It's one of the most difficult problems of aesthetic philosophy: What do we mean when we say that a song is sad? None of the big names--Aristotle, Kant, Croce–Benedetto, not Jim–come close to answering it.

Sit right down in the chair. It's a glider, see? Smooth and easy movement without that annoying head-swing you get from a rocker. And easy to get out of, unlike a lounge chair. Relax. "Reba" reruns will be coming on in a minute.

I may as well have been sleepwalking. Either way, I had no opportunity to admire the moonlight flooding into the long corridors, illuminating the stag heads and painted cheeks of long-dead ancestors.

It is easy to look out on the Bowery and say, "There are the bums." Encountering one, however, even one who asks to "bum a quarter" or tells you he's "on the bum" the word "bum" slips away in one's mind...

The Inauguration Day Windstorm had blown out half the downtown lights to celebrate its twenty-first birthday. Two old friends flecked with gray snow and white hair sat on the boulders that kept the Sound from sweeping away Myrtle Edwards Park. Look at all the…

He rolls in unbidden across the stubble fields / Old acquaintance astride a newly booming cloud/ Under sky an alien shade of strawberries whipped/ Her watch stops ticking out the rest of her/ scheduled breathing poses

In the mode of Swinburne's ‘Dolores':For the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster- A study of the notion of “Intelligent Design” Since the universe came into dawning, If e'er this bright universe did, Men ought to know better in…

Eat blueberries every day and you'll live to be a 92 year old mogul. Really.

One moustache hair at moustache level on a filmy bathroom mirror. A red velvet spread on a big round bed. Dear Ma: We saw a bearded lady.

Eighteen-year-old Svetlana Kabalevsky was now the widow of the poet Dmetri Kabalevsky, soon to be another widow-whore on the Moscow highway.

Fine gradations of the fractional/ fissure the eggshell whole we crave

Their tongues were dry, her milk was gone, and the last bit of water in the plastic jug had evaporated.

The rat had been informed, assured, cajoled in order to gain his assent—duly lied to, in other words, by the researchers with not one tear of remorse, with no smudge or smear of conscience . . .

One day a girl with blond hair was walking along the fence on the other side. There were just a handful of us left and I was the only one to notice her. I watched her. She did not see me. The next time I saw her, I went to the fence. I thought she might y

Like a distant memory of past expectations I wander through past journeys, delineations chew on the fresh air like a discontented Wordsworth now free, free to roam where I will..