Sometimes at night there’s a procession of headlights in the windows, unceasing, and each passing light contains voices and thoughts from the television and textbooks and daydreams of all the things you’d like to do. 12:361:173:19 you give up and open your eyes but it doesn’t seem to make a difference, as though you’d been…
Of the things I enjoy most — new cities, quiet reflection, strange drunks — it’s writing I miss the most or feel the least fulfilled in. Not that I don’t write most nights, bad poetry, novels that went in wrong directions and short fiction I never completed. Projects drawn out to burdensome months trying to…
Summer sat in the heat watching day dreams play outof festivals and barefoot fields, of sleeping in moonlighthearing soft ocean tides, and the morning damp on ourclothes. We were the silhouettes in the sunlight, love burning freeon highways and skylines, desert peaks, bikini lines,and bad jokes reciprocated and the confidence to tellour secrets in bright…
There’s a man scrambling to climb back onto the ice where he’s fallen in. A friend extends a hand, and helps the sopping fisherman back onto the ice. The fisherman takes a moment to come to his senses, water running out of his sleeves and his vest pockets frosting stiff. The fisherman looks at his…
How far does an ocean go of troubles –how long till the seabird finds its perch. How many miles Mr. Dylan,dear Jesus,the context of a word with no sentence. The tides are dark and the beaches lie quiet,not a star in the sky to compassbut a roar of what must always crash down. For as…
I lost my first tooth at 23,a long time coming,a black stone whenever I spoke.There were aches in my knees and knobs on my back,knots curdled and sick in my belly’s pit. Cancer? Tuberculosis? Liver failure?All three. Sweating profusely,interviews and meetings,executive discourse turning to my sins: Masturbating in the neighbor’s bushes,stealing mother’s pills,not staying late…
All that’s left to remember is the feeling of faces, three thousand miles from touch. Etches left in a sketch erased: Carefully held on a Greyhound, folded along creases, slipped into a shirt pocket close to heart. That animal bore no animosity but in a moment flared its spite, flared the impulse to bleed its…
It was an evening in November,
cold rain and a wet street outside that had been dark since dinner.
And the house had been quiet because the kids had been sullen
and neither you nor I could see the street.
Gone for the winter but I’ll be back in the spring. I’ll be back for the warmer weather -back for family and holidays, my mother and sisters and friends. I’ll be back for the great lessons of seasoned professors and pages, and pages, and pages I would’ve read by the pool in June, or at…
Arm in arm go the couple in white, down the aisle, through the crowd. Vows told in lace, speaking secrets in the midday sun: a bouquet soars across its yellow face. Consummation is a popular word for their grandparents. There’s a quiet announcement in the newspaper: congratulations. Congratulations from friends and family, a high school…
Mick's Neon Fog 