Poetry

I am conducting a writing workshop where I tell the students to put down in absolutely straight language something so present it flames from the page. Only the facts, I say, but literature, not journalism. Someone asks, may I work from a newsbreak at the scene on my transistor now, the police breaking down a…

The luxury of avoiding the inevitable disappears unharmed. *     *      * the greenness of the night is false to the green of the lawn he said. The thickness of the air is illegitimate if you live in my closet she purred. If you were to travel from this point to anywhere you wouldn’t be here he…

I know you hardly ever leave your room now      & perhaps this letter will remain in the mailbox for months      only to stare out through the grating, white in that shallow black space,      like the moon in the mirror of a one room basement apartment      on a waterfront street; its smooth face like an Indian…

Bless you, gentle Perphenazine and vivacious Amitryptillin! You’re my spring fever and my autumn smelling of campuses. You turn my head as two women would who stopped to stare at me with amazement and delight saying together, where have you been, etc. We belong to each other, darling Triavil, in a ménage à trois! I’m…

Ocean currents spill dust Underwater canyons extend to African rivers from the Congo and back to the Orange Canyons Ain’t this Atlantis? No this is Walvis Ridge! Under the Atlantic deep troughs and long ridges Moonless Mountains to Hawaiian Deep and Johnson Island north to Musicians Seamounts and Mendocino Fracture The Aleutian Trench borders volcanic…

     orphalese in orle. kestrel khansamah khanjee keyed. orsellic                                                ort. purgations eurydice bulbous. of her golden smock, her tablet ornithodelphid. components enacted.                              ornithopilous ormazd descending from his aeolian heights,                                                      killing scapes with his orisort feet.      ork orillion…

People look at me and say, there’s a man who knows where he’s going. That’s because of my attaché case. If I didn’t carry it who would notice me? Entre nous, it’s filled with sand, which is running out.

If you had picked one life to live and one body to live it in you couldn’t of picked a worse carcass said the master to the devotee, thankyou master I brought you my wife and children, do with them what you will. The perfect master immediately had them all commit suicide while asking for…

On some days the mind refuses to play. Given paradise terrestrial, it can make nothing of it, craving instead its minimal dose of something lethal. But spring is arriving, the great forgiver, and it appears understood that we did not really wish to die. Blackfish Creek has gone into molt, sunken and gliding past its…