The crowd- which consisted of exclusively men with beards and djembe drums and women with hairly legs poking out of corduroy patchwork skirts- cowered and crawled in fear around the angry man-bomb, mortally frightened yet encouraged to shimmy because the

What are you, my judge?

The church pews were straining at the crowds who had come to see David get saved. There was no salvation in the water really, but the Baptists preached the gospel of immersion. There was a certain Baptist church in Kentucky that pressured a man who'd been sprinkled to get…

the memories return like they do every year at this time

A little poem about prison

That’s true, you know, what they said about the drummer and spontaneous combustion.

facts of matters are not as they seem,/hour by hour crafty comments creep in,/another hour and "the good" is a horror:/ our human blindness is older than our sight.

It's time, more than anything

The day came shyly up to me like a rolling orange thing. Perhaps of alien origin, but not if the Buddha of our foolish hopeless dreamer inside has anything to say about it. It said, pick me up. I did. It looked like forever on the inviting horizon with trees as…

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

He called me one Friday when I was a kid and told me he wanted to go trout fishing. He had dreamt that I was a worm or a fly -- he couldn't remember which -- but he was sure I would bring good luck to the stream. The next morning, before grandma awoke, I

Back in the sixties, I chanced upon a list of books. That’s right. Sifting a black garbage bin, I found the long lost canon. Seizing the moment, I snatched the list, and cradled it in my palms. I felt proud and patriotic for saving such a noble list f

I was raised in a big city in the slow South. I know a little about cross cultural dining and where Delta Blues collides with Sly Stone, Al Green, and Zeppelin. Dirty rice in the Dirty South. Fried chicken, collards, and pintos. Fried velveeta…

Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,

...listening to the ache of errs our mouths had become.