The feral boy sleeps at the foot of your bed. You only get him one weekend per month but he refuses to sleep in his bed. You don’t get to have sex with your younger girlfriend because your feral boy curls at the end of your bed, waiting, like a stray to be taken somewhere….
Joe Joe lived in a cabin outside of Mount Vernon, Washington, a place his uncle built for hunting. I visited him there once or twice, on my way somewhere else. There was no water, no electricity, just a woodstove and black windows, and his things: a suit of armor into which he had pounded…
The Dining Room Table is the universal receiver of all letters that will be answered and filed soon and bills to be paid next month and the sprawl of folders on diets and the health effects of prunes. It’s the holder of everyday intentions to make some sort of conscientious order of what we’d…
It should be Margaret Meade leaving her barely palatable threesome to figure it all out for me. I don’t live on the banks of the Orinoco: these rocks on the bottom are all paved and worn with ruts. I do want to know why my brown eyes turned green after fifty years, why Ancestry…
I never told anyone but I’ll tell you. About the fire Folding up my tongue, The last counted hour With my stomach shrinking Toward my graveyard spine. My body wanted to be pins And needles, Balancing voided meals with Cigarettes. Burn marshmallow Fat like burning up S’mores, Campfire chocolate, Childhood knobbles In…
“The Marrow of Zen,” one of the sutras of Shunryu Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, relates zen practitioners to four horses, with the fourth horse responding only after the pain of the whip penetrates to the marrow of its bones. If alcoholics need to hit rock bottom, I have some sense of what that…
