Most read stories

Exile

12761276 views1212 comments66 favs

In the summer that my mother returned from wherever she had gone after her divorce, she and I moved to a large, old farmhouse high on a hill, far from the town where I had grown up. The farmhouse was over a hundred years old and no one had lived in it for…

Etienne's Voice

12761276 views55 comments11 fav

And suddenly, I have this crazy impulse, so crazy and so puzzling I do not possess enough vocabulary and grammar skills to describe what is invisible and what is visible about it. The reader must excuse me and be attentive.

Ballspenden

12761276 views00 comments00 favs

Even if you're doing it together, there's no unity when everyone's dancing to their own tune.

Placeholders

12761276 views44 comments33 favs

Everyone falls,

A Good Man

12761276 views44 comments44 favs

Charles tapped the anger management code on his steering wheel. He rolled down his street and saw Jack Watson throwing stuff into the trunk of his black Volvo coupe. He waved, but Jack did not wave back. Jack's face was blazing red. He looked like he might have a…

Nightmares from the Wanted Section

12761276 views88 comments66 favs

WANTED: a Muse. Former Special Forces solider turned poet seeking artistic inspiration. Brunettes preferred but blondes will not be turned away; gingers, however, are out of the question. Must have a voice that sounds like money, a self-destructive tem

Arborist Abridged

12761276 views55 comments00 favs

Besides, that might have been the area of his birth, and if so, Jacob was now the director, priest, pallbearer, driver, and custodian of a hometown funeral

MISCELLANEOUS SHORT SHORTS

12761276 views55 comments33 favs

Maybe you, citizen, should be a jerk. Jerks get where they are going. You, citizen, what about you? Handy, dandy, where’s the jerk? Conformists. Sheep. All of you, all of us, boiling out our radiators. Spending our day, our days, our lives in coope

All Else Stopped

12761276 views44 comments00 favs

it seemed odd from even the first few seconds.

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.2 - c.4

12751275 views00 comments00 favs

Mayumi could see as far as her eyes could, all the buildings hugged by the trees. Roads stretching outward as if reaching for something far away.

Personal Hell - I'm Not Scared, Just Disappointed

12751275 views33 comments33 favs

Satan is a wide-eyed Pollyanna mime who communicates with a ventriloquist dummy that corrects my grammar, speaks in internet acronyms, tells me that I’d be a lot prettier if I just smiled more and lost fifteen pounds, and nags me about how all my problems

A Life of My Own - 4

12751275 views1010 comments44 favs

"Middle class workers and working class poor and the unemployed will soon be forming a revolutionary movement to break this stranglehold of corrupt elites."

Too Weak for the World

12751275 views55 comments55 favs

There was a certain romanticism in it, the salty old man sidling up to me at a bar, rhapsodizing in a slurred stream of conscious about the state of the world, the country, the state of his own heart. He didn't have an eye patch nor beard, nor was he…

Language Lesson

12751275 views00 comments00 favs

I smoked my cigarro under his watchful eye. We were never able to make too much conversation even when I was teaching him at Educenter. Now that David had opened his own school, Evert had come to learn with him because it was much more affordable, but he

Broken Bulbs - Chapter One

12751275 views11 comment11 fav

And here I am again. I chew my nails. I tap my foot. I chew my nails. I sweat. I bleed. My nose bleeds. It drips. I drip. I'm dripping through my chair.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin

12751275 views00 comments00 favs

Two angels walk in a dark cloud arm in arm discussing the nature of good and evil Walking along in flowing robes now that nakedness is forgot, and they both stare at the same eternal thought with their heads bowed as serenity is the only thing

smitten in an inner place

12751275 views99 comments11 fav

for paul celan take it like an amulet a jewel like a tulip filling up the expanse of green the volatile view from within your thin wrist you write into manuscript for the hand is a map with but grasping still it is but a like two palms like a…

Please Don't Pass The Salt

12751275 views44 comments44 favs

The only silver lining? The man in my life and I are in this together.

Song: Got a Sixth of a Cow In the Freezer

12751275 views77 comments55 favs

I got a sixth of a cow in the freezer That’s not meant to be just a teaser I guess all I’m sayin’ Come on home and you’ll be stayin’ Cause I got a sixth of a cow in the freezer Got a rack and a half of ribs I ain’t tellin’ you no fibs

The Window

12751275 views44 comments11 fav

Just beyond the tree, beyond the fence, close to the grey clouds that hung almost to the earth, a boy sat on another tree's stump. Beneath his crossed legs that he moved up and down rhythmically, under his bright red, Superman shorts, inscribed in the stump, a symbol which…

The Last Time

12751275 views1313 comments99 favs

Stalks were scythed to submission one stroke at a time

Hybrid Man

12751275 views00 comments00 favs

The day I met Griffin Burns was the worst day of my adult life. However, it wasn't a series of unfortunate events, one mistake which followed an unlucky break which followed a bad situation; nothing …

Impetuous Daffodils

12751275 views77 comments55 favs

...the daffodils will fling/ their yellow petals, taunting winter

Air Conditioning Bill

12751275 views66 comments77 favs

The last night, I shivered in bed until three a.m., the blankets wouldn’t work, or the socks, or my tears, but I reassured my heart that my next love would be warmer. 
He was. 
And our air conditioning bill was so high we could’t afford it.

Downward Facing God

12751275 views33 comments44 favs

Argus was on to me from the moment I unrolled my mat. He knew damn well I was in the wrong room, but he turned blind eyes.

from: The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars

12751275 views66 comments55 favs

I got on the Greyhound Bus at 11 a.m. and sat by myself staring out the window. I could see the reflection of my own dark beard in the window, a 27 year-old man with a huge poem bursting my heart, gasping to get out into the bright lit-up world out there,

Klarheit oder Genug

12741274 views55 comments55 favs

F.B.I. then or: "I said later 'for a boob job' and imagined her, a public lawyer, wandering Arizona on foot unable to hide a Playboy-Mansion style rack."

Baby Catalogue

12741274 views22 comments22 favs

my mouth is open, ready to bite your tiny toes

she has one of those names that only a southern girl could pull off

12741274 views55 comments33 favs

“But I don't HAVE an accent,” she said. With an accent. “Tell him I don't have an accent, y'all.” Looking from one friend to another. Messy ponytail bouncing. I just stared. I may have blinked. A couple times. Every syllable…

High School Bards Face Tough Summer of Two-a-Day Practices

12741274 views44 comments11 fav

Joe Don followed the route taken by an increasing number of Texas teenage jocks whose football glory days are prematurely cut short and joined his high school's Cowboy Poet Squad.