‘Unfamous’

I decide to be famous / only to myself. It is / so much easier and my / tender, so lightly bruised / ego now thanks me for this / demilitarized zone …

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Categories Poems Poetry

‘The Cow Bell’

A great grief saddles me,/ rides down the pampas of / Virginia Dare Avenue, / until I am too tired / and we return home / together ...

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Categories Essays

‘Mission Statement’

‘To scratch the page,/ to pick the scab, / to mix and match the phrases, / enter the lab and whip up potions, / address the sky with curses, praises, / annoy the authorities, cause commotions …’

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Categories Poems

‘Earth Mother Lullaby’

Wrinkle-skinned earth mothers from / another decade, a far more interesting decade they profess, / nest live orchids in tangled-up hair, / black-cotton gloves rising past thin wrists ...

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Categories Poems Poetry

‘Stephen’

Where have you gone, Stephen?/ Now, this night that I need you./ Need just you, the gravitas/ of your bulldog self. Your ancient/ belief in me. Rather, a belief that dates/ to 1977 or so./ Ancient enough …

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Categories Essays Poems

‘10,000 Thunderstorms’

If I'm to be an insomniac, a fine thunderstorm is a welcome thing. To entertain. To relish and divert from mournful or misbegotten thought. I ponder 
getting up. Going to my front porch, storm-sitting perch.

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Categories Poems

‘When Hay Bales Speak to You’

Let’s talk hay bales. I have, perhaps like you, been spying hay 
bales most all my life. Yet, in all that time haven’t met a hay bale. Up close. The other day, I had my chance.

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Categories Essays

‘The Flavor of Grief’

I have been getting familiar lately with the flavor of grief. It comes on me with no warning. While driving up-river, to shelter-in-Nature. At 68 mph, passing a too-slow, white Chevy truck.

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Categories Poems

‘Window No. 1’

One of my earliest, notable windows was in the basement bedroom I shared with 
brother Rick. It opened to the left, sliding open with a satisfying 'chonk!' Revealing the level grass of our backyard.

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Categories Essays Poems

A Dozen Ways to Look at Chicago, Illinois

I've always been intrigued by human beings whose lives are lived just below and sometimes at the level of the clouds. They surround us by the thousands, the tens of thousands. In blue rooms, staring at TVs in their skyboxes. Doing Downward Facing Dog, 2,000 feet above the sidewalk.

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Categories Essays Photography Poems

‘My Paragraph & I’

'I want my paragraph to strut, carved cane in hand, the Left Bank, like a proper boulevardier. I want my paragraph to wow you. leave you wanting more. To, if possible, make you gasp. To make you—prose willing—cry. And then, to laugh. And then to laugh at your crying ...'

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Categories Essays Poems

‘Body of Evidence’

'I'd no excuse not to grok the fact, or traffic in illusions of not growing old. Or denial of encroaching senescence. Or flipping the bird at Mister Death. It would halt nothing of my body's fade, of our decay. I was, perhaps, whistling past my future graveyard.'

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Categories Essays Poems Poetry