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Eye-Full Tower

Where a love-dock jutted into the Narrows I took turns with friends at a crack of light someone scraped into the one black window of The Eye-Full Tower, and saw through the tight crush of men a woman dancing naked, her sequined bridle glittering down her breasts drenched in luminous sweat and smoke-haze. From one…

On the Road

I love early mornings in a new hotel, traveling west and up on East Coast time, before room service starts delivery, searching the lobby or even down in the kitchen for coffee, to greet dawn with the night clerk, starting his wake-up calls. I find a paper from the bundle by the revolving door and…

The Crying Room

The church had a crying room— up at the opposite side of the altar. Good for the baby. It was glass on all sides like a tank. A microphone brought in the priest’s voice. From the crying room we could see how things happened backstage: someone coming to the priest with a bell and a…

The Wreck

Again on the highway with tears in my eyes, cadenced by rhythm of concrete and steel, music of cloud vapor, music of signs—Blue Flame Clown Rental/Color Wheel Fencing—again overcome, again fever-driven, transported among the pylons and skidmarks of the inevitable, sirens and call-boxes of a life I have laid claim to with a ticket found…

A Version of Happiness

for Ellen Bryant Voigt Tonight the band’s Nigerian— Afro-Cuban, last week; next week, Cajun: the summer multicultural concert series in the San Juan Capistrano Library courtyard; two hundred of us, all ages, in the audience; Edenic evening air and stars: tickets six bucks. You’d love this music, this place: the musicians are like poets (they…

Biblical Also-rans

Hanoch, Pallu, Hezron, Carmi, Jemuel, Ohad, Zohar, Shuni: one Genesis mention’s all you got. Ziphion, Muppim, Arodi: lost in a list even the most devout skip over like small towns on the road to L.A. How tall were you, Shillim? What was your favorite color, Ard? Did you love your wife, Iob? Not even her…

The Mayor

The light that woke the mayor made him think of town. It was a pale pink light ticked out by a palpitating bulb that droned above the empty road he lived on. He sat upright in bed, noticed his posture, how his jutting head sought equilibrium and not much else. God was far off. And,…

Solace

Having awakened again at 4 a.m. inside the skull-dungeon in which my brain’s chained like a nasty old man muttering, nattering, keeping me from sleeping with the usual complaints about the accommodations, I focused as usual on my breathing, asked blessings on every living human being by name, alphabetically, one at a time, except of…