mechanic robot walking down the streetssad eyes, broken heartedeveryone sees the beauty in it but methey think to themselves“what a glamorous way to go navigate life!” i knowi’m a mannequin of sufferingand with cigarettes on my nicotine-stained fingersand bruises on my thighsit looks so romantic, as if i’m living in…

Bill Evans on Kind of Blue The melody off Evans’ keys       grows underneath the hornslike a python in a Florida marsh,                   the notes easy to catch,all prey without trees to climb.       His hands feed in the horns’shadows. Cymbals and snare                   scurry away as he slidesthrough these tunes. Reeds       take flight any time his lineflicks near their…

Are you alive? I heard the poet ask, speaking to me, my ear bud as it started snowing as I walked inside the gates of Père Lachaisecemetery? Is everybody in? the ceremony is about to begin? Embracinghis American Prayeran ex-patriot in Paris has been my guide since the moment I held that 45 vinyl record when he first lit my fire, ageseven, thirty years laterafter…

Writing the date May 14, ____which ‘til today has-been routine,suddenly seems a mystery. Born just after the war in 1945,time has apparently caught up with this mid-septuagenarian. What the hell does 2-0-1-9 mean?It feels so very unfamiliar, distant from roots’ origins – even horrible. Was that the beginning (or middle)of my losing…

In which I discover many years later that I never did read my great-grandparents’ names in the book of Jews killed in concentration camps  I came to put my hand on the book.I paid my entry fee and walked aroundmainly to turn to that page and lookat my name in…

One puncture drained the whole lake                   into a salt dome. Then the drilling platform,       boats, and trucks parked nearby                   along the bank. All down the same hole. The island was no longer       an island without water                   to set its borders. Silt bottom dried slowly,                   stared at the sky like a blank face, until one night after…

Recall has become an affliction. The early years are like-claws in the dark waves of rotating temples.Their gait subtracts, and twists up therein not-sleep, behind a sleep-mask I am told is supposed to assist. What matters withers, like a thirty-six-hour-old death-bloom, corpse-flower, I have lost traction with the winged crowd. I expand…

Facing inland like most of the moai of Easter Island.Perhaps the Rapa Nui people thought that nothing could arrive from the sea, although that is how they arrived. Taking in the sun. Aversion to non-walkable surfaces.Markers on a fence invisible to visitors. Their shell and coral eyes dislodged like seeds from watermelons when they…

The sound of her name rings in the air.  It’s always been there.  Alice is waiting.  An aisle flutters under her footsteps.   At the end of the aisle a piano is waiting.  It’s ever been there.   Instants flicker and merge to a hum. She stills her breath  to breathe in the silence, closes…

It is not a moment of madnesswhen I take the plungeNeither is it a fragment of time carefully wrought in patience and resolveIt is more a breath caught on a slip of the windin the new year eve’s restorative airthat emerges in the brilliance of a sighSo I take a few…