Sing for us whose troubles are troubles we’re lucky to have: cold orange juice, and cold coffee, corridor after corridor, as our circadian rhythms fall into place: work is a refuge from home, and home from work. We have task force reports, but no tasks, and no force, so far removed from concrete and crisp…
Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…
I can"t say: sweat, and then skin, and then mom, and then speak. No such thing as a sentence, it seems. No such thing as what’s happening. Moth under the covers, get out. Brown wings, hung on the lamp stand. If the soul lives in memories then the soul is no matter to reckon …
Nicole has this one friend whose hand can burn straight through her clothes & through the skin of her back. Like this, she said, placing her hand on my winter coat, the train above the East River, stalled. Like this, the canary blossoms of Chinese witch hazel flame into this world as astronomers believe dark…
Here, on the boulevard of run- amuck dreams, each stamped with a doll-like face you half- recognize as yours, the neon displays its chilly, self- possessed light. But the lips on the billboards are raspberry cream. They say Buy me or Be me, you can’t tell. You’re confused like mad again, in this night of…
The embarrassment of wanting to pray to God, the demand that God give a good Goddamn had made him pretty nutty by the end; a lifelong Marxist, he took up with Ouspensky, then spent all his money (and he had tons, all those years in the bank when Das Kapital and the Wall Street Journal…
Beside the cash register in my favorite used bookstore I see a glass bowl of what seem to be postage stamps until I look closer: temporary tattoos of red and green, with ornate black lettering Bruised Apple Books. Take one, says Andrew, Take two, as if he directs a film about the struggle of an…
The meadow hears everything—or does it? Perhaps the short-haired girl up to her knees in grass is the one who takes it all in. She’s skin and wide eyes, alertness and hurt, as if she can remember the fireflies sparking on some future night, the voices saying I want to be like this forever. As…
They said that’s where Lulu went, that was the smell. Not rats. Fifty years go by. They say Yes. They don’t change their story, it’s true. A low cement block fence around the house, a collie dog bark, four kids. Not collie, but collie dog, Howdy as in Doody, The Stooges on someone else’s TV….
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