Maureen
We don’t have to hate all people at all times. Maureen is a funny woman. She takes my taxi just to have an audience. She tends to talk on and on. She has no friends, just a cat who drools. She has no physical coordination at all and is the butt of everybody’s jokes even her own. It has been that way since she was a child. Now she’s a 41-year-old nurse who can make fun of herself, which is something even most saints can’t do. Passion...
Read MoreBetween your two weakest fingers
Between your two weakest fingers the quarter slips, your wish drowning half in moonlight half held down by your arm — you’ve got an hour in a meter clogged with ancient lakes and marrow with wings seeping through the altitude where north stays stranded in your bones juts from the curb and a little water for your heart — with the first handshake you will forget again, your wrist towed from beside some motionless glass filled where nothing else is thirsty. Passion...
Read MoreCommunication
It was always the same he’d stand on the corner in front of the kiosk playing his sax one note at a time like walking a dog the same deliberate gait step by measured step. “Are there enchiladas in heaven?” I’d ask him drop a dollar in his old felt hat that must have belonged to his father [they don’t make them like that anymore]. “Are there enchiladas in heaven?” I’d ask again wait for his answer that always came “bo ba be bot” a line of black...
Read MoreThe Long Cry of Autumn
Blustery morning winds are driving low lying clouds and three days of drizzling rain into a gap in West Virginia mountains, and I walk my dog under an autumn sky so perfectly blue no words can hold it. I’d like to hold this moment though, the way my wife holds fragrance in dried leaves she keeps in a dish on her vanity, but the dog cares nothing about past or future, invisible center pulling hard against the leash — all nose now — brain gorged by smells far beyond my imagining, enough to quiver sagging lips of half-bark dreams he’ll dream in front of winter...
Read MoreCast About
the wind blows like a zither leaves, branches, flapping, the house banging against the house you would love this time of year your favorite growing colder, the pumpkins at the side of the road like small flames skeletal winds, I’ll stand looking at this world you’ve left Passion...
Read MoreNorth Dakota Blues
I’m as shriveled and dead as an autumnal leaf I’m a-blowin’ through life on a gossamer breeze To a ghost-ravaged town on the edge of the world Where the rain never came and the wild winds blow Through a sun-whitened skull on a sun-whitened plain Only thirteen are left only seven are sane Where the Indians roamed and the buffalo fell And the hide hunters struck with a harbinger’s knell. Then the homesteaders came with a robin’s egg dream And they planted their towns like a field full of wheat Till Depression and Dust like Colossus in black Left their...
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