October 2011
1 post
3 tags
Audio Keck
Look, if you don’t like dirty words, don’t listen to this. Don’t even be tempted by the salacious tales of sordid sexual rapture! Go here instead. If you want the full audio notes, you can find that here.
June 2011
1 post
3 tags
Memory Fragment: June 1991
This brief excerpt from my book AYTG?IM.K. references events that took place twenty years ago this week. And it’s also available as a PDF should you prefer it.
* * *
I graduated high school on Saturday, June 1, 1991. A local television reporter who was comfortable speaking with the odd delay/echo of the PA system in the football stadium gave the commencement address. It was clear by his...
February 2011
1 post
Humor for poets and geeks alike →
December 2010
1 post
Scrap
I think this was meant for one of my books. The last line alludes to Cicero (however please correct me on that if I’m wrong). I don’t know what else I might do with it, so here it is:
But I’d renounced that life and decided to forage down the same road that everyone takes: the golden road to unlimited capital accumulation. Well, not exactly like that, of course. I have a degree...
November 2010
1 post
4 tags
Five Things Bob Weir Said to Me Over the Phone in...
“Basically, all the songs, at least that I do, are character driven, and I’m exploring different characters to find out who they are and what they’re up to. They come and introduce themselves to me, and I’m not sure where they come from. They’re probably all living inside me at all times. Half of what makes me up is spirit driven and half of what makes me up is flesh driven, to one...
October 2010
1 post
New Work for Those with a Sentimental Streak →
September 2010
5 posts
Fragment for Michael Burkard
Philip, Stephen, Larry: these are the names of my fathers. Where is Michael? He is off in the woods with himself not being my father. Michael is a ghost, Michael is unseen, and Michael drags a fiery sword that unmakes the world. Michael is un-is. Michael, when I lost the words I hated you. It’s in the poems, the ones not found, not written: the unpoems in the unbook, the names that tell...
Honor Your Father and Mother
It all seems easy to an innocent mind: there’s a method to the rules, with children wedged between adults and dogs in God’s arrangement of the cosmos, and so as a kid you take orders from the top down. But there’s no provision for what to do when your parents start acting like fools, for when your grandmother kidnaps you, when your mother brandishes a knife at your sleeping...
Rock, Paper, Scissors #2
We each start out as paper, I suspect— just a name mused across some blank scrap to tease out the way your identity will come to sound and soon suit you, and before you know it you’re being torn from the woman who dreamed up your name, who slept like a rock the night you first fused into her, though she couldn’t have known at the time what was settling inside her like a...
Rock, Paper, Scissors
There really isn’t one that wins them all. Each time you go to choose it could fall either way, and even though it was just a silly game to pass the long bus ride on the way to the loathsome school, maybe the real lesson was in those shaking fists that met in the aisle on the slow yellow barge. Maybe the teachers knew that algebra wouldn’t save us one wit when our ass was in...
How Low Can You Go?
Everyone thinks loss is the worst, but worse yet is what isn’t known. Those loves that ended in bitter words, smashed glasses—we may wonder, What if… but in our hearts we harbor the truth: no good was ever to come of that. But the calls that trailed off, the unanswered letters and drunken, late-night texts: where did that other person slip off to, what bright corner of the world...
August 2010
1 post
2 tags
Six Shooters & Sex
It’s a shame you’re not a fan of westerns because this has all the makings of a good one: a woman alone, her husband prospecting in New Mexico, the sudden return of the fork-tongued old lover. She and that smooth talker laze in her marital bed, smoking, blowing rings that waft out the window and carry like beacons across the dusty plain. (And the worst part is that even the...
June 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Not Quite the Caboose
Someone’s parents were out of town; it was mid-Spring, and those factors combined with the impending close of the school year were enough to warrant a party. Kegs were obtained, liquor cabinets raided, parents’ drug stashes pilfered— no expense was spared in orchestrating one of those parties which is destined to take its place in the annals of local legend and be reminisced about well...
And I write songs too...
Well, I write the lyrics anyway. The music for this song, “Hungry,” was written by my good friend Bret Mosley. He also performs the song in this demo which was recorded, if I recall correctly, in his bathroom in Brooklyn.
April 2010
2 posts
A Damn Fine Story
This short story “Trilobites” is one of the best stories I’ve read in a long time. And it was first printed in 1977. If you like good writing along the lines of Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff, then you need to check this out. The writer, Breece D’J Pancake, would very likely have been one of the great short story writers of the 20th century had he not blown his head off...
Lost and Found
I very rarely write poems for public consumption any more. I write a lot of poems, but they are intended either for a specific (and private) audience, or, like a mandala, they are written and then very quickly destroyed.
But sometimes I find a forgotten poem, and I’m rather pleased with it. This is one of those. PANTOUM FOR A CYNIC (REPRISE) So there you have it: it’s all true. Love...