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My parents thought they’d raised me,
but that was a stand-in boy I’d
sculpted out of wonder bread to fool them.
Meanwhile I was off with the deer
learning to jump fences,
I was off with the bees, learning how
to make honey and annoy people,
I was off with the cats and fish
riding a great wave of blood.
I never came home
until […]

The leaves are bright green
but the nights are cold now.
Listen closely — everything’s rattling.

The sun rises over the pines and unfurls
a broken stripe across the pond.
I paddle into it, my canoe a needle.
Waterbricks, sunsparks, narrow road to the other shore.
The sun climbs, the gold road falls apart.
It is no more a road than the surface of an eye.
The whole pond quivering with gray light.

coaxing Blake’s invisible worm into the light

subway riders
small accidental violations of private space
a delicate beating of wings
in the clinic waiting room
a man holds a CD from radiology
“his images”
holds it nervously and somewhat reverently
like a new friendship with a celebrity –
maybe death sidled up to him at a bar
and has his number?
and back to the subway…

…and unfinished things are my monument for a while.
What I made was always provisional, that’s my justification for this light-weight architecture.
Now I become my world.
Fire and wind lap my ribs, a flood polishes the inside of my skull.
I lack foundation and pretense, and when I go
I will be gone completely.

Night has always meant for me an escape from the civilized, a temporary return to that which is not a movie set, not a construction of the human economy and mind, not nature tentatively held captive but totally beyond capture. Night is the crackling of electricity, the pounding of waves, the emptiness of sky. If […]

what I want to say to everyone is:
thank you for being in this beautiful dream

The pearl is everything the oyster isn’t. It is the oyster’s accidental foray into capitalism. It is too often cultured, like buttermilk and opera-goers.
The oyster, unlike the pearl, is slovenly and naked. It is scrotal. When you taste an oyster’s juices a veil parts and you are plunged into the immensity of the night sea, […]

We fall asleep into something like our ocean origin, we wake up into what is by contrast the thinnest air. The sensation of tiredness is similar to dropping into the sea. We move our limbs only slowly in the water, the world takes on a darker and darker cast as we sink. We close our […]

the storm
(knocks down walls, unhides lives
as they are now, as they’ve always been,
the poor a nation huddled between stores)
reveals our mundane catastrophe

Photography, film: images hidden on celluloid until chemically tricked into revealing themselves. I could not know exactly what would be brought to light — the time between shooting and processing was a pregnancy, an artistic silence full of potential energy.
It was not so different with writing. I wrote by hand in a barely readable scrawl. […]