i believe cartoon characters really exist, paris hilton's ham sandwich for a gold statue and the great game of baseball is around the corner

i am back from my travels in wonderful new mexico and let me tell you if you ever get the chance, i know the beverly hillbillies thought california was the place to be but new mexico is right there with it, it is amazingly beautiful. two thoughts about that place (1) everyone has a dog and (2) the older women there don't color their hair they let it go naturally grey. so let me say this the older women there are much more attractive than the dyed and tuck jobs women here in dallas get. also when in santa fe do as the locals do and go to catamount bar and grill and ask for julie and chef chris his cooking is genius. hey guys tip one back for us this week as we head back to work. they will treat you to a great time. but always in the back of my mind as katie casey was baseball mad it is now only...

23 days until pitchers and catchers



what we talk about when we talk about love


i might as well begin by saying how much i like you
it gets me right away, thinking about years from now pushing a cart
up a grocery store aisle clamoring over what type of cereal to buy
and don't forget the bread
so you immediately grabbed my attention

and the precision you used with those sharp scissors when you cut
out my heart and took it
i think about perfectly arranged words in a famous sonnet
in this condition i could write extraordinary love poems about
someone i met or exploiting the connection between sex and death

decades from now when we vacation in a foreign country we will
head down to a coffee shop and the waitress known as dot will serve us
we will slide into the flow of the morning paper, you with the editorials
me with beetle bailey
as bread, some oranges and eggs over medium are on the way
after breakfast we will stand outside the cafe
we will not have to find someone to take pictures because you will
turn the camera around yourself and snap the frame

today i think the stage is littered with literary bodies
it is sylvia plath in the kitchen with her head in the oven
anne sexton lounging by the pool having a cigarette and a stiff drink
flannery o'connor hunched over her cane because of lupus
or hemingway crippled with depression at his cabin in idaho playing with a rifle

it also seems i really have nothing up my sleeve except i would like us
to watch a movie tonight
and whisper in your ear that you are so beautiful
and i am a fool to be this in love with you
and that we have become beautiful without even knowing it


nothing amidst the wreckage of the years


he sometimes took pride in knowing the fact
he knows half the people in town
by their names and faces
but he truly had few friends and was a solitary man
he knows we are a lost society of lost souls
liars, con artists and manipulators

he was sitting at his kitchen table pen in hand
before a blank page all afternoon
it was hot outside but unusually rainy
the rain muted traffic and the lower greenville duplex
was so quiet, the wind from the isolating fan bothered him

he worked near the kitchen
as the room where his wife cooked calmed him
and made him feel less alone
his three prelunch drinks had him buzzed
but had been dulled by his can of luke warm soup
he had eaten over the sink

at 3 o'clock he stopped staring at the blank page
and turned on huckleberry hound
in between laughs
he thought how paris hilton
could never fuck her way to win an academy award
and laughed some more


after the cartoon he returned to the blank page
the vastness of the white page paled his spirit
yet there was a time when a line from a song, a voice in his head, a random memory
of the past transformed into a novel, a story or a poem

there was a time when he felt the mastery of his art
a time when he was a writer and writing daily, hours and hours on end
like artists with a blank canvas
he stared at the blank page and a silent room

now he sat there
slumped over in his chair and somehow fearful once again of the future
a man in his late thirties, with dark circles under his eyes
still as blue as ever though and thin, lips and mouth

all creatures die alone he thought
he gazed out the window at the rain
lighting a cigarette he let it droop from his mouth
and his thin lips seemed too relaxed to hold it

he then suddenly began banging away pen to paper
and said the words as he wrote them