A Brief For The Defense

Hemingway wrote best when in love. He’s dead now, and the women who had stopped loving him many years before (though they had the decency to...

Susurrant sounds of highway traffic, not seen, slow abrasion though quick by geologic measures, the mysterious journeys of others The night ...

The persistent, pleasant palaver of rain; like a wedding party passed in the night, heard but invisible, some light deep inside, the plangen...

We couch our insecurities deep in language’s familiar shape. (it is very soft on the inside, like velvet) A young woman opens a door to some...

Often, in the most central acts of love, I feel hollowed, absent, as if coolly watching a third party. And her breasts had an unusual hang, ...

There seems an abundance of leaves, as if they are never ending, infinite as stars, waiting for the wind to play with and disperse them like...

Why would He create a world so vastly beautiful only to watch it be slowly destroyed? Ah, but he gave us free will! you say. I say, No novel...

November of 1902, in Philadelphia, felt like summer, and the poet was suffering a bout of dyspepsia. He wasn’t a poet at the time. A dental ...

The soft palaver of a young couple, the disturbance of their hands - sounds our skin makes when touching other skin. Only visible, audible -...

I am at dinner with my best friend and his future wife, and we are into our third bottle of wine. She is drunk and laughing, we are drunk an...

"One" I do not believe happiness is a sustainable movement, desire’s existence being a kind of absence. And the emptiness of anyth...

As children we are never prepared for such unassuming days, the way they will decimate things. Waves roaring, one upon another, slowly abrad...

Often, my poetry, like my thoughts, descends into clutter, much as a pond overstuffed with Kai - brilliant flashes of vibrant ora...

I would like to capture whatever it was that I found so disarming, so reaffirming, yes even magical, in this moment (though it is true my gi...

"A girl remembers" All I remember, she tells me, my little sister, on the threshold of womanhood, is the sound of her voice. We w...

Indiana from the highway, July I find myself in agreement with Lowell: Whitman’s shadow over us is far too generous. but then falling from o...

Tell me life is more than an accumulation of mementos, tangible things ensuring that when we are gone, our life will still occupy some space...

The wind is roaring through the leaves like a torrent, lifting the lake into rollicking furrows. The post storm clouds, long, lean and limbe...

At my age, life begins to yawn open my small, insular stream growing itself ever deeper, so that soon it is a small river, and then much lik...

An ex girlfriend, a soft lover of mine who loves penguins and long, hot days of embalming sunlotioned blitheness called me to say she saw a ...

A man is cradling a book, knelt at an alter adorned with wine and candles. The whole chapel is one of symmetry, buttresses aligned, stained ...

I am sorry I did not bring you home with me. Your figure, wet with dew in the dark, defies my limited lingual talents. You were a bell, inve...

You are ahead, and the water, still frigid with spring, is being displaced by your glide, moving out concentrically so that its imperceptibl...

The basic tenets of modernism (or, for that matter, post modernism), my own blood type, the lyric movements of flamenco dancers, how to cons...

what are these orange flowers I see everywhere? they’re like sullen younger cousins of the late day sun I have all the words except the ones...

My father sends me a text from halfway around this watery, sliding piece of space rubble we inhabit. I think, how amazing that my very fathe...

I suspect there are things of this world that move only my writerly heart For instance: Our communicative advancements become more and more ...

i. How strange the whims of our intimacies when a word inflected with unintentional melancholy can charge our bodies anew, and apart ii. I f...

the smell of fresh laundry, that faintly metallic, humid aroma of down, reminds me of infidelity .......but also of fire illuminated figures...

Can’t sleep, burning through the late night channels a picture is crystallizing for men, ordinary men, of which I am one. I am in dire need ...

The balloons sag like weary heads at half deflate the bottles of seltzer have lost their spritz glasses on the table are stained crimson, bl...

A man swindling investors - many close friends - of near eighty million dollars gave one mil of his haul to charity. Guilt, perhaps, or mayb...

A reservoir has been carved from the bedrock and it has been given a fall a serrated groove of stone On summer nights smelling of verdant ...

How does a symphony come together? A pluck of the bass, a pull of the violin bow, a whirl of fingers on the French horn, the conductor mad w...

My last night, full of celebratory lamentations, so much of both, I do not remember falling asleep, or the moments before when I must have m...

A friend asks of me, over a lukewarm beer, Do you think we’ll be the last generation to remember life before technology? He does not mean te...

A woman I love, the one who scrawls verse with lapidary eyes the color of pale cucumber, is somewhere in Paris celebrating an engagement Oh,...

This, here, is a project still in the works. I'm not quite sure where to go with it from here. I'd love feedback on what people thin...

I fear the more I write, the more I obscure what it is I really want to say, that millions of pages, a whole canon of human communication, a...

Today, of melted snow and moist earth, smells like the springs of my childhood. If I were still young, I would play basketball in the slush ...

Water at 6500 feet does not boil, not even at 752 degrees, pressure, so much pressure weighing down, changing physical laws as we know them,...

I count it among the great gifts of this generous world that I am still able to spend an evening talking with you. That you and I, after all...

I am in Wawa, swaying with the slightest, most pleasant amount of whiskey. My stomach is rumbling and aching in hunger. Over the speakers, s...

The grass is the color of grass, and we have run trails through it so when it wimples like an ocean, you see where we have come and gone as ...

But then there is this swell in my chest A wave of language, and maybe it resides more in my gut, though when it moves uniformly, unexpected...

There are children playing on the steps of an abandoned school, gliding on skateboards, falling to concrete in flashes of skin On the steps ...

The wind has found its somnolent chords driving across the earth with portentous song played in C-minor, an ominous dissonance stripping the...

We all play so many different notes of intimacy in our lives. Your smile, the one when you’ve let your body throw itself back and the youthf...

It was a dour, pewter day in the middle of April. Rain had fallen the night before, and oil slicked puddles coursed along the curbs, lending...