The instant you remember gratitude with enough focus to spring free its power...

The falling may continue// forever.

The truth about the bird and the snake is this. They are dead. And me? I cannot stop thinking about them.

For two days, I bashed out words with grimacing fingers, wrenching images from my whining consciousness – a weak, lumbering, uninspired piece – and now for what?

Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu

I am the marigold wheel no one can understand, the menace your grandfather warned you about. Yes, yes, that last phrase was overkill...

We laugh at them, parading two-by-two, the elephants rolling tail to trunk across the makeshift gangplank, wide slats flexing under their sway. A pair of snakes contemplates gulping a pair of frogs and their clandestine movements stun a cricket and his mate. Birds squat…

Earlier that morning a tree in the yard had filled with starlings, and on the way home after lunch, the sky held planes that looked like starlings, floating together.

If they are all speaking medicine & I / start speaking French - how / rude am I? Would they understand then / what it is to be entirely left out / of the conversation, unseen?

I don't think you understand. A sad boy doesn't just die inside, slowly he becomes withdrawn from certain types of lovely youthful reasoning out loud, accustomed to feeling what is expected of him, just to be allowed to survive another…

It's the outrage of the red monkey at her feet, And the nude thirteen-year-old woman sitting upright In the blue velvet chair, and the hints of blue at her navel, And at her lips and belly and crotch, that so upset Paris. Gauguin had his nerve

Public Wi-Fi ”hotspots” allow men and women to ogle each other discreetly while pretending to write the Great American Novel.

As ghosts, they became lovers. Rodion would strum the Underwood keys like a balalaika. Lizaveta would sing.

Your honour stinks of failed fishing trips to Galway.

Never mind that they cost millions per year just to amuse the monkey bone in us all or that they spew pollution or that their only real purpose is murder. They are justified by skill and thrill.