For Now

I want to take a moment to pay my respects to Peter Faulk, may he rest in peace.

Don't you think he might be that very angel he portrayed in Wings of Desire? I think so.

News From The Absent

1.

I wonder if I left the keys in the door or I wanted your news so bad, I had to let you in somehow. How hard I thought it would be to release a pigeon. How fearful I was. Much like the shoppers in the bread section of Key Foods that one time. We rolled our carts along as if we were walking on long planks. But somehow I found it perched there already, when I least expected it. An oil slick rainbow of a coat glinting in the sun. And with my two hands I lifted the flimsy mesh.

if a noise falls

if a noise falls upon your home, and you are the only one to hear it for what feels like an eternal week, you may feel held captive. for a week, no one enters. you tell no one. there is no time and no one seems fit to receive such news. and then the one that sometimes sleeps next to you, he comes and hears it. the nightly drilling, source undetected, failing your sleep. and he feels the arc of your sleepless body. and you are the only one to hear his easy sleep, totally confounded. the noise passes. you realize he will be the only one to hear and feel this ever. and you may be the only one to hear and feel his easy sleep those nights. is this when you realize what love might be? sounding out its first movement...

Martini Express

Christmas Eve my father asked me what was my drink of choice. I told him to make me a martini. With the arrival of this little goblet, he said, "here's martini express." I loved.

Silly Poems Monday...

Give me back
My 212 number
I'll give you my 646 in return
And a cordless olive branch
Think about all those people who now have or had our numbers
Like old lovers
Passing through eastern standard for a time together

Transits

Bermuda

This is a story about unhealthy love. In the end she quits smoking. In the end she dials him and hangs up. In the middle she makes her mother cry. In the middle her mother makes her cry. A scene takes place in Baja. She has a headache. Moody in Bermuda shorts. He asks her how bad it is on a scale of 1-10. She says its an 8. He wonders what she’s like at 9 or 10. She has lied, its only a 5. She calls her family collect on a pay phone. The steel phone chord is tightly wound against her hand. The hand is in a fist. The fist is drained of its tan. Her knuckles have gone white. Her father picks up. “Yes, we accept.” She says, “We have arrived. Everything is fine. Really, everything is fine.” He says, “The Late Show is on. We’re having popcorn.” In the beginning, which is told as a dream remembered at the end, she is little, tucked in bed, fighting sleep with the fear that all the gown ups are having a party downstairs. In the dream, she sneaks out of bed and sees them in clusters around a punch bowl and a record player, laughing and naked.

For August

Even then when we could not look yet
We found a room and hung up our coats to dry a while

Candles flicker with the window shutters
The muted howl

In sorrow stencil a menagerie
Even if you only add a squawking penguin
It is something