Most read stories

The Greatest Narcissist on Earth

20652065 views1818 comments1515 favs

I forgot how masterful you are, way better than a pickpocket. After our meeting, I drove home with one hand. It felt funny but I figured I'd absentmindedly put the other in my purse or tossed it into the backseat with my jacket. In my…

Noah's Ark, NYC

20652065 views44 comments22 favs

Two by two they come walking down 7th Ave girl with girl boy and girl boy and boy two pigeons strolling side by side two robins two crows walking stiffly like two pieces of anthracite coal two spiders two dogs sniffing each oth

The Sky is Simply White

20652065 views1414 comments88 favs

The rain is no terrible epitaph

Three New Poems

20652065 views99 comments88 favs

Letter(s)The sky set itself on fire, butit really didn't make a whole lot of difference. Birdsknew not to worry any more thanusual. Trees thought and made the mostof their landscapes as a way ofbeing modern and yet timeless. It's onlypeople who suffer from too much…

Jesus Had a Tat

20642064 views88 comments44 favs

Jesus Freaks will go tat head... crowns of thorns for their noggins and so on. Christ had one too...

Kepler On The Bus

20642064 views2727 comments1919 favs

On the bus I sat like an ounce.

4Beers

20642064 views44 comments11 fav

I would ask for your name/if your tongue wasn’t in my mouth.

Hobo's Pastor

20642064 views1616 comments88 favs

The three of us traveled seven hours that day and Al traveled as far in the service of finding the right tool for his writing.

An Old Sweet Song

20642064 views33 comments22 favs

Rob thought he might even make it. He'd stopped off south of Seattle, in Kent, and filled up the tank and went back in the can and topped off again. He got back on the road, to all appearances blase, blase. The montages were muted, at least for…

April Haiku

20632063 views2020 comments1010 favs

A sardonic moon/ surveys our plight and cackles.

More Abandoned Sentences

20632063 views2323 comments77 favs

By morning it was over. I crawled farther out onto the ledge. The three year old was screaming like Donald Duck. Trains ran into the night. Several pigs entered the open window.

Eighty-eight

20632063 views77 comments66 favs

She realised that things you can't prove can be more intimate than the things you know to be true.

Before California Fell into the Sea

20632063 views22 comments11 fav

The trail wound through oak trees and climbed up a hill. The sun was high and hot whenever we came out from the cover of the trees. We stopped under a tree. “OK old man,” Leda said. She came to me and kissed me. Then she was unbuttoning my pants and kne

Class

20632063 views55 comments11 fav

Class (appears in my book Breaking it Down; no journal publication) When your neighbor James Frehley cusses you out for hanging a block and tackle from the silver maple in your front lawn, begin to pull the engine from your Galaxie anyway, smile and nod…

The Truthmobile

20632063 views33 comments22 favs

She's had a magnetic sign made for the side of her Honda, TRUTHMOBILE, simple and elegant. Maybe too simple; she's worried it suggests a religious affiliation.

Husks

20622062 views22 comments22 favs

She would have moved on to the next guy in the next bar, the one who looked like danger on a stick.

Poems Are Scary Things

20622062 views2323 comments1616 favs

They will take you, naked, and put their tongues and fingers into intimate, erogenous openings

Daniel in a Den of Liberalism

20622062 views00 comments00 favs

He had forgotten what the culture was like in certain parts of the city. At the lower end of Second Avenue, there lived an amalgam rare anywhere in the world, save other pockets of Manhattan. Punks, hippies, gays, the homeless, and artists of all strip

Suppose, I ask my friend

20622062 views11 comment11 fav

nothing has ever happened in this or that or any other or maybe too damn many parallel universes. . . .

At This Particular Moment

20622062 views1111 comments88 favs

in time there is nothing more important for meto write than this line. It isn't defined in the way you'd like perhaps, but it doesn't matter because it will be true, and you will be true, and I will be the message you get. Some signal has…

Major Chaos

20622062 views1717 comments66 favs

Major Chaos came here one of those hot days. I was washing the floor, wearing old clothes, when he knocked on my door. Since I don’t have many visits, I let him in. At first, he seemed like a soldier, but upon reflection I realized he was a big green fr

The Party

20612061 views33 comments33 favs

Mike poured vermouth over his Campari and ice. “Gotta say, you have the most amazing view up here.” “Thanks. It's great when I'm washing dishes.” “Yeah, and the view in your front room isn't bad either. This cocktail …

Godot Finally Shows!

20612061 views55 comments22 favs

Vladimir and Estragon stood hunched at the corner of Ellis and Taylor in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Bedraggled and spent, they looked dully around them at pretty much nothing. They could have been thirty, or maybe…

Buoyancy

20612061 views22 comments11 fav

When I ate with my girls, Bliss and Victoria, I would lift my head up and look at us eating until I could imagine him chiding me. “Our daughters are looking more and more like you each day,” he’d say. “Fat!” I didn’t feel like eating when I thought abo

Blink

20612061 views44 comments22 favs

He stands straighter and walks toward the phone in the back, near the bathrooms. His wet sock slaps loudly against the tile floor. The buzz of conversation dims to whispers, barely audible above the roar of the espresso machine.

The Lost Boys

20612061 views2121 comments1919 favs

Every day hurts, just a little, but not enough

Second verse, same as the first

20612061 views22 comments22 favs

Most people assume I’m gay, and have assumed I’m gay since I was in fifth grade. Maybe sooner. Maybe fifth grade is just my first memory of recognizing what other people believed true about me. But coming out as a gay man in 1987, when I was in fifth gra

SantaBot, Can You Hear Me?

20612061 views88 comments44 favs

Mimi: Santa, I am so down with taking a number, but I really can't have you reading that particular story. Santa: Let me be the judge of that. I am Santa. I give presents to kids.

Freeway Deaths Attributed to Talk Radio

20612061 views66 comments00 favs

"I was just coming home from work listening to Consumer Dave," said Murrietta resident Mick Baylor, through his attorney, "when my eyelids started getting droopy. And he was just talking about how Circuit City was going out of business and I was. . .well,

Torn

20602060 views11 comment22 favs

My parents were married for forty five years. “A lifetime,” is how the rabbi at my mother's funeral describes it. The man says it with such a tone of familiarity, of genuine sadness, that one might think he has known and adored my parents all their lives. But…