Most read stories

A Song To Lose Your Shoes To

11431143 views33 comments00 favs

You’ve got me standin’ on my knees, A’searchin’ for a beggar’s alms, From folks who’re deaf to all my pleas And blind to open palms.

Ready to Go

11431143 views66 comments00 favs

Where the fuck are my keys?Where the hell is my phone?Where the fuck are my keys?Where the hell is my phone?Where the fuck are my keys?Where the hell is my phone?Where the fuck are my keys?Where the hell is my phone?Where the fuck are my keys?Where the hell is my…

The Harrisburg

11431143 views22 comments22 favs

“Gliese Base Twelve, come in. Gliese Base Twelve, this is the Harrisburg. We have a level five emergency. Requesting immediate assistance.”

The Angel Closes the Rain

11431143 views44 comments44 favs

I may have gone A little soft in the brain But I swear I still see it The angel closes the rain Even God has to refrain From causing us pain When the angel closes the rain So the angel closes the rain At the end of time The angel mus

This Old Man

11431143 views22 comments00 favs

“Have I told you this one before?” I can’t think of one he hasn’t told me, but saying so won’t stop him. I fire up the FreeCell game, put the phone on speaker, and pour a tumbler of chardonnay.

Bringing a New Poet into Your Home

11431143 views66 comments33 favs

You may want to pretend to leave once or twice, peeking in through a window from a darkened room, to see how they interact. Never leave a new poet unattended with the pack until you’ve determined that the new arrival has learned to fit in with the other w

Starting Over 1974

11421142 views33 comments11 fav

Stone-gathering became my job by default. Digging the foundation, trundling the loaded wheelbarrow away from the site, yours.

Wedding

11421142 views99 comments88 favs

It was cold in the church. The Lutherans were freezing to death. The Catholics brought their winter coats.

No Lions or Tigers, Thank Goodness

11421142 views11 comment11 fav

I scrambled back a bit and found my feet after untangling them from my trekking poles. Really should have dropped those when this all started. The bear lunged at me with his teeth and I just barely dodged to the left to avoid getting something bitten of

Five Million Yen: Chapter 26

11421142 views00 comments11 fav

Ben gagged after shot-gunning the scotch. He hiccupped and it came back up through his nose. He grabbed a napkin and caught most of a shot and a half of Whyte & MacKay as it poured out his nose.

My Flying Debris

11421142 views44 comments44 favs

a book of 5 poem-like things I made out of silly string and shot your way when you weren't exactly looking "..kisses are a far better fate/than wisdom."--E.E.CummingsContents:1.The Day's Thin Blue Swim-Suit2. The One Who Needed Let In Most3. I…

Black Night Takes Bite

11421142 views00 comments00 favs

The Black night reached under his shiny silk jacket And touched the steamy leather of his holster.

How did you get your second Silver Star

11421142 views00 comments11 fav

No one told us that the LZ was already hot and the last Combat Mobile Team had already been shot down and killed. No, no one told us that. So when we came in below about 500 feet I began to hear that "pitit" sound of AK-47 rounds going right through the f

You Require Sharpness of Image and Therefore of Words

11421142 views00 comments11 fav

I wrote a poem and asked a professor to read it. / He said: IMAGE IMAGE IMAGE IMAGE / like a mad man on meth, foam running down / his mouth crowded with sharp, shimmering teeth.

Osmotic potential

11421142 views55 comments44 favs

Guttering semiotics, The jeremiads of delirium; Drinking lukewarm tea over a late candle Like Hamlet in a power-cut; Affecting his own audience of himself, Hastening soliloquies through gritted sophisms, Withered and spun to intentional…

Gentility

11421142 views00 comments00 favs

The walls of our shanty were of the standard corrugated rusty metal typical of communities like ours.We did our cooking over a Bunsen burner purloined from the Catholic Boys' School - beans mostly. We did our drinking from bottles of Thunderbird or Old Crow (when…

Oyster

11421142 views11 comment00 favs

"Maybe…" he began searching for some comforting wisdom. "Maybe it's like this. Husbands live for their wives. Mothers live for their children. And children...well...until they're husbands or wives, they live for themselves."

Octopus

11421142 views44 comments00 favs

Sometimes I think there's an octopus in my stomach. In the mornings it stretches and droops its lazy head to one side — It suctions it's tentacles to the walls of my belly and pulls them together forcing me To gag, and vomit what we didn't digest of the…

In This, Our Life

11421142 views1515 comments55 favs

Her captors allowed her the use of the toes of one foot. It was hard to pretend she was numb—as if playing an artic game indoors. With the ball of her foot, she primed the canvas. Her big toe acted as a fan brush, the rest were sable, flat, or pointy. She told…

Love and Cigarettes

11421142 views11 comment11 fav

She's waiting there, for you, in bed but the analgesic cigarette calms your mind more than her heat. She's there waiting, in your bed, eyes closed, fluttering, somewhere between the dream and practical world.

Reburial at sea

11421142 views22 comments00 favs

“Sloshes to sloshes. Drip to drip,” I said, then ceremoniously flushed the toilet bowl, our heads bowed in reverence as Molly and I gave Swimmy its last rites. Swimmy, named by Molly whose overstatement of the obvious is endearing in a three-year-old, was…

Breaking Bread at Al Qalzam

11421142 views33 comments11 fav

My first time alone with the women in Saudi Arabia...

Precipice of Questions

11421142 views88 comments44 favs

He stood with the bride of quietness / on the precipice of questions

Visitation

11421142 views77 comments77 favs

we can say all we couldn’t say when the ears could hear us

Ambassador of Nowhere

11421142 views66 comments55 favs

Before you tripped on the third rail, you were like any other: coat a shard of midnight-blue, eyes filled with gratitude but for nothing. You were a lost coyote on a snowy hill. With sad magnificence you wandered, terrorizing passengers who secretly wished to pat your…

Confidence

11421142 views33 comments22 favs

one day the words will form an order, one day the words will make a rhyme, one day the words will make a meaning

Abortion Mill

11411141 views44 comments55 favs

She arranged to have an abortion at a doctor Greene’s office, who practiced out of a converted house on Solano Avenue on the north side of Berkeley. I took her there the day of the procedure. You couldn’t go to a regular hospital to have this kind of thi

Free Magic Lessons

11411141 views99 comments66 favs

" No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing."--T.S. EliotI think, okay now I know, the poem's starting to wear off. But I'm alive, at least…

A Tale

11411141 views44 comments22 favs

But you don’t know how to fly, Bunny! How ever will we survive?

Leda, After the Swan

11411141 views11 comment00 favs

I do not jerk up to sirens birds doorbell shouts hello hello through the letterbox hello