Joy! My daddy always swore it was true,and, I guess, a 14-year-old boy would notice.In Montgomery, Alabama, on hearing the news on VJ Dayspontaneous dancing broke out in the streets.After selling all his newspapers,he spied three nude young women.No mad Gorgons turning celebratory jitterbuggers to stone,no matron Fates spinning yarn,but flesh-and-blood, young American womanhoodfull-bodied with
my gums are receding, but on the good side – I’ve finally gotten a superpower, invisibility. Well, at least to young attractive women, I’m invisible. They stare past me as if I were transparent and sometimes they even walk right through me. Really. I ought to remind them of physics, but that’d be yet another
5 hours in a sun so blistered trying to hitch a ride out of Alamogordo – pasty-faced seniors in Winnebagos for some odd reason not trusting my long-haired bearded self – I gave up. Called my old man to wire me bus fare. In Amarillo I had an hour layover, walked the main drag at
All those beautiful women in their twenties with their naked, supple bodies, incredible pre-sagging, pre-kids breasts, buns, still firm and shapely, and well-muscled thighs wrapped around my waist, as I carried them to bed. Could that be the cause 30 years later of this excruciating back pain that’s laid me out for nearly 3 days?
Me, the dumbest sentimentalist of all times. Today I’ve been thinking on that run-down apartment house my grandma lived in near downtown decades ago. Been razed for years, but today that musty smell in the hallway came back to me. Is there even one other who remembers that? And the dents my grandma put in
In the psyche ward’s cafeteria, she sits, barely picking at her food. Her brow, wrinkled like a hieroglyph, meaning unbelievable suffering. Cutters, schizos, manics, substance abusers form a rag-tag choir. . Belt out an off-key “Happy Birthday to you” to someone they don’t even know. My eyes flit from face to face. Whatever private hells
Weekends in Connecticut, chipper didacts, trust fund babies, who live in cities but write of “nature,” not as anyone who knows it sees it, but as a kind of gentrified ecosystem. Survival of the cutesy! Woe to those poets of easy comfort! May they wander for 4 times 10 years, taking circuitous routes among quiet
That some patch of dust on that hard-to-get-to shelf yonder could be dead skin cells sloughed off her bent, pain-racked body more than 2 years ago now. Or that some microbial creature still spirals through my twisted, maze-like intestines, a parting gift from her, one last kiss, that last time we shared bodily fluids.
