and anthologies 
(UCLA's Journal of the American Indian, Argestes, Curbside Review, Plagiarist.com, Hackwriters.com, 
San Salvador Press, Dublin Quarterly, Retort, Midwest Book Review, The Simon, and many more). 
He has been praised in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore for his insightful, 
honest critiques of literature, as well his poetry and fictive prose. 



 

FOURTH MURDER: THE EYE SINISTER POEM

“-Human suffering doesn't sell tickets in Kansas City.

-They want laughs in Kansas City, they've been
working in the wheat fields all day.”
-Stardust Memories, Woody Allen

The young boy, blond- this one called “Ziggy”-
laughing so lightheartedly from behind a telephone pole,
from behind the perfect arrangement of moments,
beyond the luck of the ordinary, or any other  
scheme of fate grander than a stalk of wheat,
                                                                                    
is only aware, vaguely- if at all, that he is also
being watched by a dimming eye unknown of its own
slow cancered destruction, like his, by the mute acceptance
of violence voyeuristically branded into something deeper
than rods and cones, the gruff burnish of an evening
                                                                                 
long ago passed, yet alive in the eye of the eye
watching this inebriate junky argue with his dealer
over the purity- cut or uncut- of the powder
he will boil and shoot into his system filtering through
the lives of the dealer who stabs this insolent customer,
                                                                                    
of that boy called "Ziggy" who grins with the knowledge
that this is the way of things, of that remnant
eye catching them both, the cloudy departure of life
from the dead man's eye, which would never sell tickets
in a place where cow chips and Shirley Jones are icons,
                                                                                   
still, garnering laughs from the synergy of blood and sight
the dealer ambles away, the boy- the one called "Ziggy"-
heads to tell his friends of this great gruesomeness,
and the other one merely stands, for a moment, while it
stumbles to pass.
                           And it is this I remember.