Sitting on a bench beside a Scottish canal, watching the locks rising and the Lochs glowing he crossed his legs and placed his hands upon worn corduroy wales that had seen much of the civilized world. “It’s a beautiful world,” he said, smiling, an eternal boy peering from behind octogenarian eye-creases. “It’s a beautiful world....
The powerless feel invisible. A ghostly cipher jigs and shimmies, sending up flares, announcing the Annunciation. The powerful seek invisibility. A malevolent cloud overhangs and shrouds, secreted in cracks, hidden from the light. We evaporate and expectorate and obviate. No one sees everything.
These are not theories, conjecture, reckless reckoning, supposition, hyperbolic hypotheses crooked as a triangle untangled by Isosceles. These are facts. Yet many of us prefer to pretend instead that the precise contrary is not a fairy tale but a fairly stale debate over which the irrational fantastical religious folks can masturbate. So I shall spell...
Didn’t he warn you? Didn’t she scorn you? Hadn’t they found you? Wouldn’t they astound you? You who couldn’t differentiate between abiding love and aberrant hate? Time will obviate the degradation of your sensate mind and accelerate the assignation of honorifics, burrowing within the fissures of tissue held together by gravity. Were you...
The 2015 MK Spring Poetry Festival, April 20-30 Mother protector, father provider. Brother who helped the elderly. Sister who held children when they cried. Potential saints, condemned sinners. The heretic and the ignorant. The past-tense blasphemous visitors gone before He arrived to save them. What of them? All the others. The ones who lived...
Splayed on her sofa like a hastily disposed corpse haphazardly stashed out of the way of more important harbingers of Life, she watches the screens, the big one on the wall and the little one in her demure hand, waiting for the next plot point, the next map point, the point of all her affluent solitude,...
Where you want to put it, fool? On the dark? All right. I’ll say it again: All right. All right. You know it’s gonna be all right. Everything is gonna be all right even when it’s not. Perfection includes imperfection. And that includes you, fool. So where you want to put it, my brother, My...
At the Middle School two driveways down the street, Hollywood safari vans tote tipsy tourists and King of Pop-culture purists to contemplate like jurists the Michael Jackson Auditorium, whose much-lauded eponym was sleek and slim, and boyishly indiscreet. At this school, Russian parents take parking spots and umbrage, when their children start to bleat about the...
You could say our addiction to convenience and comfort has been successfully repackaged as the highest end for our brilliant technological means. Or, you could say that we’re in the grip of a nationwide plague. Of…A.D.D. Or, you could say we’re simply a country of poorly developed adult minds with the collective attention span of...
How can it be You might wonder in a quiet moment set aside willfully to focus on will, on what you will do and what you won’t and how it always is what you will it to be – yes, during one of those appointments with your soul you might wonder How can it be?...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Clarinetist Glenn Dickson, master of klezmer, has made a solo recording, “Wider Than the Sky,” that’s been on perpetual repeat at our home office. Using over-dubs and electronic digital effects, Dickson fills the aural soundscape with a rich melange of chordal textures supporting the melody. His celebrated virtuosity is subsumed here to long, elegiac musical...
