May 2012
4 posts
Samizdat: "How to Like It," by Stephen Dobyns →
lesterthenightfly:
“These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps. The dog says,…
3 tags
“One thing I can say is that I am quite certain that Mozart did not have a...”
– Mark Helprin
3 tags
Letter Poem
Dear Devin,
The other day I was at the driving range, setting up four
golf balls in a row, then speed hitting them, not even thinking,
just whacking one after another, and this made me think of you
and the rounds we used to play during the last call for tee off
when the sun was low and our drives would get lost in the horizon.
Only yours landed anywhere near the green. Mine were always...
2 tags
April 2012
8 posts
two-percent-milf:
Trouble - Cat Stevens
1 tag
2 tags
David, come down and drink with us. Oh, sorry guys...
Inside my heart you make yourself at home
taking off your shoes, lying across
red velvet couches, using generic floss
to clean organ stained teeth, while phoning
long distance friends in Wales, in monotone
voices you talk of Christmas, when snow was tossed
from lowly clouds. How you are no longer lost
walking around naked, singing songs alone
in ventricles and arteries, clogged with old...
1 tag
“A Mormon told me that they don’t drink coffee. I said, “A cup of...”
– Emo Philips
March 2012
12 posts
2 tags
Rob was accidentally hypnotized earlier in the show to feel drunk every time he hears a bell ring.
Making It In Poetry
eating-poetry:
The young teller
at the credit union
asked why so many
small checks
from universities?
Because I write
poems I said. Why
haven’t I heard
of you? Because
I write poems
I said.
By Bob Hicok
1 tag
By Their Works
by Bob Hicok
Who cleaned up the Last Supper?
These would be my people.
Maybe hung over, wanting
desperately a better job,
standing with rags
in hand as the window
beckons with hills
of yellow grass. In Da Vinci,
the blue robed apostle
gesturing at Christ
is saying, give Him the check.
What a mess they’ve made
of their faith. My God
would put a busboy
on earth to roam
among...
2 tags
The Neighborhood So Far
by Ron Carlson
If my heart is a house
then it stands on the street
in the little village
where you are paperboy, mayor,
mailman, garbage collector,
water meter reader,
building inspector, vacuum
cleaner salesman, UPS driver,
yard crew, chimney sweep,
window washer, tax assessor,
magazine solicitor,
census taker,
snow shoveler, house painter,
voyeur, door-to-door
scam artist,...
4 tags
Oranges
by Gary Soto
The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I...
floating-ribs:
When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I’ve noticed this: when it’s the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you’re sort of a stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you’re not her, so you get all this nice residue emotion.
2 tags
1 tag
“I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me...”
– Colm Tóibín
2 tags
Supposed To Be Doing Math Homework, But Who Does...
I Wish I Could Love Like Anthony Trollope Loved
I wish I could write more like Anthony Trollope.
He wrote 3,000 words a day in his prime.
Sometimes more. He published over 40 novels before he died.
There were a handful of short stories and essays to go with that.
My wife says that’s not how real writers write.
She asks, where’s the fire?
I tell her that’s what people...
1 tag
2 tags
February 2012
5 posts
1 tag
“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world....”
– Raymond Carver
1 tag
Let Them Talk
I’m a full time listener. There aren’t many of us left.
The pay isn’t great. The hours are inconsistent
and long. We don’t get vacation time, sick leave, overtime, pension plans,
maternity leave or anything of the sort. We pay for our own gas
and all medical expenses are out of pocket.
I meet the talkers wherever they’d like, in diners, hotel lobbies, on park benches, in parked cars...
1 tag
Excuse This Poem But I Am In A Poetry Class And In...
There’s more known about space than our ocean. It’s why we put
more weight in the color of eyes than the texture of hands. It’s why
poets lose their emotions in things like the weather, and fall in & out of love
between sunrises & sunsets.
Space sits there with its legs crossed, chewing on the raw end of a cigar, in
a velvet smoke jacket made up of planets, ex-planets, clusters of...
3 tags
Facts About The Moon
The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of...
January 2012
1 post
December 2011
1 post
1 tag
I Love You Like A Love Song
I Love you like a love song, baby. And that means barely, or not at all. I love you only when all the other songs won’t cut it anymore. When the club music has died down and gave way to that dark, silent part of the night that has me reaching for a bottle of gin and my phone, to play a love song and text every girl I’d ever fucked and see if they are as lonely as I am. That’s how...
November 2011
2 posts
Who’s in the Top 1 Percent? - Thomas Sowell -... →
October 2011
8 posts
1 tag
The Silent Season of a Hero: Annotated →
putthison:
Our friend Gay Talese wrote this piece, a profile of the late Joe DiMaggio, for Esquire in the 1960s. It’s considered by many to be the best sports feature ever written. I’m inclined to agree.
(via)
3 tags
“The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of...”
– Dinesh D’souza
2 tags
“I can’t imagine when I was their age that I could have enough money to hang...”
– Thomas Sowell
2 tags
First Monologue From Last Year's Playwriting Class
My mother believed in everything. She prayed daily, sometimes for hours at a time. I remember her anointing the doorways with oil bought from the Church gift shop. She spoke in tongues and flopped like a fish on the stage when our pastor put his hand to her head. She doesn’t have a pastor anymore. Now she stays home and performs fire ceremonies in the living room and talks to the wind. She...
September 2011
6 posts
3 tags
1 tag
I Think I Am In Love With A Stripper
…and I thought the joke was on her when she said she found a new job, something that wasn’t retail at a show club in Phoenix, way further northwest than I’ve ever been, cause then I’d finally be able to see her naked. She had turned me down before, at parties where we met and that time she came over and we got drunk—though I was drunker—and she said I cared too...
2 tags
like that one time. .
when I had to drive you home the morning after cause someone stole your phone and who remembers numbers these days and you were half naked cause that kid no one knew puked all over you after his second Irish Car Bomb so the dress that you wore, stained and crusted by dawn, was wrapped in grocery bags and I threw it in the truck next to my golf clubs and rackets and when I dropped you off and you...
1 tag
Ending.
I try to tell her that I am good. That I’ve tried to be good, but know I shouldn’t tell her these things. I shouldn’t talk but just let her keep doing what she is doing. We have moved away from the piano now and are on the floor and she is on top of me, lifting my shirt up and I can feel her fingers on the bits of hair across my chest. I could tell her about the bags of clothes I...
August 2011
5 posts
1 tag
2 tags
Films Of Mine That You Now Own
I have lent out nearly half of the movies I own. There is little to no hope of ever seeing them again. The people who borrowed them long gone, departing after high school in their own separate ways, following their own specific ambitions. Sure, there is a downside. I wanted to watch Match Point last week with a friend after explaining, using no hyperbole mind you, how it was absolutely the...