Free The Book of Counted Sorrows by Dean Koontz Page A

"

    No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means
    without permission in writing, in blood, from the publisher. Any
    violation of this copyright will result in the violator being tracked
    down by packs of spectacularly well-trained and utterly savage pigs
    that will find you as easily as they would locate truffles if that
    happened to be what they were trained to find.

    These pigs will bite you on the ankles, kneecaps, and genitals until
    you have been subdued, whereupon you will be conveyed to the proper
     authorities to be executed, convicted, and put on trial, in that order.

PUBLISHER'S DISCLAIMER:
    Inevitable Doom Press hereby warns all readers of the possibility of
    insanity or violent death resulting from the reading of these verses.
    You may also suffer headaches, halitosis, hoof-and-mouth disease,
    dizziness, failure to achieve dizziness when dizziness is desired,
    bleeding from hair follicles, the unexplained cancellation of
    subscriptions that are dear to you, hives, rashes, boils, inflamed
    earlobes, the sudden growth of a second head, bad weather, colossal
    flatulence, the compulsion to insist that your name is Igor when you
    know perfectly well this isn't true, the unwanted romantic attention
    of cats, blisters, and the growth of eye hair.

Table of Contents

    One Door Away From Heaven
    Neither Do They Fade Away
    In the Fields of Life
    The Weight
    The Train Leaves the Station
    A Delicious Walk
    Habit Makes Destiny
    Pedal to the Metal
    Remembering When We Didn't Expect to Live Forever
    A Roundness
    Remembered Dreams
    Academic and Novelist as Abbott and Costello
    The Chain
    Short Story
    The Modern Age
    Wee Wisdom
    This Old Honkytonk of Fools
    Cold Fire
    Whom You Might Trust
    1992
    Men on White Horses
    Crossing Nevada
    Melodrama
    Busy Humanity
    Kiss

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
    Winter Moon
    The Mask
    Reality
    The Answer Comes After the Funeral
    Drummer
    Potboiler
    Saving Graces Politics
    Ten Years Old, Reading in Bed
    Fallen Yet Not Lacking in Virtue
    February, 1969
    We Are All So Modern Here
    All Those Snappy Epigrams on the Theme of Night
    Anthem
    A Thought While Reading Rex Stout
    Cry Doom
    Dragon Tears
    Cold Questions
    Mary Shelley, No One Listens
    A Job May Not Be Enough
    The Root of All Mystery
    Haiku
    Where God Goes on Vacation
    Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with Exploding Heads: A Tribute in Verse to Robert Frost

    About The Author

Dedication

    To the doomed. To the forgotten. To the misunderstood. To the misbegotten.
    To the doomed and forgotten misbegotten who have been frequently
    misunderstood. To the melancholy, the lonely, the lost, the weary, the
    hopelessly anguished, the bitterly distraught, the terminally
    cranky, the ferociously depressed, and the seethingly disinterested.
    Also to Uncle Mort and Aunt Clara: Thanks for the homemade muffins.

One Door Away From Heaven

    One door away from Heaven,
    We live each day and hour.
    One door away from Heaven,
    But it lies beyond our power
    To open the door to Heaven,
    And enter when we choose.
    One door away from Heaven,
    And the key is ours to lose.
    One door away from Heaven,
    But, oh, the entry dues.
    One door away from Heaven,
    And yet we sing the blues.
    One door away from Heaven,
    We live each day and night.
    One door away from Heaven
    Is such a perilous height,
    A long fall from the doorstep,
    If we can't tell wrong from right.

    Neither Do They Fade Away

    Elvis is dead but spotted in Biloxi,
    In Nashville, Corpus Christi. He's got moxie
    To be dead vet movie-going at the Roxie,
    Still sticking to this world as if epoxied.
    Glimpsed in a pink Caddy there in Biloxi,
    Our ageless King, still smilin' and still foxy.
    They say Walt Disney was frozen to live again,
    To once more walk his magic land of mice and men.
    Al Einstein's brain is rumored floating in a jar.
    Until he's got a new body, he won't go far.
    This is America, where failure is decried.
    This is America, and death must be denied.

    In The Fields Of