Let's fuck like 20-year-olds, darlingwrap ourselves around each otherand fuck our way to the starsLet's cross that line between you and meand the stuff people pay to seeI know pleasure and it is thisall over me, you, covering,…

I see young girls in their white summer dresses and remember how I was like that, light youth that barely touched the ground. Screwing and unscrewing the lid of a salt shaker (sitting at a table.) Swinging a shoe off the tip of my toes. Rubbing a foot u

Blending in at a rock concert in ballet flats was harder than I thought it would be. The heavy eye makeup and lit cigarette I never brought to my lips put me somewhere between “Trying Too Hard” and “Bless Her Heart.”

If you stop, you starve// and they just offer what you do/ to others, starved already,/ and schooled, as you, in servitude.

We were young, she said, it was all in front of us. We should never have settled for this.

The thumb, incarnate, knows/ the moment of the misplaced hammer blow;/ the tongue, incarnate, the cool invigoration/ of water drawn from the dark well.

Satchmo sings a love song over the sound system. People read books, tap keyboards, drink coffee, eat cake. In Barnes & Noble—more a coffee shop these days than a bookstore—I am thinking about my dad and his stomach cancer.The terror he…

Not quite full, but bright,/ December 23rd.__ A waning moon for New Year’s Day-/ Portent?

She was about 35 or so and noticeably pregnant. She was near hysteria when she knocked on our apartment door, right across the street in L.A. from a convent. But she took one last desperate wild look at me, standing at the door. I saw the animal in her ey

So, once, we were all like sitting around the kitchen table, and it was so kind of like an okay sort of day to begin with. We were all like a secret theater of strangers, a living children's secret circle, meeting right in…

Afterward, at the motel, I asked her why she liked sex so much, and she said she liked the taste.

Growing up in Mississippi meant growing up in a “dry” State which it was until 1966. Dry State meant selling alcoholic beverages, except for beer, is illegal. Period. By period I mean there was no distinction between selling whiskey and stuff to adults and…

Upstairs, in a room where some years later, the occupant would be murdered by his lover, I sat in my skivvies in an armchair and wondered if I should call my wife.

"I’d rather move a word around a page than raise a glass or pass a plate or work a room immune to poetry."

I threw my hand / at the gearshift/ the car glided off.