Today, the doors are salmon. Well, all days the doors are salmon—what I should say is that today we are in Delta Hall (instead of Echo Hall or King Hall or Lima Hall or), which is the same as all the other halls in every aspect except for the fact that the cell doors are salmon. This lone stroke of individuality and color, this solo suggestion that monochrome and uniform is not necessarily the tyrant it seems, has always struck
For FP It’s true to say that there were April freeways— More true, in fact, than to say that there was pain Pain is a squirrely concept, sullied and conflated As it is with time’s inevitable rot April freeways are sleek black ribbons Beneath blue canvases like God Frisbees and Always there is the bang of a stock car stereo uncontaining Guitar licks and the sunroof doing that Thing with the cigarette smoke
When I met God he told me you’d be surprised at the way it all shakes out these days, how virtue and vice lend each other ballast. The depths of spirit that contradiction and hypocrisy sometimes suggest if you can—as he can—just lift the silly veil of those concepts, which are, after all, flimsy, cycled so many times through our bullshit puritanical washer. No, God told me, while he might conjure a friendly nod for adherents to black and
The insidious entropy of resolutions Is violent The tradition wears a virtuous costume: Spine erect, eyes reflecting a fire but The scaffolding sags if not with dawn Then with February’s dark expanse or Certainly April’s giddiness Certainly: adherence as an examination Of will But also: a proscribed space To commit acts that ought To roll and bloom From the landscape of life December 25th is for generosity February 14th is for love November
For FP, after Amy Gerstler’s gangster soliloquy Fragments of sordid recollection come careening down on me at this time of year like the surplus missing posters of her danced on the airstream of a bonfire in a North Cascades meadow when we sealed the end of 2004 with flame. Fragments of sordid, I said: the piss stink and shuffle lurch of dark figures in the alleys she might have crouched in; the