We meet in a hotel with many quarters for the radio surprised that we've survived as lovers not each other's but lovers still with outrageous hope and habits in the craft which embarrass us slightly as we let them be known the special caress the perfect inflammatory word the starvation we do not tell about…

John hadGreat BigWaterproofBoots on;John had aGreat BigWaterproofHat;John had aGreat BigWaterproofMackintosh —And that(Said John)IsThat.

into the strenuous briefnessLife:hand organs and Aprildarkness, friends i charge laughing.Into the hair-thin tintsof yellow dawn,into the women-colored twilight i smilingly glide. Iinto the big vermilion departureswim, sayingly; (Do you think?) thei do, worldis probably madeof roses & hello: (of solongs and, ashes)

In the desertI saw a creature, naked, bestial,Who, squatting upon the ground,Held his heart in his hands,And ate of it.I said, “Is it good, friend?”“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it“Because it is bitter,“And because it is my heart.”

Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washeda thousand times. The journey of a thousand milesbegins with a single step. On the interstate listeningto NPR, I heard a Hubble scientistsay, "The universe is not only stranger than wethink, it's stranger than we can think." I thinkI've driven into spring, as the woods…

Does the mouth remember every kiss Or does time erase the lines of memory Until finally there is nothing left But the memory itself, and  Then even that is gone.

Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky…

       Reading a used book on evolution I wonderabout fingerprints, how long they live.Were the fingers licked before the pageswere turned, did the ownerof the book, of the fingerprintsread in the bathroom, will there be a hairon page 231, on a train, did he take the Cuptown, did she eat lunch with the…

There are times when they gather at the edge of your life,Shadows slipping over the far hills, daffodilsblooming too early, the dark matter of the universethat threads its way through the few thousand blackbirdsthat have invaded the trees out back. Every ending sloughs off our dreams like snakeskin. This is the kind ofblack ice the…

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you readto the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or…