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.

"Some Purgatory in order, innit?"

the brand we like best and buy whether it's on sale or not. Surely there is another blue cheese dressing that is sold, possibly in San Francisco and made in a Berkeley basement by hippies who scrape together all of their change twice a year and buy cheese from an ancient…

A man and a woman argued over the size of the quake. They were sitting on the floor like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

I like how you completely disappeared inside a undetermined and yet planned point of pretty good view, like a rabbit with a gold chained pocket watch, like a stunned, frozen bird with a still burning bullet in its tinyfeathered brain. You could…

Walter met Danial at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They didn't have much in common at first, other than AA, with Walter on the recovery side of treatment and Danial reluctantly just beginning.