Song for a Roadside Motel Room

Gravel crunches as I pull into an almost empty parking lot Cut the engine, watch it shudder a weak protest Slump back in the torn leather seat And light a cigarette Eyes jumping to and from the few scattered cars Like an old detective film Make sure the coast is clear Office door creaks open…

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“The rain fell like applause”

(M. Ondaatje)     The rain fell like applause it fell all night and it fell like applause though for whom or why I do not know it fell and it fell and I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it was for the moon this hollow moon or the trees drained of birds there…

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Hummingbird Becoming

red drop blur down hover first, then rush with helicopter sound on mute, between a Monday and the lavender bush, aligned aside a moment you forgot to even notice; still, on wings, it seems to rise in up and down motion, the hope of each becoming squeezed inside the beat of wings, a quantum fine…

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Three Changes

This isn’t about a man evaporating to skeleton, or joe bargaining with air from a combat zone as his father lies on the crucifix bed, moaning so coherently the sins of the world coalesce, come forth in black chugs of foam, intestine, final whispers of God.   Not the twenty-by-twenty-foot crater where the memory of…

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A Ghost of a Chance

You must have had the same experience. You meet someone and in an instant, you know they’re the one. That’s the way it was with Maggie. The fact that she’s a ghost created complications, sure. But when you’ve fallen in love, you’re not stopped by the first hurdle. Hugging was a challenge. I wound up…

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Michael Salcman

The Eloquent Insufficiency of Poems —James Woods, The New Yorker   They may begin with a stutter and a pause— the interruption grows, reality first distends then explodes in silence, like a spider’s web struck on purpose by a trowel.   The sun isn’t better seen by the shredding of the filmic screen but the…

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