Her plastic shopping bag brushes your leg. You look into it and all you see is a 2 liter of Coke, a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a package of Oreos. It’s so oddly touching, so purely American, that your heart breaks a little bit. You want to hug t

and you imagine euthanizing them if what she says is true, that she is leaving them to you in her will.

--"Look at us," she murmurs. "Tristan and Isolde without the adultery." --"Well, you can't have everything." --"No? I heard otherwise."

She remembers the days when she could have purchased every card in the store and found the words to fill them all.

Could even drift off to New Orleans for a slow sip of a hurricane

Back then we used to dance slowly to Sam Cooke's “You Send Me” on your parquet floors, whispering about planting our vegetable garden, planning to seed the lawn with centipede grass, promising to count all the red cars that came down the street.

Along with Bad Bunny comes the reckless dancing the ambulance chases and the long, drawn-on faces

Now I hear a woman's voice. It sounds familiar, like I know her, but in my daze it is slightly distorted, like I am underwater and she is calling to me beneath the waves. She tells me not to be afraid. Her words are calming; they soothe away the panic and confusion. I…

Don't slow down, he said, time grows shorter every minute. So you pretended to stay young or cheated on your marriage or forgot to watch your children growing up, and still never found someone who could understand you.

IV. Upwards, into the white eye rising, There is will, to stay, yet stays no will to be. Come,…

Yesterday I saw Marco Polo getting a tattoo on East Olive. He was practicing Mandarin Chinese with the tattoo artist who was also Chinese. He got a yin yang symbol on his bicep. He looked to the east and saw the hills lift themselves into sky. He grimaced

Then I see her walking down the grass aisle: my assignment. She looks nothing like the image I have been trained with, but her identifier is strong.

It was a bright day in April, the cruelest month, and the gears and pumps of the train beat on into the still air.

People act, today, as if there were no such thing as Death - i.e. they "psychotically" reify the notion that we "live on" in our work or more pointedly/poignantly in our offspring and in society qua Creation. This tendency was half present in the old Greeks - the …

Star-eaterHere lies the star-eater.Tilting on the ancient wheelof summer-glaze-breath,you speak the oceans. Fire's the mealfor you, the star-eater. You defy death,and out of your mouth, a universe openspouring forth, as fleet as the starslight on your tongue. Space…