I broke my brain. I’m not shitting you. It was joggled around in some giant, anonymous pair of hands and tossed end-over-end, without hope or desperation, down a scarred velvet table in a dark and nearly empty casino. Have you ever felt like a moth that has been pinned to a post and is being … Read more
The clock is ticking. The clock is always ticking, always tick-tick-ticking. The sun is burning, burning, burning. The moon is rising. The moon is rising. The moon is rising. The world is turning. This world is turning, turning, turning. Our hearts are yearning. Our hearts, our hearts, our hearts are yearning. The days get away … Read more
Good lord, the stars, the dusty, glimmering sprawl above some dark, quiet place in America, the stardust, star-scatter, the worlds stretched up there above this one. Remember? Remember standing on a gravel road in Vermont –along a big river in a Montana valley, on a dock jutting out into a lake in the Adirondacks, at … Read more
Source materials for the project at hand, whatever it is, and whatever it might yet be: Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Hans Christian Andersen; William Graham Sumner’s Folkways; Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Mythology (Graves, Bulfinch, Hamilton, etc.); the Icelandic Sagas and Norse myths; The Odyssey and The Iliad; The Aeneid; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; The Divine Comedy; James Brown; … Read more
Because you ask things like what the hell? and why? Because I guess you want to know. Because I joined up with the Amish after my dad decided it would make a man of me and it was either that or go to work at my grandfather’s automobile dealership and I knew damn well that … Read more
I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what to say. I have absolutely no idea. I can’t even begin to imagine. I’m speechless. Seriously, words fail me. The cat’s got my tongue. I’m tongue-tied. There is nothing on the tip of my tongue. I can’t explain. I have no comment. I’m at … Read more
Disappointed in love and broken at forty she married a small town in Ohio it made no brash promises whispered nothing sweeter in her ear than good morning good afternoon good evening good night my dear good night my darling good night my dear in the morning I’ll still be here
Burch woke up one morning in a ditch in some low-lying country. He had no idea where he was and no recollection of how he might have arrived there. Whatever possessions he might once have owned –and he had a vague recollection of a backpack full of belongings– were nowhere to be seen. He was … Read more
Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, and dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men. —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy All he could do was transcribe the interminable babbling voice of the night, the insinuating perverse voice of the demons. —Pietro Citati, Kafka What if an individual is perceiving … Read more
The little house with its peeling paint and mossy shingles was set well back from the street and appeared to be floating in a sea of saffron grass bleached by the sun and burnished by the fleeting sweep of twilight. It was hot. There wasn’t a shadow left in which to take refuge, and there … Read more