Most read stories

Weld (St. Petersburg Blues)

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There's one graveyard for the part-timers and another for the full-timers. Ours is a little nicer, but we're still all going to hell. Do you remember St. Petersburg? No, you're memory's not that good.

How to Lose Control of Your Pencil

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Real hands

Five

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"It all began with a painting," I said. "Mostly blue. Acrylic. Naturalistic in a modern sense. She was stylized but recognizable, and her breasts were exposed. Everyone could see her disordered skirt. The painter was a fan of Herrick.

Control

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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 he hit the landing at the…

Land Fill at Morning

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The gulls/ have somehow mastered the art// of avoiding the nooses of six-pack/ plastic rings

Cherry Almond Streusel Cake

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Tomorrow we will eat it in anger.

Lights Out in the Ardennes

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Once with the lights flickering....

More from The Chronicles of His Demise

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Dread and drudgery sour each day

black

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my soul is black and it's deep like heartbreak and heavy as stone and as thick as ink and it is pressing on top of me like last nights one night stand like dead weight so that I can't lift my arms or spread my legs it feels like I am walking through mud but it's…

On A Carport in Bethlehem

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I can hear soft rain

Things an Old Person Would Say

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Obituaries aren’t as much fun as they used to be.

I Don't Know How the Nights Can Be So Long When Life Is So Short

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I will always remember that picture of you in your bright blue summer dress, with your arms spread out against a wooden fence in Central Park.

enchantment

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I remember taking you to see all these sexy movies because it really built up the passion in you. I loved what you did to me when we got back home after those movies. That’s when we were just trying out our dating wings. I don’t know if you knew how

4:09 and American Music

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If you knew everything, you would not be able to sit on tropical balconies at 4:09 A.M., discovering a book and then the world for the first time If you were part of the spiritual set, and could astral travel far and wide, but neglected to open the door…

Dreamless

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We call it the alley of the shadows, the low sunless concavity of earth between the stalks, the acrid scent of the ripened arrow-points.

The Lonely White Elephant in Rome

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the gambling priest stands in the morning fog/red moon hangs in the sky/the army of seven houses marches over the hill

Noir in cadence

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...hup hup hup...

Fibers(next:our world without ice caps/yipes!)

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The light they love to hate so much is always pulsating within each life; the unbelievable color sword of what happens next when any two people find each other in their hearts and all pretense is somehow gone, for at…

Elevator Music

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Of course, no one can control what goes on in an elevator.

Scanner

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The Bearcat 101 was a police scanner popular with a certain type during in the 1970s. Daddy was that exact type. I found the Bearcat in his apartment after he passed. His illness was a common one, the process gradual, implacable. No red and blue…

The Fat Man and the Magician

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The Fat Man took a sip of whiskey, then replaced his glass on the table next to his fedora. …

Coalheart

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He is sleek with hearts and I see a different name etched onto each one.

Never Catch Me Alive

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We walk with our heads down, maybe 15 of us, moving under a sun that has grown to encompass everything. Everything is in hues of orange and red like a bloody eyeball on fire.

Preacher Alphonse Jicklo

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Samson was also somewhat in hopes that his son Jason would become engaged in this minor capitalist enterprise and 'turned around' in his life.

War Story : Alternate Duty

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They say that air traffic control is stressful work and I guess it is for some people. It did require a lot of concentration but that never bothered me much. I could keep the position, bearing and altitude of a couple of dozen aircraft in my head without

That Was Then, Not Now

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Memory is unreliable, of course-/ re-coloring savored scenes-/ paler here, more saturated there-

and we can only hope

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When I was alive with you inside me, I discovered briefly and finally how to fly. Up near your ceiling as I floated around the universe with widening eyes, like a butterfly, like a god, like a bird with golden hair at my neck, like a speckled moth infla

Away From the River

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Tiny poem

Of the Terrible Angels and Their Fleshy Conduits

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Other pathways are more satisfactory. They are more closely attuned to music of the other world. Even so, the heat eventually burns them up.

A Winter Gift

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As we follow the trail and things snap beneath our feet, I tell myself that the snapped things take pleasure, find purpose even, in the sounds they make with my soles.