Concrete coffeecake drumbeat gyrate Andy Rooney ran a meter.

I guess you felt more comfortable holding your Moby Dick

My kid chased the umpire back to his crappy Honda Civic and flipped it over–at the age of 10! That's what steroids can do for you.

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.

After going to the garage and moving at least 4000 boxes of junk we found the coat rack. We wrestled it up the stairs to my room. I wasn't much help, but Dad was cool about it. I think he was just happy I liked the suit.

I wonder what it would be like to dog-paddle in the middle of the ocean. I wonder how Jean Auguste Ingres got the flesh tones for “Odalisque.” I wonder if bees have dreams.

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.

He saw in her something fierce and wild and gently led her to his open palm...

The television was playing reruns of Mr. Ed, but it was hard to hear because of the flock of birds in the palm tree. I’d sometimes imagined the birds coming through the window, a swarming of pink cotton mouths, mawing everything in sight.

Listening too much to the night, with its whistles, bright lights of luminescent bursts like leaves on fire, or the raised ear of a cow in the purple mist, or the curled tail of a pig foraging in the night.

He almost died, but hasn’t been this much alive ever.

"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.

“Outis of Utopia” my found name! / I'll inscribe it soon as the tide goes out.

Goodbye comes in stages. At first you recognize that you will “miss” someone when they are gone. Then you have to accept the fact that they are leaving. And finally accept the fact that they are gone; and not particularly in that order. If only it

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