| 1397  6  5   
 | His looks were polished like his shoes, his hair as black. No one would have guessed he made his living as a thief. | 
		
		
			| 1038  8  5   
 | I'm not plagued with high levels. Must be all the raking I do. My pubes look as lush as my hair, so fire isn't even a concern. Maybe heat exhaustion is.This might be a poem,My oceans aren't small. | 
		
		
			| 1309  9  5   
 | I never meant to shipwreck you,
I didn't even know I was singing out loud.
I just stood on my rock a little too boldly,
and hummed a tune you wanted to hear. | 
		
		
			| 505  7  5   
 |  | 
		
		
			| 383  7  5   
 |  | 
		
		
			| 1247  8  6   
 | and, once in a rare while,/
actual pearls. | 
		
		
			| 1322  9  5   
 | "Possible candidates for reading to a crowd"
the subject line of the email to myself read.
You see, writing can be hard - 
or writing can be easy.
But writing for a crowd you'll see is something else entirely. | 
		
		
			| 1176  7  6   
 | You look at me with that contemptuous smirk while I'm here in Walmart dressed in sweats and house slippers, sloppy, a bit fat, trying to figure out which electric toothbrush to buy.  | 
		
		
			| 1898  10  5   
 | I scare my daughter when she sleeps because she thinks I'm going to kill her.  | 
		
		
			| 1505  7  6   
 | Clear as my conscience may be, you still haunt me as the brown settles to black
sit there and recommence as if nothing had ever happened, your hands conducting the orchestra of your purity. | 
		
		
			| 817  7  6   
 | Marcel Proust had never been to a big-box store before.  He was dazzled by the sheer size and scope of the store and the seeming  impassivity of the shoppers. So many products, so many shelves, such strangely  intriguing examples of the human condition. The people seemed… | 
		
		
			| 1156  9  6   
 | " 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… | 
		
		
			| 1270  10  6   
 | gravel coughing up tires at 90 miles an hour
and just getting under way | 
		
		
			| 1490  6  5   
 | LECTURES        A Bra Burning     When Freud painted “Envy,” the women collapsed, holding fans to their faces. Hot that year, they retired to the Tyrols.         50 Days of Palindromes     Although Thiebaud painted cakes like women,… | 
		
		
			| 1023  8  6   
 | "ain't hardly got a lick o' crabs today" | 
		
		
			| 105  8  5   
 |      Every morning when she arrived at work, Jackie filled her  bright red cup with coffee, sat down at her desk and riffled through Women's Wear Daily to see if there were  any candid photos taken of her walking down Fifth Avenue where… | 
		
		
			| 1449  11  6   
 | The days cut off by damp chill with every thought a different variety of protection. | 
		
		
			| 1156  18  5   
 | another paper saving 55er | 
		
		
			| 1313  10  6   
 | Here comes my speed dealer
he's riding shotgun in the open | 
		
		
			| 1317  7  6   
 | Up at the top, a quarter mile south, billows of black smoke crawled up the faint blue of the sky. | 
		
		
			| 1674  10  5   
 | That Dagwood is not a real person but a story told in dots. That Blondie is a male fantasy and will one day find her Nora Helmer.  | 
		
		
			| 1171  10  5   
 | I am studying the way/
dust bunnies emerge, grow/
and apparently reproduce. | 
		
		
			| 1291  7  6   
 |      All these poets with their wrinkled hands full of freshly poured over poems are driving me into the dried wheat fields like a black block of crows. Offering a collectable cigarette, they light the damned thing    with another hand-rolled poem,… | 
		
		
			| 709  13  5   
 | Dawn is spreading its pink and blue colours over the morning. Pleasant hues, with children playing and birds chattering. A light morning, without commitments, without waves, open to promises. Mornings don't speak our language and don't make the same gestures. They speak a… | 
		
		
			| 1125  6  6   
 | The moon, a cataract cloaked in its charcoal fog, slowly seeps among the trees; night's unguent.Its glance is constant and white,its arc known. I watch its brow of bone with constant wonder.The long, slow funeral of America is taking its time; its… | 
		
		
			| 1284  8  6   
 | There are stranded people just like us, that's     Not necessarily what I'm looking for.     Negativity won't pull us through the     Barbed-wire halls of hate. And even if I     Was the only one, I wouldn't want you     To look any different in the mirror. I'm older    … | 
		
		
			| 754  7  4   
 |      ...Or  perhaps it has;    It  depends which way you look at it.    Perhaps  the reader may cite laziness    As  my reason for not titling this    Any  other than I would have done    As  now, with such a title    As  it has, since for some reason    I  never… | 
		
		
			| 1428  9  6   
 | I tell myself I should have known. You were always absence. | 
		
		
			| 1336  8  6   
 | Said do you feel it when you touch me? | 
		
		
			| 1904  8  6   
 | Len and I sit on Harpo's porch, drink beer and gab.  It's hot, even for July.  Len and I joke and laugh, and Harpo stares off into the middle distance. |