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Rock Deaths

Ham sandwich, food poisoning, own vomit. Plane crash. Car crash, motorcycle crash, bicycle crash. Slit wrists. Suicide by shotgun blast, suicide by hanging. Carbon monoxide poisoning, leap from hotel window, leap in front of subway train. Natural causes. Overdose of pills. Heart disease. Double suicide with mother. Brain tumor, defenestration, erotic asphyxiation. Victim of hit…

Brasso

sweet, waxy smell, and opaque film it dries to a kleenex on the thumb, a coal-black residue it lifts, the watery depth of tarns, corroding vapors, killer oxygen, pure proficiency, what it should be, neutral as a crease, or a smart salute, or alignment, the meditational boots under the slow, circular spit, the mindless attention,…

One Leg

In September of 1965, when I was eighteen years old, I traveled from London, England, where I was living, to Hamburg, West Germany, with my friend Carl Jurgen Kurtz. Carl was twenty. We’d met at a boarding house in Chelsea I’d lived in for a few weeks after I’d first arrived in London, and where…

Hansel in the Cage

My father bars the door, bars harm From this house, and it is years. —Louise Glück, “Gretel in Darkness” I was fearless under the firmament, the starry dark my first education in freedom. It was my last. On the second night— when there were no guiding stones— it was clear: the expanse was a cold…

Mine Own John Clare

He was the first person I knew who spoke to God and to whom God replied. And he was the first person I knew who had written the great works of whomever you might name— mine own T. S. Eliot—though he affected no accent and wore a shrunken Grateful Dead T-shirt. It was not only…

Worm, (to a rumor of lilies)

Ach—the gravitas of the hunt. I. Digestive turned blue so the woman said. Said, I write my own islands, and red, red. Was urinary.            Under the astigmatic lens of her naked eye she followed the tracts. Looking at worms for a long time she said A worm in its lifetime moves short distances. She knew…