You don’t really need to take a vow for better. Only just for worse. No one has to give an oath for richer— the jet skis, the chalets, that house on the Riviera, pouring champagne on your morning Oatie-O’s. It’s the poorer that entices you to leave; upon that shitty futon full of fleas, your stomach all a- rumble from that slice from Quickie-Mart, knowing it spun all after- noon beneath the lamp, waving to the wieners which you’ll down for lunch next day.   In health  you’ll

We need to end this nonsense about the birds. These early-morning sirens. Devoting half our petty verses to their honour. I realize I’ll be booted from the guild, seen as a bitter bard, renounced as a blasphemer, but I’ll waggle my duke at the sky like Grampa Simpson, scowling while one flits   on her merry way, flapping her gorgeous plumes, always looking forward—   never peering to the ground at our transgressions, our stepping around the tippler on the pedway, taking his e

All of us are smitten by the cute. And the shine of symmetry. The clear, un- blemished skin of stunning’s layer. I could sing each varied note of your cantata. In its proper key. Something that’s beyond my scratchy throat. My wineless inhibition. You say the sweetest intonation was from a haggard in the alley, bottle on its side beside her feet—bare, sniffed out by a rat’s consuming hunger:   Mama take me with you. Reach down with your hands, gently tickle like you did. I rem

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans —Claude Shannon Dr. Chandra, will I dream? —2010: The Year We Make...

Everyone recalls, if they’re lucky, that second they fell in love. When the clouds played spin-the- bottle  with the sun. If it rained...

It's a Jane or Johnny-come-lately, the solitary rose in my garden, a harvest holdover or belated bloom that's risen when the others have...

With your hands wrist-deep in the black of loamy soil, you tell me your infant daughter died at break of dawn, on a day that our star...

The flowers in my house are a fraud, marigolds that never wither, forsythia forever fake with vibrant yellow that doesn’t fade, daisies...

I’ve never written you a love letter, as I did for the girls I crushed on in school, vowing a childish forever love. I’ve been told that...

It’s hard to believe that crotchety old man and his wife hobbling into the store where I work were once hippies. Their faces creased like...

This one is not so Grand as its river, no Seine cutting at its heart or couples arm-in-arm amid  je t’aime. We can see the eroding...

The way our cat sleeps on our books has made us appraise osmosis, her head reposed on the cover’s title, her paw outstretched over the...

On the day of your Bat Mitzvah, you twirled beneath the snow, your unpierced tongue extending like an ophidian from a cleft, trans- muted...

We discern the milky seeds of dying dandelions, afloat in mid-June breeze, and I tell you as I boy I saw them through my bedroom window,...

The cat of which I scrawl is but a menace. He doesn’t make an attempt at being cute. His purr is like a Dodge without a muffler. He will...

What is it about our conditioning that moves us to hate the weak and ugly? What stories were we told of beautiful riders and delicate...

Our daughter is dead. We plant seedlings by her grave in April, when Spring seduces with all its promise, moisten the ground with a jug...

I was finally compelled to cut my lengthy hair. Twirling it on my fork in spaghetti’s place, staining it Ragu-Red; quaffing it with my...

I blame everything on our thumbs. Their cursèd opposability; picturing how things would go if not for their relative acrobatics: the...

I’ve always overblown my heart’s confessions, what I’d do  for you,   screaming from the mountains every minstrel boasts they’d climb,...