The email arrived one day recently in my in-box from Glasgow, Scotland: Did you know, it said, that a letter your friend Sister Mary Pellicane sent to Charles de Gaulle is on sale on eBay in London? Um ... no. What?
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The night he watched the skies for others
Dots of satellites, / slow-moving stars / high high overhead, / always circling the / marble of the earth, / pass by well past / midnight, far above / the push-up Appalachians ...
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Gathering Up a Group of Gondoliers
Venice is sinking, Venice is faded. The sea is rising and Venice may be dying. But, as Lord Byron sings in 'Child Harold's Pilgrimage,' even in her dotage she remains a glorious wonder.
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‘I Am Too Serious’
'Hey, here you go. What's your name? Where'd you serve?' He nods in thanks. Stuffs the bag into a pocket. Tom. That's his name. He takes off his black knit cap. Syria. Iraq. 'A shell took off part of the top of my head.' I wince. He points to a jagged line. 'The Med Evac was the best. Saved my life.' He's homeless. 'I sleep in the park.'
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It’s no longer a mall thing
Heading to the local mall used to be one of the social highlights of the week even ten years ago, much less 20. A recent visit to the Town Center Mall in West Virginia's capital city reveals how much the idea of the mall has faded.
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A Horny Encounter in the Neighborhood
Do auspicious omens from a deer encounter extend to the semi-suburbs? I have zilch expertise in gauging their racks, but this 2-, 3- or 4-point young buck showed up recently in my backyard, which butts up against a narrow spit of woods. I got a closer look at him last night upon returning home from an outing ...
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It’s an altar boy thing
Let's not talk about the moon anymore, but instead Solzhenitsyn's idea of 'political horror,' how to write a 'sorta memoir,' and breaking up with Twitter until the perp walk.
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‘The Religion of Want’
How hard it is to dream, / to dream well. Besieged by / wants, missing what’s not / there. Wanting what we / cannot have, or could, at a / high cost of misery ...
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‘A Hoeft Marsh Melody’
Hoeft Marsh in Greenbottom WV is where I get off to when I want to get off the timeline of the world's news. Here's a short musical visit there. It's a little fishy, too.
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“When ‘Frankenstein’ Came to Town”
“Listen to this!” say Tommy. He shifts the Les Paul to his lower back, rock star-like. “Edgar Winter,” he says, almost reverently. “Johnny’s brother ..."
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“Stormtroopers & Grandmas”
The balls of his black pupils stare at me intently, oddly echoed by the round marble of a self-shaved head. Moments later, I have second thoughts about my diplomacy as “Speak English or Die” batters the room.
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‘All These Pages’
As a writer, purveyor, and publisher of creative works, I am constantly wrestling with my ego’s desire to see such work as of lasting significance, a hedge against my own mortality. Yet such works, too, will soon pass on by and melt away, swallowed by the river of time. Here’s a video-poem about that.
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“The Green, Green Hills of Earth”
When the azaleas burst into bloom around a Buddha given me by a dear, departed, harmonic soulmate, it was time to set her memorial song to imagery of the green, green hills of Earthh ...
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Seeing Red in Downtown Cincinnati
When the Opening Day parade for the Cincinnati Reds 2022 season snaked through downtown Cincinnati more was going on than it might at first seem.
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‘The Difference Is’
There is a difference / between people who do things / and people who don't ...
