The bum had abandoned More than half of his rich Chocolate cake In the bottom of the shopping cart The wording on the top of the cake read "Happy Birthday Doug" But it also read "From Doug" Either he was too full To eat his own words

After it is over, I go out into the world, to the café. The flower sellers are setting up their booth outside the glass doors. Classical guitar over the speakers. A soft rain falling. Heads bowed, reading the news. Coffee, croissants, cappuccino. This g

There are moments in life where it's like you're driving late at night and you should be on your way home but really you're just rolling along aimlessly through the city streets when suddenly you turn a corner and realize the road is open and empty for miles to come, a…

The rain is filling up my shoes, I can’t see through my glasses, Rain all inside me.

It is absurd to think that a cockroach will wake up one day as a human. And it is certainly surreal to imagine that a fat pigeon in Paris, New York or Rome, say, or even Prague, will one day take up a pen and begin writing poetry, or wave the wand of phil

living in the cross current lawn-care worlds don't give a whit about the so called deeper things. They don't have to scrape and you can't make them go to the river to see a sunset. They've got all their bonafide luxuries in a smart little…

If I had alcohol in me right now I'd be singing out loud. I'd turn this boat around & turn it into a karaoke bar. Why is it even worth mentioning? This is why people gaze abstractedly at the ground. Ambition is thirty gallons of gas & a red Silverado. Wishing, on…

Richard bounds up the stairs to his apartment. He can’t wait to get home to his new kitty. He found the poor cat right outside of his building just a few days ago, and already they’ve become fast friends.

leaves, starlings and other words fall into thickets of orange or green grasses or tendrils or snakes

Last night Ariana our second daughter, only 8,wanted to baptize you for your birthday. Her hair shimmered and the face of her joy reminded me of Two Oceans Plateauin the Beartooth Range in southern Montana.As she walked from the sink she carrieda large…

I wriggled in the bed and felt the sheets soaked with perspiration. My arms were lined with tape and tubing, needles pressed in veins. I reached for the cloth again and again, and every time they stopped me. The hands that came were cold and hard, urgent

Drugs, after all, once in the system, demanded unfalteringly more drugs.

Two people are talking. They are both wearing hats.

First it makes me think about the time I held a live, albeit tranquilized, juvenile gator at a zoo in Florida when I was twelve. (Somewhere these's a photograph, no doubt, of me looking terrified and a gator looking asleep.)

Her nervous toes danced under the table. She thought, on this dismal day in South West London, the time had come to confess her state of tangled affairs.