A kiss in the dark Dec. 8, 2024

 

I don’t need to imagine it, how bad it felt to hear the news on the TV about him first, when Howard Cosell interrupted Monday Night Football to report about the shooting, making me tune to my favorite rock station where the disc jockey put on the unedited version of Working Class Hero, and how like him, I knew what it felt like to be one, and now all these years later, bearing other burdens, wounded elsewhere by things much closer to home, the girl I kissed outside the bar, over whom I still sometimes still ache, that too long ago as well, too distant to worry about, and yet sometimes I still do, my life mapped out with such moments and such people, an accurate portrayal of what my life is all about, the people we have loved and lost, rather than those we manage to keep, each hurting deeply but in a different way, not always as acute, but always there, like a kiss in the dark.

 

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The echo of it Oct. 21, 2025

 

 It is not the real sound I hear, just the echo of it, resounding from countless canyons. I do not reckon its source, only partly its meaning, it strikes me as hard, the reverberation that coincides with the vibrations I feel in my heart, beat after beat, the echo coming at me at those moments when I think of you and hear your voice, singing love songs that fill me completely and leave me empty when they are done.

I could spend a life time searching out where they come from, this valley or that, seeking the source of this sound I know I will never find, unable to define it, pin it down, locate it, when I fear when it ceases, so will my heart.

 

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The bear from Bear Mountain Oct. 6, 2025

 

The bear who lived in Bear Mountain is dead, one of two bears rescued at seven months of age and for three decades since became the main attraction of the zoo there, though in latter days became less and less interesting, choosing to sleet, or stroll the boundary of their confinement, waiting for the attendant to bring them food, neither of which I can recall a name, and so I have to mourn the loss of the first, knowing the second wont last, after which management will seek a new pair, and I – having come here to witness a love story in the wild – know it won’t be the same, sometimes feeling as the male bear must, lost without her.

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Oh no not again Aug. 2, 1983

 

I felt this before, she and I pressed against a phone booth glass, not love, yet enough for me to join the army when the French Foreign Legion wouldn’t have me, my young, innocent mind unable to reconcile my head thinks.

Many men run from her until the sin gets into our blood, and then we crawl back to her like wiggling worms, the way I did when the discharged from the Army, her parents telling me she’d gone away. When her letter came, it wasn’t perfumed the way the ones she sent me in the Army, yet enough to start my head spinning, as I plotted to steal the money I needed to reach her. I never blamed her for the crime.

Now all these years later, after it all feel apart, my head spins again, making it clear I might be older, but I’m no wiser

Time does not heal all wounds, not if they go deep enough and somehow she is still there inside of me.

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Food review May 2012

 “Where are you,” she texts.

When I tell her, she asks: “Are you coming or not?”

I say, “Where?” and she says, “You know where,” meaning the new restaurant she is supposed to cover and I say, “I thought you didn’t want me to come,” and after a delay, she texts, “Are you coming or not?”

I text: “Do you really want me there,” to which I get no response.

I am almost home, tired, depressed and feeling every bit as lonely as I ever had, and so, I park my car and go into the house, finally get a text saying: “Where are you?” again.

To which I reply and again she asks, “Are you coming or not?” and I respond, “Do you really want me,” and again I get no response, and like a dog in heat, I go back out, down to where I know she is, and she asks when she sees me, “What are you doing here?”

“You texted me,” I say. She says, “I was texting my brother.”

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recall 2015

  

like Pushkin I can recall

 that first moment when

 I saw her face

Though I did not know what I felt exactly

I recall it was intense

we all caught up in the throes of a grief

we do not know

 our lives lived in vain

even if we knew not then

it was

 how deep her eyes

how wide

how thorough she would have me skewed

casting open and revealing

even something I did not know

 what was there

now as time passes

her voice unheard for years

I grasp the sounds

 I tried recall and can't

like a deaf man watching

her lips move but no words

and yet even then

 I still ache

And still wish to kiss

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Scared to death? Sept. 2, 2012

 

I ought to

Still be scared

Perhaps I still am

Having lived through

Another endless summer

Letting early fall rain

Cool my overheated brow

Life thick with

Back to school

And overly early

Decorations

For the scary holiday

As if my Tuesday

Visits weekly

Are not scary enough,

Almost religious,

Where I must

Confront myself

By being in her presence,

Feeling the way I did

In line for the confessional

With the invisible priest

Waiting to hear all I have done,

Dare I detail all the dark thoughts

I have thought in the dark of night,

The intense desires,

The panicked moments

When all fell silent

Save for the rapid beat

Of my overzealous heart,

Things I still won’t

Talk openly about,

The pangs I feel

Each time she passes

Or the avoided stares

When she is seated across

From me,

What is left to confess

That I have not already,

How much more terrible

Are my sins that

I dare not confess them,

What more can I say,

That I have not already said

In the dark of night,

Scared to death,

Of what, I don’t know.

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