Dear Sirs, I never asked for your treatise. Your recent manifesto bored me to tears. Every one of your manifestos, in fact, has landed unwelcome on my doorstep. No man over the age of twenty-five should write a manifesto. After that it’s just too fucking late. I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten … Read more
The hostile colonization is now almost complete, my skull reduced to one more cluttered victim of American conquest and imperialism. I close my eyes and I still see giant petroleum and fast food logos, neon beer signs, beautiful celebrities. I hear voices that should not be familiar, the voices of complete strangers that someone has … Read more
I hear my son scraping away at his electric guitar in his bedroom across the hall, writing songs about girls who will not look his way. I often lie awake long into the night, listening to my son’s sleepless labors. My wife left me some years ago, and took with her our two daughters. My … Read more
Shit blew up and shit fell down. The wind raged for days and it rained for weeks on end. The water rose and swept stuff away. When the water finally receded, the sun broke through the clouds and the clouds dissipated and the sun blazed like an angry thing and the river evaporated and the … Read more
I had this period in my early thirties when I would have what I guess for lack of a better word I’d have to call visions. I once saw a woman –a stout, elderly woman in a disturbingly translucent gown– levitating in the lovely chapel of a huge hospital in the Midwest. This chapel was … Read more
Out there in the country where I grew up there was once a pond that was said to be full of wonders. People always referred to the pond as “brackish.” I don’t have a dictionary at hand –I am a refugee now, and am reclining in the backseat of my car at a fogbound rest … Read more
I remember a darkness, real, yet stirred with a thousand fireflies, perhaps my earliest recollected encounter with true wonder. The mosquito trucks crawled through at dusk and left behind a moving cloud embroidered with the bright fragments of skreeing children. Even then two people armed with nothing but sticks could have a good time, could … Read more
I wonder where you were going in such a hurry when I passed you walking on the opposite side of the street yesterday? You always did have that purposeful look about you. Even as a little girl you seemed like you were in a hurry to get somewhere. I knew how important it was for … Read more
So ain’t we all inanimate, George? –Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280 ‘Je’ est un autre. (‘I’ is someone else.) –Arthur Rimbaud You might, you’re perhaps fond of saying, occasionally like something concrete from me, something in the way of true disclosure, painful confession, political opinion, or merely, now and again, a bit of honest biographical kibble. … Read more