March 19th, 2013, 14:25, KCJD, Delta Hall
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
Crocus Punch
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
WHAT I TOLD THE CHAPLAIN
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
IRRESOLUTION
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
Counting Down
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
Jesus v. Santa
Dear son, It occurs to me that as houses light up psychedelically and you begin to see fat men in red costumes everywhere you go, when the size of boxes and bags seems to swell and there is
Dear Moonfaced Man
Dear Moonfaced Man: You were a demon to me only for moments, then for many years a ghost and eventually a teacher, I suppose, though I won’t reify you or the hungry shuffle you might still commit on darkened streets where desperation’s scent is as strong as urine. You tried to buy me or at least to rent my body, but I must tell you that renting the body of a young man may differ little in impact
IF MY FIST COULD SPEAK
If my fist could speak it would recount dumb reptile incidents of fractured picture frames, how it didn’t even injure the lies the photos told beneath the bloody glass If my fist could speak it would refuse to If my fist could speak it would put lyrics to metronomes originally beaten against car dashboards If my fist could speak it would scream If my
Commuting
8:17 a.m. podcast bleeds Syrian over the unbuckling Velcro of studded tires on the wet pavement and despite the California stop of the cat at the four way I press the brake like a cockroach and let him go first 8:20 a.m. stoplight winks green just as a dark tangle of motion steals my attention in the parking lot north where a fifty-something balding man in a burgundy Aero 19 hooded sweatshirt and torn jeans is striking
The Terror and the Love
The snow had just stopped falling in breakfast-cereal sized flakes in Plain, Washington and the Social Justice Fund board had just sat down to hash out the strategic plan for donor organizing in the coming years when Burke got the voicemail. His little boy, Lucas, born with myotubular myopathy, was in an ambulance, having stopped breathing in the presence of his respite care nurse. Burke reached out to me amid the crowd and we went into a darkened
