Our voices hushed, we slip into the narrow, gloomy room, a taper on the back-wall bar the only source of light. Lou leads us to the wooden chairs,

M. The Old Widower’s Effluvium His cachet evolves from subtleties… as he is groomed for an ever small… He doesn’t sweat for he cannot toi… so baths now seem superfluous,

Poesy’s Progress My rhymes are gone, at least quite… my lines are stop– ped just anywhere. The meter is, no doubt, unconscion…

Leda Lays an Egg One morning Leda, sitting on the… Saw Zeus appear transmogrified to… She heard too late the honks and w… And so with godly force he conquer…

1951: Ice-varnished streets, the s… as a young woman accordions her an… into the back of my treasured blac… She, head through glass, carmine-s… while the cops look over the two c…

Elephants, Lawrence wrote,* let love bloom slowly “in their vast shy hearts.” But Lawrence dreamed. The beasts, it’s true, were once

The Skaters Nothing is less of the earth than couples skating: the woman in her white raiment clean, clean, and full of light,

///Channel-Surfing Segued The score now even after Jordan’s… up yours, you punk, confess before… she’d deceived you, Lance, her pre… see the Bible, frayunds, Isaiah f…

The trunkless legs* ignored detritus the colossal mass of time space and motion rolling on the trunk the face engorged millennia ago and a second ago the amorphous...

The Pathetic Fallacy Mitigated (An exercise in near-rhyme) To liken buying blue-chip stocks To squirrels hoarding nuts is bosh… As wrong as claiming dogs can blus…

My Last Trophy-Wife (Apologies to Robert Browning) That photo of my ex there on the… Is one I took before we split las… Yeah, people always ask me how I…

Kings once favored beheadings; and when it was their turn, so did angry peasants America chose a different tableau: Black hoods, elaborate nooses

(George Meredith advised Thomas Hardy to fill his novels with bizarre and exciting people and events. Subsequently, Hardy in an early novel had a person following a person following a ...

Give Me No Perfect Things Give me no perfect things: a snowflake - kalaidoscopic, machine-cut, different but all alike,

Sports News from Mudville (Thanks to “Casey at the Bat”) The outlook’s great for all you fo… Linebacker Doakes was just picked… Then football’s finest running bac…