Recommended stories

More from The Chronicles of His Demise

888888 views1515 comments99 favs

Dread and drudgery sour each day

On the Road

13121312 views1616 comments88 favs

how did they not know

Pick Me

13961396 views1010 comments99 favs

Strike me down hard, bolt of pure blue, laser focus square, blast of hydrogen nuclear, knock me on the keister, blind me down, oh Lordy Lord Lord.

There's Always A Tree Dying Somewhere

756756 views1414 comments66 favs

Bonus included.

Bait Shop

11771177 views1111 comments1010 favs

They wanted to go fresh water fishing, so I had to buy worms. None there in the saltwater town. Drove about 10 miles over the long bridge to cross the bay. I'd been there before. Walked in and a crusty, little skinny man got up from his chair. He: Watcha need? Me: Fresh…

Old Age

11641164 views1212 comments88 favs

Are they too old for life's little pleasures? The answer comes as I pass them on the canyon road one morning.

The Bet, Forever Boy, and Dangling

567567 views1616 comments88 favs

a boy with a gun, a skateboard, and spray-paint

Extinctions

132132 views1818 comments88 favs

Dinosaurs, a little boy, a hapless mother and mortality.

Whispers (set of 3 themed poems)

13941394 views1212 comments88 favs

.

Boredom takes a Snapshot

246246 views1111 comments99 favs

.

Reiki Master

13991399 views2121 comments77 favs

55 words, slightly naughty

Falcon Street

18151815 views1010 comments99 favs

Marcy is two years older and got her period the summer before me. She thinks she’s a professor of everything, but she’s my best friend so I don’t say she’s being stupid or that her tangerine lipstick is smeared across her front teeth.

Just the Facts

12761276 views1111 comments99 favs

skin cancer walks along Zuma beach at noon

The River, Once

16851685 views1414 comments88 favs

once she went to quenchthen she went to scrubnow she collects dead toadsgrinds them with cornmeal to feed her sowsonce she ploughed the land toiled with her face deep in dark soil her back burning in hot sunnow she works in the paper millmaking laminated labels for the…

a prayer for lambs

557557 views1313 comments77 favs

unsteady, they try to rise

Remember the Maine

13811381 views99 comments99 favs

He remembered waking up on those lazy summer days hearing the sad song of mourning doves.

Assless

12391239 views1313 comments88 favs

I heard on WUSF,

Cut-offs

11721172 views1313 comments99 favs

The sauce is you

You, the Real Story

11221122 views1010 comments99 favs

I don't need to be toldhow natural you are, not here.I'm reminded every singletime I open my eyes.What I want to know iswhere have you gone? Whyhas it taken you so verylong to return? But Iknow the answer. You aresomewhere fighting for your dearlife. It's what we all do--in…

Here be Dragons

12861286 views22 comments22 favs

Most nights while in his sleep, with his one good eye deeply shut, the old man can hear the whispers of the specter in the remote wanderings, holding the surrounding woodlands in its snare. The sound of it closing in, with the bones of the universe crushing in…

Good Country. People.

21772177 views77 comments44 favs

Initially, she had no hopes about his impending arrival, scrawny as he was, until realizing that, because he was a boy, because he was new around here, he might want to wrestle.

Popeye

746746 views1515 comments77 favs

In one of the cartoons I watched as a child, Popeye the Sailor gives Olive Oyl a bouquet of flowers. She is thrilled, he walks on air, thinking they will marry. His one-eyed heroism is soon challenged by Bluto however, who pours cement into Popeye's bath. It goes…

In This Lifetime, Oh How We’ve Drawn This Close

16011601 views99 comments1010 favs

Together at last, we'd gotten this far toward the warm end of those sweet Promises we made, once, with our sincerest written and passed down smart Words, done all on our own deeds, with some real gusto, and offered them as Christmas Lights,…

CBGB

12371237 views1616 comments88 favs

Lou Reed was sitting in CBGB, I was sitting on Greenwich Ave. and West 10th street. I didn't know him then and I didn't know him later either, but we were both there.

Penny cosmogony

13741374 views1111 comments77 favs

On his knees he divinates diverging lines with belly laughs he levitates the rebel spheres into geodes .

If I Were a Chemist, Not Now, but Maybe In The 1920s

12901290 views1212 comments99 favs

She said, “I think I’m pregnant,” but I thought that the sidewalk looked cleaner than usual,

First Rain of the New Year

11631163 views1212 comments88 favs

Compartments trickle together/ in light diffuse and unreliable./ Fortify yourself against the day.

Delphi and Parlor Games

11741174 views1515 comments88 favs

Ghosts// and the voice of God/ never actually visited you

I Can Take Satan

14051405 views1010 comments99 favs

It was all I was convinced / in designing the encounter.

The Watch

12431243 views1717 comments1010 favs

I packed food for a lifetime, clothes and boots, all the guns, and the audio of our poetry...