These fine fellows with their wattles and their medals Their jiggling jowls and joyless eyes Broadcasting breaking news from the feeding trough Where these fine fellows congregate and cogitate These alphamen oozing oleaginous charm Any cute ambitious telegenic girl with a healthy appetite for achievement Could hardly resist How unpleasant and unkind and unthinkable really For...
There once lived a man from Secaucus (the part of New Jersey that’s raucous) His house was a dump Befitting a chump Intending to insult and mock us His dream was to live in a tower Symbolic of great phallic power A spire so tall The masses would crawl And grovel and moan and cower...
How maddening to our friend the mollusk subjected every day to that most callous of clichés haunting a bi-valve’s life. Happy as… Each time the bitter oath was uttered, our friend the mollusk shrunk inward, as if he could escape the narrative of fate. If they only knew, he thought. No one should...
Your righteous race to accumulate Good Karma Requires making love And opposing hate This noble social justice quest cannot carve out exceptions To the covenant Between your values and yourself You cannot advocate for the homeless While cheerleading for the Wall Street Banks that put people out of homes You cannot advocate for Peace While...
Garden paradox: no February blossoms without climate change.
Why is this day unlike all the others? Wingless romantics pierce hearts, like Cupid, Who’d make love all year, if he had his druthers. Why is this day unlike all the others? We pair like doves, no need for another’s. Together we’re giddy, deliciously stupid. Why is this day unlike all the others? Wingless romantics,...
I learned today Several important things about the world Let’s count that as an epic win While we weep If ignorance is bliss, then knowing must be something else entirely That was not one of the things I learned today I learned today The Pope from Argentina The one with the nice smile This...
Water flows downstream. Water seeks the nadir. Honey does, too. But whereas water finds crevasses and depressions, Filling all the little lacunae, Seduced by gravity and soaked in its own enthusiasm, Honey journeys won’t be assimilated. They conclude only when you can’t get any lower, When you stumble into a ceaselessly bleak pit of despair,...
Bedroom window open to the night breezes, and the morning call to prayers, when the children arrive wearing newly purchased clothes memorialized by high-volume mothers with fancy phones. On the first day of school hidden hopes soar to their improbable zenith, touching the underside of the fine line between delusion and ambition. Anything is...
We don’t author our biographies. We sculpt them, chipping and chiseling, peeling back the onionskin strata accretions of time, calcified history. The layers of remaindered remnants. What’s been piled on previous to our arrival taunts just beyond our reach, like the inscrutable object of desire who can’t and will not ever requite our boundless love....
We gladly take this (dwindling) opportunity to exercise our constitutionally protected right to free speech.
Having reviewed the issue comprehensively, having read journalism, essays, and fiction and poetry authored by people of myriad perspectives, we’ve formed an opinion. We think Israel’s ongoing policies regarding Palestine are immoral. In our view, Israel’s behavior amounts to a type of terrorism — the type that encourages (guarantees?) other types of terrorism. Sure, we recognize counter-arguments and equivocations, and,…
Writer, poet, artist, improviser, lyricist, former television personality, and generally decent person.
An imaginary “precis of reports compiled by the preliminary survey expeditions,” F.J. Bergmann’s “A Catalogue of the Further Suns” is the most memorable book we’ve read in years. It’s magic, a work of inspired genius, and the less we attempt to describe this singular creation, the better it becomes. Each “report” is a brief prose-poem...
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