I wear indigo feathers on my wings, which travel from my shoulders to my wrists, and I live near a lily pond, where lightening bugs make a loose and happy cloud.  I leave them all to live outside their jar, and as I dance beneath them on the bright green pads I see you…

Step 1:

Explain to the bee in a soft relaxing voice that his presence is becoming annoying, and there would be mutual benefits if he chose to fly around in some other location.

Step2:…

Step 1:

Try to swat the bee with your book (if this doesn't work, continue to step 2).

Step2:

Hold the book over your head with one hand.

Step 3:

Hold your breath.

Step 4:

Tuck and roll into a nearby swimming pool, keeping the hand with the book above the water.

Step 5:

Kick to the surface of the water and inhale (continue breathing after this).

Step 6:

Shake excess water…

I

She wouldn’t have guessed in a million years what I was going through, and before I convinced myself of her wayward affections, I had planned to tell her, but now I would just feel cheesy expressing what I had intended. On several counts she strikes me as self-involved and extremely naïve, though I would not boost myself out of that consideration by any means, but what she seemed to have had in mind, I mean before her brother’s death and all, would never have worked. I merely thought…

He sang so pretty and dressed in rainbows that auraed his skin.

Songs and rainbows reshaped her vision and made her heart dance to new rhythms.

As did his whispers whose echoes became the music of oboes, the lilt of new mornings to come in an Eden that disavowed time and the death that comes with it.

She took him on home and into her bed and he bled her.

The oboes croaked to a stop.

He left her hollow as dreams of new dead, and the clock ticked away in time…

Kurtzov was old school, perhaps a better phrase would be old guard, after 20 years as a KGB officer I doubt ‘old school’ really fits.  Sure, when Russia rolled over and got butt fucked he’d done his time in the FSB, but he was just earning his pension, if there is such a thing in a butt fucked Russia., and then moved on to private enterprise.

 …

You know, if they both wore hats, although they almost never do, and going on looks alone, I couldn’t tell the two of them apart. Certainly, Veronica can be bitchy in a playfully malicious way, and  though Betty appears to have the more pleasant personality, she has been known to pull off a vindictive prank or two. No one truly knows what’s going through the perhaps solipsistic Jughead’s mind because he’s always stuffing his face with burgers like some Wimpy-wannabe and trailing with that…

His words were smoke, feathers, flowers, and he read to the ladies in soft, dulcet tones.

The smoke let them see things that weren't really there and feathers tickled their senses, and the flowers were realized beauty, a promise of whispers, of love.

But words were meant first to be food for the mind, and then afterward grist for the soul.

And one cannot eat the smoke, feathers, flowers.

Though ladies tried.

And grew sick with the poisons distilled from…

Why is Yesterday Just Like Today?

You know you’re getting up there when the nineties seem like current history and you still can relate to disco; when you can remember your older siblings listening to records of  Dillon, Kerouac and the poetic ‘Beat generation’ and understanding that Hip-Hop is nothing more than its twin.

That hiding under your school desk in case of an atomic attacks was just as foolish as thinking…

I tried city life. I got an apartment and a roommate. But then my roommate moved out one night. I needed to get some extra money, but it's a grind finding a part-time job that doesn't conflict with a full-time job. My family and friends couldn't help me.

I got desperate.



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I kidnapped a lawyer, Lee, and took him to my family's empty grain silo and set him into a large aluminum frame dog kennel. I really didn't know how much I could get for him, but it had…

I was riding the bus and the driver pulled up at a stop, and a guy was at the stop smoking, and the driver opened the door and said, "Put that cigarette out" like a cop; bad mistake.

The guy hopped on the bus and dragged the driver right out the door and kicked his ass bloody--and what he said after was chill for all time:

He called the driver a nazi-ass bastard to start with, then said, "You fuck, I will torture your ass, you think-you-a-cop…

"So do you feel better now," the smaller man asked, looking into his beer.

"No, but I wasn't expecting to."

"So why kill him if you didn't think it would make you feel any better?"

Getting no response he continued, "Was it just revenge then?"

"No, " the larger man replied, draining his glass and setting it carefully on the bar in front of him.

He stood and looked down at the smaller man, "I just want my daughter back and that can never happen, but at least…

They were city kids from all parts of the globe and maybe they should have been in rehab of sorts. They played hooky, drank, partied, lied, cheated and stole. They weren't trusted and for many, neither were their parents, parents who were alleged gangsters, terrorists, and just plain bad.

Well, when the school year began they desired action so they began to raise funds--bagged groceries, washed cars, sold candy, and shoveled snow, and though the pot was robbed twice they made enough…

Tonight I drank beer in the parking lot of a Hampton Inn in Calera, Alabama with two men who were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck, swinging their legs.  It was not hot anymore, and they were just talking and looking at the sky a little bit.  They weren’t drunk, just quiet and relaxed, and they looked at me as I got out of the car, and we greeted one another the way folks do around here. I was full of something grand and good, so I asked them for a beer, and I cried a little bit…

In the '60s they had this old movie house down on First, the Green Parrot; it stayed open all night and cost fifty cents to get in, and me and my good buddy Pete use to go there sometimes. We'd dropped out of high school and stopped going home and we had a lot of time on our hands and every so often the Bird was a good way to kill some.

The movies were mostly '50s B westerns: Rory Calhoun, Randolph Scott, and those guys, the second-tier heroes, and I was seeing this cute little girl…

Everyone came prepared with paint chips, a request one owner - a Ms. Sienna Corn in condo #3 - suggested would help focus the issue at hand: authority to paint front doors “any color of our choosing.”

“That’s a door we’d like to keep shut,” the board…

I sold used cars to my shame way back when; junk to the poor folks whose credit reports looked like black holes in space.

It was the kind of a place where, more than once, disgruntled buyers expressed their displeasure with gunfire.

I sold a guy a 1970 Chevy once for $400: they'd pieced it together with old chewed-up bread and saliva and stuck it out there on the lot, and the guy said he needed to get to Alaska, and as soon as he'd rattled away, old man Fraser came out and told…

Olivia’s boyfriend, Trevor, and his ex-girlfriend, Jenny, were sitting on the couch when Olivia came home.  It was very awkward.

“Jenny came by to tell me she’s pregnant,” Trevor broke the silence, “with my baby.”

“You broke up three years ago,” Olivia replied dumbly, though reality had filled out the gaps in between the syllables while she spoke, causing her to add:  “get out.”

“Sure,” Trevor shrugged, while Jenny fiercely avoided all eye…