Most read stories

The Rider

13421342 views22 comments00 favs

"The rider rode his bike in Arizona just about every day and for all the usual reasons....."

Fourth Time’s a Charm

13411341 views22 comments22 favs

We wait for a server to bring our coconut cream pie. His favorite. I hate coconut.

ExsanguiNations

13411341 views88 comments66 favs

leaches fatten-up

Mother's Day

13411341 views44 comments22 favs

By lunch: The dryer is an F-5 dervish of mismatched socks, blue jeans and your yellowing college T's, lovingly held onto. For a moment there is a comforting warmth and softness to their smell. In the debris strewn landscape of the living room a carcass

The Gatekeeper Of The Pathogens

13411341 views11 comment11 fav

It was in his teeth. A blackness, a subscription to an outsideness, a painful contraction of burnt out trees scattered there among sand drifts and tidal debris. His face, lightly weathered and troubled, a tightness built into eyes of thought and separation. His arms, strong…

Day Off Work

13411341 views99 comments44 favs

My time glass allocation nears its end.

Sailor's Visa

13411341 views33 comments00 favs

He's got a rager for Casablanca, the old Bogart and Bergman classic. I can't snap him out of it.

The Donkey

13411341 views1111 comments88 favs

Since dawn doesn't understand my words, I will give them to the donkey, finely cut for him, let them ferment some time and add a few sprigs of lucerne. The donkey grazes in the meadow down the road and always welcomes me with a grin that displays his mauve gums and his…

The Campus Socialists

13411341 views33 comments11 fav

The Campus Socialists Paul and Mary Jo lived in an apartment at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs that were so high, I remember as if it were yesterday thinking, the night she pushed him down the stairs, he would surely be dead by the time h

Fear

13411341 views99 comments44 favs

Fear I’ll be stuck here without a ladder

the leisure to walk about sweetly

13411341 views00 comments00 favs

You seemed to have that leisure to walk about sweetly when I was with you, honey-singing the reward for the intensity of emotion you lunged about in. Nothing seemed like it was going to hurt or harm anyone, even while I was going nuts between the legs.

Hook

13411341 views22 comments11 fav

“What the fuck!” Duke muttered, amazed at what he was seeing in the darkened store. A thin curtain of smoke was rising from under the baseboard like an inverted waterfall. It stretched the entire length of the left wall. Holy shit, the joint's on fire! I…

His First and Only: A Love Story for Halloween

13411341 views00 comments00 favs

It was the woman, Mary Lou Compton, that he cared about. They would've been happily married by now if Bryce hadn't killed his Uncle Ned.

Full of Mad Hope

13411341 views1212 comments22 favs

full of mad hope / we dash into the street / leap into the fray / and enter splendiferous lists

Edward Ogle the fourth

13411341 views44 comments44 favs

Charted stars by the dozens / with a side of frizzle onions / dawn showers us with glitter.

Prairie Flowers

13411341 views55 comments11 fav

As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.

WE WOKE UP LEAN

13411341 views33 comments00 favs

We were careful not to wake the kids & goodbye with a handshake & my skeleton is trapped with your universe inside.

forgiveness

13411341 views33 comments22 favs

she sees that no one has considered her needsshe feels left out, and so she strikes outon the offensive, nostrils flaringpoints her finger and makes her caseshe has been wronged, justified in her angershe will not back downthe accused one is hurtstrikes back with her own…

Everybody Was a Virgin Once

13401340 views00 comments00 favs

Most women simply don’t want damaged goods. That’s a fact I’ve been brought face to face with throughout my life. It's something you can continue crushing your brains against, like an impossibly high hurdle. At first you take the damage without unde

Carmen Scarpino, Pioneering Wise Guy, Dead at 78

13401340 views00 comments00 favs

Breasts were developed after World War II, the result of improved nutrition and the additional muscle mass that “Rosie the Riveter”-types acquired through manual labor in jobs that males abandoned to join the war effort.

Dreams Bright White Smash

13401340 views00 comments00 favs

She was there then gone then there again. We were naked and wet and touching, she let me touch her, but she didn't want to be there. But she was, despite herself. It was my dream. You can go if you want. …

(Withheld) 1970

13401340 views00 comments00 favs

The Moon The hatch of the lunar module hissed as it opened, a few puffs of leftover water vapor escaped toward them in a sparkling white cloud that rapidly dissolved…

The Cusp of Leaving

13401340 views88 comments33 favs

She waited on the hot, broken pavement, arm outstretched, her thumb a ticket to a distant, refracted horizon. Waves of heat danced like undulating snakes under the spell of a charmer. She pictured herself passing through them, abandoning the green of home for the…

When the Moon Becomes the Sun

13401340 views66 comments33 favs

While most spread their time in other occupation, I traveled through books and grew my imagination. I knew endless bliss. I was a book eater. I would just devour books that I loved and slug through those I didn't, just to make myself eat the truths and li

Nocturnes

13401340 views44 comments44 favs

You go out on a night with no moon, when all the stars are flush in the sky, when all of everything, even you, is just a shadow moving softly, and I swear, you can hear it, if you listen hard enough. The music. It’s like it’s coming from under the ground.

Brief excerpt from the Fantasy thing I'm writing.

13401340 views33 comments11 fav

Lucien Lucien Tidesquall lay almost sleeping amid the soft green grass. His eyes irradiated green midnight under vanquished brows. A plover hovered somewhere in the distance. It reminded him of a poem he had written as a teenager, a haiku that went as…

With Eyes Closed

13401340 views1515 comments88 favs

I believe I will become a bear, snuggle up in a deep cave, coil myself inside my fur, close my eyes on hurting images, turn a deaf ear to the uproar of the world. Bolt my door to the deceiving voices outside. Sleep. Forget. Wait, as we wait for spring, for the violet and…

Mark Twain's Typewriter

13401340 views22 comments11 fav

Did I refer to Mark Twain’s typewriter as an animal? Did I call it a hyena? I would not say that about Mark Twain’s typewriter.

The Human Phenom Project

13401340 views44 comments55 favs

I sat at the vast graveyard of broken hearts on the mending fence of wonderment unsealing the silence of the wounds I began to put the pieces together like a puzzle against forgetting

When the Germans Were on the Roof of the World

13401340 views66 comments66 favs

Flew a Messerschmitt. Drove a tank over people in Poland though not in Prague, and claimed he was never a guard at the death camps.