Do we look at each other differently ( Read more... )

Friday morning

To dream I am piloting a ship 
inside a giant tank
where the navigation controls 
are beer tap handles.

To not know while dreaming
if I am awake or asleep
and to fear I am speaking aloud,
waking the woman beside me
I left drifting when we went to bed.

And to dream of a butterfly 
following as we walk a shoreline,
its wings chiming: lullabye, ( Read more... )

I met you when you were sleeping in your van in the desert at night and studying bees during the day. I was this east coast boy who had never been to California, working all day and night on the job I was assigned and lonely beyond words. You showed up like some character from On The Road. You helped me laugh, you helped me dance. We crawled around ( Read more... )

"That whole time you just weren't there." she said. "It was so strange -- it was like you were a different person and the happiness you usually brought into the office was just...gone. I mean, you were there in the room with us, sure, but it wasn't you. None of us really understood what it was she did to you to make you like that. I have to say, we ( Read more... )

These lost lands that were our own ( Read more... )

With you, like before, it is always nearly dawn,
and your man will come to get you now, I assume,
but when I put the glasses away, whiskey gone,
you have walked ahead, undressing in my room. 

The word was new ( Read more... )

He was listening to the music and he was drinking whiskey till he could really feel it. That was the way he was when she came up to him. She wasn't quite beautiful, she wasn't quite not beautiful. Older, maybe even a mother. She'd known some trouble, but then, so had he in a way ( Read more... )

He was no longer happy she was here, so he thought the best thing he could do was to make up for his lack of interest with opulence. He booked a big room in the nicest hotel in Riverside; they had lunch on the ocean and now dinner at an outdoor restaurant at the Mission, where waiters wore tuxedos and carried silver trays like it was still the gold ( Read more... )

"Come home," she implores.
All at once my heart
and the other vital organs
are three hundred miles back,
the start of that long dark drive.
Until I retrieve them, lady,
keep them safe, be nice --
and I will walk disembodied here,
a ghost frozen in this town of ice.