1373 5 5
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There’s someone in the audience who is immolating himself
Cutting his own leg over and over with a pen knife
And groaning: “Oh God, oh God”
And all I can think from up at the podium is
This guy must absolutely hate these poems
I am reading
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137345
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After my mother died, my father shipped me to my uncle's. He hadn't told me she was dying, so he could just mourn alone.Lena lived next door, Italian, my age -- which was ten -- beautiful. She was watched by goons in black suits. Her parents owned a restaurant. Across the…
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137367
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The currents of events/
strip the molecules from cartilage,//
reverse polarity of ventricles—
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137364
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Poetry is conceit; emotional, intellectual or technical.
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137320
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Each had jostled and laboured for his or her place upon the blunt outcrop, in the cold persistent darkness, where the outcrop was merely something that had fallen and not quite been washed away.
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137394
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Take no form or face beautiful enough to cause warfare, or that which would provoke inanimate objects to song. If a tree wishes to flower in your presence, request that this happen very slowly.
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137233
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The gate squeaked, the gravel shuffled and the letterbox clattered as February 14th's mail cascaded to the ground.
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137230
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Roanne, just out of jail, went to cop. That is, she went to beg fat little Freddy the dopeman to front her once more. She'd have to fuck Freddy, of course, but, well, maybe he'd wait until after this time. Likely not…
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137200
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A brick from the parapet splat down later as I was applying a bitter healing powder, made from the seeds of watermelons, to my raw tongue.
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13721711
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Neither of us thought of real winning. We set about brilliant losing, dark angel forms of luck and greed, the desire, the craving, the need to lose so strenuous that one wins; we tied at thirteen.
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1372138
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The bathroom faucet is leaking again. Do they make diapers for faucets?
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137245
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Art books, paintings, antique chairs, marble tables, full length gold gilded mirrors, oriental rugs, tapestries, a Louis XVI painted French armoire, a wrought iron Deco coffee table, flat ware, silver flasks, mantel lamps, iron gates, a silk settee, theat
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137296
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As I walked down to the Subway, I thought to myself that now, after the horror in Boston, everybody looks like a terrorist.
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137255
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1372126
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"You gonna be old before you're old," my father had told her.
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137211
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There was no need to drive. She could travel ten miles in ten minutes. She merely had to be careful not to step on any cars or trucks.
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1372118
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He picked at his food. The teen-aged boys gnawed the bones. The conversation was nothing he was interested in. Chitchat and family jokes.
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137231
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I want to read a story that ends unhappily ever after: one where the bad guy wins and no one gets the girl.
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137200
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No, that can't be him, Joe thought. The guy was messing around the displays in back. He had walked in three or four minutes ago, by now, and he certainly looked the part — or at least Joe thought…
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137143
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137132
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today on the bus/ a man in his fifties/ smiled at a baby/
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137110
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What if
Everything
I have been doing
Hasn’t been heard
By anyone?
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137130
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Some of us, however, turn our secrets over in our souls, churning them with the fury of the howling winds of a January night. They are eroded and shaped and fine-tuned with the precision of a jeweler; the deeper and darker they are, the more brilliant of
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137150
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"And then I, and I believe,
I alone, saw
this small child
run..."
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137155
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I have a ninety two percent rejection rate.
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137152
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If there was another way to describe emptiness, I'd word the endlessness of the sky, of the ocean at low tide.
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137132
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What I did I wouldn't call criminal, just stupid. Even my judge, after so many court appointments, didn't understand what had happened. And there's a reason I got out on illegal sentencing but, either way, I paid the better part of a year for it all. I don't want to tell…
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137121
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Vietnam, Tet, and beaucoup Charlie
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137143
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The first time I ever held a gun, I was three years old...
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137110
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She lay there, skin and bones, unable to speak. Little did we know those were our last moments togethter. How cruel for her, to want to share a lifetime of thoughts and feelings in those waning moments only to be robbed of the chance. My brother and I…
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