The sea dies where a cello torques on sand, leaving me without its compass. An old clock sings.

... I know all about ax murderers because Elmo, my uncle by marriage to my sister who never had any sense was one. He done killed six women in a farm outside of Topeka in the space of they say three minutes, including my sister and her bingo friends . . .

You're nothing. You're wallpaper. You're carpet.

You said it was easier when you were ten and could play Risk with a girl and it was a game, not foreplay.

Catullus 16 I will fuck you up the ass and then the mouth, Furius the catamite, and pederast Aurelius: you both who think, because my poems are salty, that I possess your equal lack of shame: for it's proper for a poet to be moral, no way essential for it…

The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he'd be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had…

"Well, I'd like to inquire about getting a muse. It says in your ad that you provide muses for people who are creatively challenged by their art form."

On Saturday mornings, by noon, the delivery car comes from Boston and unloads fresh bread and sandwiches, pork ribs and ground pork stuffed inside of breads and buns and banana leaves, bean shakes, and sticky rice desserts.

He pounds the roof of the Pontiac with the side of his fist and it rumbles like a timpani. He raises his head to light and wipes the sweat from his forehead. There's no sense in fighting it. He will go back and knock on Peter's door.

Writing as parallel form | Writing a parallel line | Seeing stealing | Stealing seeing | Stealing as seeing

A solitary snake, his belly full, stretched out in the sun. His uncoiling swept sand and small rocks to the left and right. Ah, he thought, I have the power to move mountains from my path. See how the lowly earth makes way for my comfort.

I stood there skinny-as-a-half in “big hair,” ankle boots, and black eyeliner. P. was in radio, not books. He had a sense of humor. I was researching a different man for a novel.

Writers, hopeful ones, hopeless ones, poets and petty penmen, worked as bartenders, librarians, substitute teachers, anything.

The grenadier moans in his sleep. He’s making love with a dead brown woman. A small, bone thin woman with heavy milk full breast. A dead child’s milk.

A patient with a B-Cup hygienists hears “The tissue is a little red around this back molar" as "I missed you in my little bed this morning."