Things must be in this order then: Opinion, size, age, shape, color, noun. And so on. It is an easy enough thing to remember. Sweet small young round brown bear. The mnemonics of our lives. Don’t say it another way. You will be made to believe that your stupidity unmeasures you. Language is the leash
To be distrustful of questions is the best way to translate three ravens clustered in front of a house I was considering buying. Even just a few months ago I would have steeped the moment with symbolism. The sheen of wing. Their beaded eyes that know roofs. And trees. But no demarcation lines. Before I
It is a cave we can only see at low-tide, the moss drifting like the hair of drowned mermaids, the sea-stars clinging futilely to the rocks.
Sitting on a bench at the dog park a younger woman, someone who I assumed was intelligent because she was attractive, said to me, “You have a dangerous dog breed.” A single man has to double-consider statements like that. When God leaned over to Adam with that fingertip cosmic spark I’d like to think he
It was always New Year’s of a sort I guess. That book was last year’s gospel. You can’t read it anymore. Here’s a new and different one. It was like getting dumped in junior high by a girl. Everything had changed! You leaned blind against the wall. That night at home there would be mac
I lose myself in daydreams of a sheep- throwing contest on the moon. Distance wins points. Bonus points are earned for every sheep that lands upright and magically prances away, launching itself with strange floating grace. Is there, somewhere, an animal whose mind drifts to thoughts of a similar sport involving the likes of me,
Wistfully I long for the day when the Emperor of America forgoes the affairs of state and instead sits all night at his lamp-lit desk absorbed in composing sonnets in tribute to a girl he’d admired as a schoolboy. Sipping peppermint tea, lips silently moving as he tries out tentative phrases, he’ll tap on his
I sit on the bench and borrow the view; a small brass plaque spells out your name as I hope you have all your answers now. I watch the waves roll onto the shore: the sea’s eternal gnashing at the land. Your ashes long since flung to the wind, scattered among the restless waves. Along
There were two thousand red bricks that made up the front facade of the high school I would eventually drop out of. I counted them on a daily basis, as I waited for my step-dad to come pick me up after class. Some days when he was on a roll at the races or the
Whenever I think, some notion in the cloud or other confluence that floats the mooring will seize upon the wonderful convenience, joukery-pawkery. That bluster, “To duck, to dodge,” has danced into its corner so few adherents. Like a hollow barrel the empty drum thinly porous, joukery-pawkery. I keep seeking that latent horizon beyond a rip
