She was looking like trapped meat. I’m talking about the pretentious freak of nature stuck in her mother’s washing machine down the street. It was yesterday afternoon. I’d dropped by to return borrowed eggs. I heard screaming, begging, laughter. We used to play house. I was eleven. She was ten. I was a bank teller….
I run into my therapist from seven years ago. He’s standing around, still the young side of middle-aged, face blank, totally unimpressed. But he’s not as I remember him. For instance, he has a fever. He’s glistening. His spectacles: gone. Man, our old sessions. He was strict, for real. Even coffee was off the table….
On a rainy Sunday afternoon, pre-workout, I approach the girl behind the counter at my gym. She mostly deals in fresh towels and electrolytes, and she doesn’t like me — not sure why, but she’s blatant. And so right in front of her I go, “I’ll take the red Gatorade — the fruit punch flavor…
All my life, reading has made me feel on the verge of something, like a bird turning in the wind to lay itself bare before going higher — with feet stretched out behind — higher than the indifferent trees and noisy earth. I’m grateful to my teachers who nurtured this experience, education being our first…
Mutants are not so very interesting as wild types and other natural strains, like penguins wearing tuxedos and tigers with black-striped orange fur. With my regular looks and manners, I am no mutant made of chemicals. Still, the world makes no sense to me, and sometimes it’s as if I am wearing the wrong eyeglasses….
A man doesn’t cease to exist because he is invisible. He is like a lone guitar, or curly neck-hairs, or false water. Pull his arm when you go by, and he forgets it once was a fin (according to Darwin). Another year passes, never to be lived again. I remember being touched, but I cannot…
Gloucester, Massachusetts I. I’m sorry you were not my favorite. Probably your dark substratum was too much for me. I don’t believe in Hell; therefore, I don’t fear it. I’m no possum playing dead to conceal myself. Reading in your boyhood room, I feel like a counterpart to nature and the animals, and I still…
God, bless the lowborn and the shy of luck, Those rubbing nickels, hoping for a spark, The tweakers, boozers, losers, and the fucked Who breed like cats behind the mobile park. And bless them even when they’re screwing up, Or shooting up, or burgling something sad, Or fishing for old cig butts in that cup…
Have I been faithless to your memory, Who died before our beards had come full in? We who’d buzzed our hair short in the yard, And punched each other’s arms until they bruised? Our falling out was from a dozen things. You mocked me secretly to the wrong friend, I thought myself the better of…
She always speaks too little or too late. Never has lied, but always puts the truth So on the lean that touch it and it tips. She wears a blindfold as she paints her lips. You go to her when desperate and alone. Up from her navel comes the platinum word That cleaves you like…
“A white doe in the green grass of a glade Appeared to me with two horns made of gold . . .” —Petrarch All joy, being considered in its truth, Has in it both the terrible and good. You will not know the beauty of the deer Until you’ve lain her low within the wood….
Her whistle is climbing its spiral stair And loathe are my evenings, loathe of bone, And fir trees are steeples in the air, And every confession is told alone. The little lung beats the feathered snare, And fair is my sunset, fair of light, And here bend the proverbs, the tricky prayer, And I sit…
