The pleasure in being tired after sex is the feeling of that slow infection someplace else. The explosion passes like the name of a town you leave your body outside of. Emptiness returns to normal under you. Then you burn imaginary rubber, extracting the acrid smell of Indianapolis, the collision of smiles and steel. You…
I love to watch the butcher wipe the sharp blade on his apron stained with fresh blood. I’m going to marry him WHAM the side of beef split open he tenderly spreads it like a woman’s legs between smeared fingers stroking the cold smoothness from his fingertips bloody red drops on the floor spotting…
We sat hunchbacked in the town cafe, elbows propped on grainy wood tables over our coffee. Listening to the recent news a story bloomed of a ghost seen at Badger Swamp. A local made us a map and talked of crops and weather. Seeing myself it was inevitable I had no money, my friend reached…
It’s all because the round man with the pumpkin neck was teaching no one in particular macadam composition, and because a lady giggled like dry fire when the bartender who liked lighting his lighter and looking at it said a fellow wanted to be a vampire to get the inside story but he had bad…
1. The bottoms of her feet were tatooed Fear on Demand. 2. I’m sucking her magic stones from Puerto Escondido. 3. The islands on my wrists were dread. You have, she groaned, to persevere. 4. She found a homemade triangular scarf and laughed a map of blood deposits. 5. A drool chain dips along her…
It is startling now how sexual the poems of 15, 16 were – not surprising, closet ached, but the almost classic images of bells and candles, apples hair and bridges came completely without calculation mixed with vague communistic slogans this obviousness of compulsive wildass lack crapola still carries the mysteries I must learn * * *…
I The morning train arrives at two. Be there. I’ll be carrying a briefcase, wearing heavy face lotion. If you get there before I do I’ll be in the second coach, compartment 5. I’ll be sitting in seat 3 facing a fat man. He’s following me. After the briefcase. Discretion. If I don’t descend the…
Let us remember that unsung breed who send my likes to you – wisely: Van Elliott, Bert Kelsey, Fred Weed of Roxbury Latin; and the likes of Feathereye Mykey my uncle did so unknowingly. Let me remember thresholds left here to cross yours there; remember the clutter of the place that’s Feathereye’s junkshop where I…
Doyle's reflection scintillated wetly from the shop windows as he passed along the Boulevard du Montparnasse without pausing, as he frequently did, in front of one of Hemingway's old haunts – the Coupole or, across the street, the Dome. He turned right on the Boulevard Raspail and walked slowly, nearly shuffling, toward L'alliance Francaise and…
Spring 1997