I circled the sun with a lasso of figures in the dark, where every atom’s splitting. My fingers tingled, slowly growing numb. To make nothing, draw a circle around what isn’t there. Bless the hands in the mirror, whoever they belong to. Eat clouds when in the motherless air. Is a short time circular, fluttering … Continue reading Death Is A Tower (Cento)
SAM SAT IN HIS usual mom and pop on East Colfax waiting for his usual lunch. When the waitress arrived with the bowl of green chile stew he’d accidentally caught a glimpse of the TV screen on the wall to his right, his remaining eye side, showing the start of a horse race at Arapahoe … Continue reading The Inadvertent Adversary
The stars peck our eyes as the night’s chemical grin rises. The wind plants a good-luck kiss on your cheek. We climb down the ladder, my hands behind your knees as we clear the last rungs. We have always touched as strangers; now our hands slide around each other lizard-like in a dark kitchenette. A … Continue reading Baby’s On Fire
IT WAS THE DAYS, for me, of Succession. Two of them, thirty-nine episodes. You can imagine the distress. Amanda, alas, could not. The last of us came in gradual, episodic spurts and then suddenly (or however that goes). I remember vividly my disgust at her suggestion that Tom Wambsgans would emerge as Waystar RoyCo’s next … Continue reading Islands, In The Stream
Turns out the penthouse suite doesn’t suit me, too posh and roomy for my delicate tastes. Give me life’s honest feeling; the cold concrete and steel of burning basements; the creak of a cratered rooftop. Luxury reeks like a toxic tonic, a sick and sour salve to soothe self- inflicted wounds (ingredients include juice of … Continue reading Hymn to Riches
THE FIRST EIGHT HOURS were the best eight hours, when I still believed my lusty dreams would be fulfilled. Among the Amish, where I was born and raised, and up on Northstar, where I spent the better part two years, I’d marinated in high-octane fantasies of flesh and hair and spurting fluids, buttocks, breasts, and … Continue reading The Full Package
Just once and in the spirit of whatever winks please help me create a dearly different religion Steeped in hoot toot and with whistling almighties All given over unto and believed in with heavens upon from the get go Yes teach me how to sing like vines on porches or as spit-jokes do or as … Continue reading Given Over
So yes, cheetah-print carpet did whine something sensual as I pressed into it, coaxing me further upstairs because Is this what everyone else knew about? Hotels, spaces, glamorous enough for one’s own reinvention? because who really belongs here but the sharpened spiders crawling along the roof we peek over, fairy lights cutting their silhouette? Later, … Continue reading We’ve Never Been to This Part of Downtown
BY THE TIME I noticed the squirrel, it was way past too late. The squirrel had already eyeballed my driver’s license and the paper forms for the gun purchase with all my private information on them, and so had a firm fix on my telephone number, home address and who knows what the fuck else. … Continue reading Squirrel
Your feet speak as they meet the scaffold stair: You brought this on yourself. It’s clear from the humorless way the garroter yanks your chain that he hates his work. You soften to the pillory’s kiss: its wooden hug whispers of headless love. The crowd squawks in unison. Your eyes empty themselves. The blade whistles … Continue reading Guillotine