• HERE

    We greet as long lost friends, having never before met save sharing a place a decade apart. I strive to cling to what was there in that place, she, fueled by the frustration, has turned away just because of it. I go home to my words, she to her art, and we know our paths…


  • WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

    The room is awash in words, they pile up in corners, form untidy stacks that perpetually threaten collapse, strewing consonants like shards of ill broken glass. It might not be this way, for words need order, a rubric in which they are forced to operate. But here, in a room of poets, anarchy is the…


  • EARLY ARRIVAL

    Autumn came on hard today the drop in temperature not unexpected in these climes, but still unwanted, forcing the closing of windows. Still, as the afternoon faded, I shouted toward the window a reminder not to go gently into night to fight the soon approaching dark. The squirrel on the lawn outside the window stood,…


  • GOING

    Mingus             twisting  roiling                 blood of streets        child’s cry                         laughter of old men             s              w…


  • ERATO PREFERS LATTE

    My muse sits quietly on the shelf over the counter in the Café Espresso at Barnes and Noble nestled between 12 ounce bags of Colombian Supremo and Kenya AA, in the shadow of the plant whose leaves reach out to caress her cheek. She whispers to me between notes from the guitarist performing on the…


  • TO A POET, TO THE WEST

    Richard Wilbur lives in Massachusetts and in Key West, Florida according to his dust jackets. If you set sail westward from San Diego you may find your dream of China, of the endless wall which draws the stares and wonder more foreboding more forbidden even than the city, which you visit to sate yourself of…


  • FOYLES

    Charing Cross Road booksellers woven amid theaters cramped sagging shelves an out of print Christine Evans, slim, collected works of those long forgotten never noticed a damp chill enfolds old leather as the door opens and shuts on a late February. Morning, my purchases sink in the plastic bag dancing as I walk to the…


  • EPISTLES

    In dreams I write letters to dead heroes beginning each Dear __________: I apologize for the intrusion but in your next life will you do the same, give up the desk in the patent office for dreams of brothers twins, one moving one fixed, stand before a jury, no testament to the Lower East Side.…


  • ACT IV

    He knew he should not have brought the gun. He hated guns, they served no purpose in his world of words. He wanted to look at it, to stare at it, really. He thought that if he did so he might be better able to write about the senselessness of the world in which he…


  • VLADIMIR

    Krevchinsky froze his ass off on the Siberian plain. The gray concrete box was traded for concrete gray skies, the whistle of the truncheon gives way to winter’s blasts. It was in many ways easier when the beatings came neatly marking the days dividing days between pain and exhaustion, all under the watchful eye of…