loot apsev

my old lady hates the word body,
i want your body; your body is the most;
let me hear your body talk.
it’s bad.
but it aint as bad as french dressing.
or some waist of skin,
open-faced helmet on his yale head,
riding a vespa,
overzealously obeying traffic laws,
heading to the salon for a manicure and some highlights.

small happiness

In that country where everything is made,
boys are valued
like ring-pops to second graders.
girls, seen as a small happiness,
are fed to the earth
like seeds. they don’t grow
like yams in melanesia,
ten feet tall and celebrated.
they choke on apathetic soil
and the small bones of other unwanteds.

while above, a strapping son takes a
yoked beast across his father’s field,
shooting gallery duck style.

Part II Setting the Scene

In this office where I worked in the mid-nineties, we were like the folks below-decks on a sinking ship. Until the water rushed down the stairs, we just kept working away, waging little battles, acting like things mattered, engaging in playfully twenty-something destructive behavior, even the forty-somethings.

We put out weekly newspapers, toiling away in a squat low-rent office park in the shadow of a half-dozen trillion-dollar telecom companies that stud the rich side of Tyson's Corner in Virginia like the hairs on the back of your hand. Standing in line at the (now departed) Chik-Fil-a at a nearby upscale mall, my friends and I in cheap flannel shirts and jeans stinking of cigarettes and stained carpet past its prime looked radically out of place among the suits and ties of sales reps and account executives. We didn't care. We worked 40 hours in three days to put out newspapers of extraordinarily low quality. But it seemed really important at the time.

On the top floor of the office park, the various executive functions of the newspaper unfolded in mostly secret. The elite sales people cheated on their spouses and possibly did coke up here, while the president and publisher shifted money from one defunct ledger line to another. He drove a Jag while asking the rest of us to take a deferment on our paychecks for a couple weeks a year. By the time I quit, I kept getting paid this deferred salary for three months. Thinking I was a bad-ass (1996, I believe) I kept the office pager required to keep me on a short editorial leash until the arrears were paid in full.

The upstairs was mysterious to me and the other Doc Martens and jeans guys downstairs. The sartorial selections of the older folks who ran things veered from overly serious to jarringly casual. Unfortunately, both made us feel like teenagers because even the casual outfits were old: matching track suits with sweatbands, dark blue jeans with an ironed crease and loafers without socks, pink Brooks Brothers polos with the collars flipped up.

The accounting people -- sassy-talking frumpy black ladies with unattractive hosiery and (as it turned out) no heads for numbers -- similarly disdained the management team, and the strong scent of racial divide was heavy upstairs, another reason for us younger folks to avoid it. We functioned as if we were in constant battle with the short-sighted managers and their failure-prone decisions, but to the black folks in accounting, we were golden-boys just because we were subordinates who looked the execs in the eyes without shame. They didn't know we were too stupid to know otherwise. And those managers were getting twice what they were paying for from the lot of us. We paid them back in insolence, but they were more than happy to accept the terms; insolence didn't cost them a thing.

There wasn't nearly enough corporate functions to fill the upstairs area, and one sign of the various failures of the publications was that there were perilously few elite sales reps to bring up from the cubicle-sea below. Mostly there were rooms stacked haphazardly with lots of out-dated and archaic newspaper-making furniture and equipment. We still assembled the paper with wax and rollers, but most of the individual page creation happened on computers. We just printed these gigantic pieces of paper out and then pasted them up on huge tables on the other side of the floor. The discarded furniture upstairs included previous generations of paste-up tables, disgusting green metal machines clogged with paraffin wax and rubber-topped tables with millions of tiny lines from x-acto knives.

I worked a slightly-longer than normal day on Mondays, probably from 8 to 7, writing and editing stories and then putting together some of the first paper I would send to the printer that week. Tuesday was the longest day, because that paper would be going out first thing Wednesday morning. The first paper was completely electronically assembled, photographs were scaled and developed in the dark room (pre-digital photography, at least for this marginal operation), then the entire thing was waxed to stiff paper for delivery. The day normally began at 8 or so and ended at 2 am. Despite the fact that dozens of person deadlines ending my smoking habit had come and gone, I would routinely smoke most of a pack during this 18 hours of work. The first one would blaze to life before I was two blocks from my apartment, and the last one would light my way as I cut through a bird sanctuary and a darkened crossing over the Potomac river with nothing but cops and boozehounds on the road.

Wednesday morning I would arrive at the building just in time to see last night's deliriously completed newspaper leave the building, ensuring I would have regrets aplenty by five when the papers came back. I would beat back these concerns with two or three bottles of Coca-Cola and another half-pack of cigarettes as I set to work on the second, much larger newspaper of the two I served. This paper had an independent history and had resisted the assimilation that formed the multi-title office where I worked. (The newspaper I had sent to the printer that morning was for a wealthy neighborhood across the Potomac in Montgomery County, Maryland.)

This independent-minded newspaper was unique because they assembled the entire publication to length using pen and ink estimates of how many inches of text each story and photo would be permitted. With the first paper, I worked with (or was, briefly) the managing editor, and we would take a bunch of finished stories and photos and jigger them together in a layout until everything fit. Not exactly rocket science, but it's the way newspapers work.

The second paper had a sheaf of pages like storyboards for the entire week's newspaper. Each showed the photo hole and the news hole, and their writers and editors worked to this script like it was from the Lord himself. They transmitted the stories over to me using (sweat to god) some kind of dial-up-based non-network FTP connection which I never fully understood. They would just appear in a folder after I received a telephone call, and I would start building pages. I worked at a different desk for the second paper, one on the edge of the office, near a window where I could breath in fresh air when I wasn't outside breathing in the exhaust of burning tobacco.

i've had butter thoughts

butter tastes good to me now.
raw.
i lick the knife after
slathering 12 grain fantastic.
nullifying any nutritious value
it may have once had. monosaturated
or poly, I care not.
it carries the flavor like grunts
lugging pinot grapes to and fro.

It used to bother me how timmy
And his clan shaved the stick
Of land ‘o calories-ian
Any which way but methodical:
From the top horizontal, diagonal,
They would even fork it.
Leaving the once perfect
Golden harmonica case,
A molested assemblage of lard parts.

But if he was around now,
I’d tell him eureka.
They just wanted butter;
I applaud your ravenous efforts
To procure the salted sludge.
I begrudge your methods no more.

all the same

belly up to some hole in the wall,
obligatory pub o’ the new world potato eater,
dim lamps, flags of erin three inches tall,
stuffed in pints and cylindrical aluminum memorabilia,
on shelves like various plants gregormendelia.
…a stretch,
of mahogany to my left and right, brass rail for steppers,
housewife celebrating newborn reprieve asking for flaming dr. peppers.
it’s been a while, but I’m a piranha smelling blood in the amazon.
i guess I add depth to Hibernian alcoholic pigeonholing,
guinness any day over a night of bridge and bowling.
the first one is sahara oasis water, downed with the tempo
knievel and his son were accustomed.
after the second, I’m defenseless against its bewitching kempo,
i should’ve gone home, ‘cause the third and it’s successors are all the same,
just like white rappers.

swoop down

you couldn’t wait to witness her cross the threshold
of your terrible apartment. kitchen floor
begging for a wrung-out mop to take away
the beer filth underage sin water.
you thought about her all day.
was she going to wear that scent and white eye shadow?,
floating into your gristly viking kegger like some Norse snow
goddess stopping you in your swollen livered tracks.
valhalla valkyrie swoop down,
take you to see odin, thor, and the rest.
put down the beer and stick out your chest.
wanted to ask her for a sober grownup night on the town,
just earlier that day mom care-package delivered snacks,
far from home and uncomfortable like a virgin nose full of blow,
your charm with the ladies of academia developed a tad slow,
but you thought about her all day.
tell her that she’s caught your heart like webster slaughter,
but you won’t ‘cause you know the dragon’s not ready for the slay,
sit and watch him take her out the door,
drunk, wanting to give her a cuneiform poem Gilgamesh told.

Knollder

careful now. watch what you say.
I always happened to look this way.
hump on my shoulder. grassy knoll type situation.
third gunmen cross-triangulation.
I wish I had that magic bolt-action bullet puker
laughing stock of the neighborhood,
similar to bob euker.
but it’s a more sinister, impish sort of chortle,
he at least made the show,
I punch cash register buttons as a deformed mortal.
desperately seeking Sioux san-
citified arrowheads to puncture it, perhaps there’s a portal,
to take me back to the time I was a blastocyst
budding limbs and what were the rudiments of my figure,
I’d stick the sunbeam bread supermarket conveyor grocery divider
between me and that extra pound of…garbled precipice.
no thanks that shit’s not mine, sir,
that’s not gonna be the point at the lady with the hump provider,
of pre-teen scoffs and stiff index finger points;

like I’m kong and nessie’s daughter.

i’m not the missing link to volcanoes and giant lizards.
no, this isn’t a sack of chicken gizzards,
fed through a wood chipper, stuffed under my scapula,
it’s something that accompanied me
through the cervix and all my mother’s other parts,
persistent intrepid barnacle, part tarantula,
soldered to my shoulder, neck, and back you see,
like a side-sleeping beauty pillow placement, hard like quartz.
a geodeifficult cross to bear, you symmetrical stone throwing Judai!
the creative name games about me and you know what,
sometimes make me cry,
woe is my
child who has the mom with the two heads,
her face is red,
when I get on the yellow bus that takes her class to the zoo,
she watches the others’ faces seeing what they are up to,
stuffing their jackets under their shirts,
their normal moms with normal torsos are aghast.
that’s a sin.
the consensus.
I tell her the whisper gawks are always meant for us.

and that’s the way it bees for the most part, I’m guessing,
my mom used to say your shoulder friend’s not a curse,
but a blessing.

The Love Song of S. Alfred Geesfrock

LET us go then, you and I
When the pale moon hangs low in darkened sky
Like a chandelier in an underground brothel;
Let us go through streets uninhabited,
A quick, soft kiss—peter cottontail rabbited.
Unbeknownst to all, save the magnolia trees,
I write poems about your knees.
How sweet they are: the kind connectors.
They bend in rhythm with mine. They click.
Alleycat glances. Noise spotted like that of flecked spurs.
Step after aimless step I think of what’s come to pass,
How we did handstands on small patches of grass.
A rollerskating man playing the viola which led you to ask:
“what the hell was that?”
feelings flammable can’t be contained in a barrel of hazmats.

In the street the cars come and go
Nothing like Michelangelo.

The yellow pollen that’s making my eyes gush,
The yellow pollen cushioning our walked hush
Sneaked its way into nostrils trying to stay open,
To steal whiffs of helix locks giving me feelings of eloping
Allergen blankets on car hoods
On everything that stood
Irritants all around, tiny in size but potent
Doesn’t nullify feelings I couldn’t give up even for lent.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow fertilizer that itches the throat
Lounging on cars like cabana boys when the boss is asleep
There will be time, there will be time
To get a dress and contemplate the moon over a boat
There will be time to save money and be cheap
Time to masticate and time to imbibe
Enough time for the work that hardens the hands
And time for you to wear white as my bride
Time for you and time for me.
Take out your contacts, kiss your eye that’s blurry
The Eagles are on at four we can make it if we hurry,
You’ll make pasta and meatballs, then we’ll take tea.

In the street the fads come and go
Nothing like Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time, and there will be blah, blah, blah.
Not to undermine T.S., but let’s go to Madagascah.
We’ll track a yet undiscovered species of primate.
He’ll hang from his prehensile tail while we stay up late
And let the campfire’s flames lick the dark around us
Flame freckles in our eyes mirror our midnight African swoons
Heard by beasts aerial and subterranean, shattering the moon.

We’ll grow old…We’ll grow old…
We shall recount each others’ unfulfilled goals.

While sea nymphs serenade us on the peninsula of Sinai
Floating without effort, tasting wine and pie.
I see them cloaked with kelp, hair sparkling with phytoplankton
Such a lovely song, we’ll stand up and clap so as to thank them.
They’ll wave by flapping their mighty fins and go down
Disappearing below the swells, in love, we’ll drown.

New Story: Smoke Screen

I think Jim Jarmusch waxes nostalgic about the kinship of those of us who find ourselves out on a stoop, porch or office park entryway smoking a cigarette. It's in one of his movies. I kind of think it's bullshit. I pick my friends based on a lot more than what bad habits we share. If not, I'd be hanging out with obsessive gum chewers and overtalkers.

The newspaper business probably did the most to advance my smoking, and more importantly for our purposes here, my co-smoking. Journalism was closely linked to smoking and rebellion in general from an early age from me. It was, I suppose, the stress that I conveniently blamed for the oral fixation I satisfied with Camel Lights. However, my one-time best friend and by-then rival had already staked a claim among our friends as the newspaper person, so I ended up advancing my writing and smoking habits in tandem on the staff of the annual and a literary magazine I and some other people stated, probably as an excuse to smoke more.

By college, my smoking habit had become unmoored, relying exclusively less on the stress of succeeding in school than on paying for classes (on time or eventually), and of course, on the sweet, exquisite, slow-motion death of my long distance relationship. Like most freshmen, my drinking doubled weekly and I managed to spend a thousand saved high school dollars in one semester, on gloriously cheap cigarettes (the fabled sub-$2 pack!) and compact disks (my freshman year coincided with the rise of grunge), as well as lots of booze.

Then I discovered coffee and cigarettes had new meaning.

Through college I tested theories of pairing extreme amounts of coffee with cigarettes in as many ways as possible. I would smoke a cigarette at five in the morning walking to my coffee-shop job, and savor the ashy aftertaste as I warmed up the espresso bar. When all four taps were pulling perfect shots, I would wash away the spoiling cigarette flavor with a lukewarm mixture of four-times-two shots of espresso and an equal amount of milk. I was horrible.

I paired this extremely bad habit with working at the school newspaper, and glamorously reeking of cigarette smoke and unwashed flannel while storming around like some kind of newsman. It was, I'm assured, all very unattractive. Except to me, who couldn't believe how awesome it was to be typing and ordering people around and making decisions and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all at the same time.

By the time I was working at the newspaper after school, the glamour was completely gone. In the odious, crippling world of weekly community newspapers, the smokers were people like me, and they were 48 year old cut-and-paste artists who lived with their parents, and they were moth-ball smelling hags in horrible pantyhose from accounting. We had nothing in common, nothing to share, and nothing to even tenuously connect us, except a glowing ember on the tip of a cigarette.

doldrum II

I

life’s monotony
diminishes hope; we sit
procrastinating

II

celebrities shine
prancing on unfurled red mat
plebeians adore

III

days spent surviving
debt repayment and dreaming
happiness forsook

IV

stagnant forgotten
grandma doilies stretched out,
the besmirched masses

charmed

---------------------------------- i
------------------------------ used to
----------------------------always do this
--------------------------when i was a starry
--------------------- eyed kid who had bangs
------------------- my mom created with blue
----------------- handled scissors that were easy
-------------- to keep shut like a crocodile’s acrid
----------------- wildebeest wounding mouth. i
------------------- ate the frosted rhombi along
-----------------------with mallows roygbiv.
------------------------saved lone vitamin d
----------------------------- doused azul
------------------------------- diamant
------------------------------------ e.

stormless

wedged betwixt the majestic moments
involving penn 8 and schoolyard.
there were stormless interludes when the woman
who played host to my parasite
gave me, whether crisp, or thin and wrinkled,
a dollar that smelled like cigaretted hair
and brown paper bags chock pregnant with peanut
shells and unwashed denim knuckles.
a charter to venture off to westy’s to get her a skor bar.
i would buy a cherry cola slice in the glass
bottle that had the styrofoam label
that was so much fun to take off.
the walk back, a simmered saunter.

nobody was around except for that Indian kid
with the dog statues in his front windows.

that space

when my brother smiles
you’d expect a cuckoo bird
to pop out of that space.
tell you what
time it is. Running away
from tom, jerry goes
into that obligatory hole
of safety and rodent-brained chicanery.

on cloudless days with lips
divorced, the sun’s oomph
finds it way into and on his
mouth muscle warming it
up so that it’s limber
enough to follow his brain’s
whistle instructions
to be performed through
that un-hung piece of drywall
that stolen piano key
that busted chiclet
that missing picket.

his shrill alarm makes me
foot-stab the horizontal pedal. It ends the
reversing. I throw his truck
in park. I watch him
through the rearview mirror.
he opens the tailgate because he’s helping
me. Again. there’s a few things
he'd like to tell me but he just smiles
and laughs with that trademark
incomplete grin
my dad’s fist made famous.

friction

it wasn’t enough
that he put down the drink
ceased to behave like a nova monkey
and began to take the necessary steps.
bought you a house
that he could sleep in while he wasn’t
working both jobs that couldn’t work
as a team because of how different they were.
the jobs.

not enough. he
got a second overpriced piece
of paper with some school‘s
name on it while you bore
children up his ass
superdad
tee shirts to class on his frame
alien to all
that chanced him. Became tireless
self don king-er because niche
required filling.

just enough
sand has filled lower half of hour
glass for you to tell him
about sins extramarital maybe
you should go
to your mom’s house for a while
I’ll stay here with the kids.

enough onlookers
could’ve told him it was imminent
it was a newborn growing
teeth it was enamel losing
it’s luster tarnished from the start
like Valdezed sea life it was
bogged down and stuck
never to rise
unlike pungency of intruder’s
friction that singed his cilia
and burned down the progress
he hoped flame retardant.

sorry that you dropped

forsaken insulin brought things to a head
I would’ve made nice if I knew you’d be dead
burned and urned.
by the Almighty, four kids feel spurned
shocked now, but wait for the birthdays
the first days of spring, oldest might want to play first base
thirsty daughter won’t have dad taking her to get
chocolate water ice or whatever she likes that’s wet
to quench her thirst, ‘cause your heart burst
middle two scared white like chief race in Benson Hurst
when they found you in the bathroom
you felt sick they said, unaware of soon doom
left from their sight a broken boomerang
failed to return from the head, didn’t hear the clang
pots and pans, bottlerockets’ annual boist’rousness
your number was up. God’s choice must rest.

but man, I’m sorry I was an asshole and never did quit
I postured while drunk too much. I’m sorry. That’s it.

Resolution

What I was thinking about, when he was talking about being a ghost, was how I could change everything if I could keep this moment together and somehow get the mohawk-man to the police. Visions of sitcom crime-fighters and neighborhood heroism, complete with a key to the city and the gratitude of a shaken but now reassured public. I could take that moment, and turn it all around. (Surely, this was the result of the surge of endorphins or whatever it was that surged around when you had a high-tension situation like chasing a home invader through the streets of your hometown.)

Then everything went black, owing to a surprisingly fast moving IBM Selectric II typewriter hitting me from my quarry's general direction.

And what I remember next is this: When I was a kid, I fell off a rope swing during a snowstorm in the dazzling, dizzying days between school's end and Christmas itself. I was pretty young, though I don't remember my exact age. My parents had separated -- or maybe divorced -- relatively recently, and goofing around on the rope swing in the snow felt lighter than air. It felt like the easiest, most wonderful thing I had done in forever. Everything else had been so hard lately. Christmas was going to be hard. Going to Catholic school with divorced parents was hard. Pretty much anything life could gin up at that point left me exhausted.

I was in the backyard of a kid who wasn't really a friend anymore. The snow and the general breakdown of the rules of neighborhood play -- the normal groupings, the rivalries, the mean blow-offs that defined the carefully nuanced world of pre-teen boys -- put a bunch of us together who were old friends by proximity, but who really meant nothing to each other at the moment. That these boys weren't really friends probably contributed to my lightness; I felt I had nothing to lose.

Twilight was quickly turning to night, my hands were cold, and I have no doubt that the bones in my hand were certain they were gripping the old rope swing as tightly as they could. Once I hit the ground, I recall figuring that it was probably better -- definitely easier -- to just remain where I fell, listening to the sound of these half-stranger former friends run to get their parents, experiencing the exquisite pain of a greenstick fracture of my wrist, lying on my back in a foot of snow, and feeling more land on my face and neck.

The Product of Inspiration

Something did occur when I put the pince-nez on my nose.

And no, it wasn't an infection, though my wife was quick to suggest that outcome when she first set eyes on the victorian spectacles.

I had begun to write, like I knew what I was doing. I spun a tale I thought magnificent. After the half-assed computer I had been using sort of had a melt-down (technology isn't my specialty), I pulled out an IBM Selectric II I had brought from my mom's house after she moved in with my sister. I had reams of slightly yellowed paper from a short-lived experiment with contract work I had done for an office supply company. The pince-nez, the typewriter, the weathered sheets of too-thick paper like mounds of foolscap, they all conspired in my favor. I was writing.

I was maybe even a writer.

The garage and I still stank. I was afraid to stop working because the spell would be broken, the magnificent little muse who had settled in among the squalor would be chased off by deodorants and soap, not to mention the leaf-blowing my wife was agitating for.

I wrote thirty pages one day. The story revolved around the possibility that Stevie Ray Vaughan had faked his death in a helicopter accident, and was now living a suburban life outside of Los Angeles. The intriguing bit was that unlike with Elvis or whoever, nobody had ever entertained the possibility that SRV wasn't dead; it was such an unlikely scenario that a bunch of people in the entertainment business knew it was a hoax and nobody wanted to bother Stevie anyhow.

The story was really moving along.

One completely insane fan had pursued the theory after a chance encounter with SRV at gas station in Alameda, and had set in motion a complicated plot involving cultists, real estate investors and the mob. Things were building to a climax I couldn't quite completely envision but I figured my muse would deliver.

I was completely mistaken.

It all came crashing to a halt on a Thursday afternoon. It was misting outside and I had a thorough aversion to the rain. Still, I believed I could slip into the trance and bang out a few more pages before heading in for some soup. But the seat I had sat in for weeks had somehow grown hard and uncomfortable overnight. The shed's cozy humidity had become a bone-chilling miasma, and I could barely function in the room.

I knew right away it was all gone, that I was finished, that the entire thing had been a fluke. I put out onto the street, wandering aimlessly. I was adrift.

Our street wound around to a little sort of loop of houses isolated from the things around them. The loop probably existed before the confluence of two highways boxed it off and made it seem like a city planning snafu. It was here I ended up, counting perfectly-spaced gaps in the sidewalk, and noticing old cars and blight that I thought might be worthy of a photograph someday.

Then I saw the man with the mohawk.

It wasn't a mohawk like a punk-rocker might have wore. It was a mohawk like the last of the Mohicans would sport. It was nearly as wide as his whole head, and beneath it were two narrow bands of scruffly shaved skin and two ears sticking out.

Our neighborhood and others in the region had been terrorized, using the word that the local newspaper used, by a person who was breaking into unoccupied houses, eating food and taking a few light, moderately expensive items. In one house, he ate half a cake, cutting it neatly and placing it on a plate, apparently while watching television, based on where the crumbs were found. In another house, he had taken a Bose wave radio and eight of fifty-seven cds. He appeared to enjoy Broadway musicals.

All of his crimes were ones of opportunity. The houses were empty and usually a back door or large window was left unlocked. The size and nature of the missing objects pointed to an individual working alone and possibly on foot, since he hadn't taken television sets, desktop computers, KitchenAid mixers or other heavy high-value items. One police detective noted that nothing was taken twice, meaning he only stole one computer (a laptop) and then one stereo (the Bose) and then a sampling of music selections, and then a cheap hand-mixer. "It's like he doesn't know where the Target is," the detective joked.

Nobody had spotted the man in the act, but a handful of shutins and swing-shift types had mentioned seeing an otherwise unmemorable man with an unusual haircut. One said it was an immense pompadour, long on top and very short on the sides. Another said it looked like a mohawk.

I had reached the back of the loop of houses. The constant windy sound of cars on the interstate behind the sound-absorbing wall was almost like the ocean. I was looking down and began to turn around when I thought I saw something dropping out of the corner of my eye. When I looked back, nothing seemed strange. I was looking at the space between two houses, and could see a shed behind one of the two. I must have imagined movement, or spotted a cat or a squirrel on its daily patrol.

Then, as I looked, a man leaned out of the window of one house. He didn't look my way, concerning himself with looking below the window, about a five foot drop. His head ducked back inside the window and then his feet came out, and his torso, and I heard a thumping sound over the car-surf whooshing noise, and the man fell from view. He had a mohawk.

Looking back, I guess it was pretty clear throughout this period in my life that I was depressed and maybe a little manic. I had never really analyzed the situation before, but I had the mood swings, the periods of soaring emotional highs (like the writing spasm that had just crashed to a close), and the moments of deep despair. People say that these can be controlled with medication, of course, but that other factors, such as adrenal surges and personal tragedies could also affect the emotional status. I had read an article about an athlete who fell into a depression whenever he wasn't in the height of his competitive season, apparently because the adrenaline surge served as a medical check on his natural up and down shift.

I stood on the sidewalk for maybe ten seconds after spotting the man leave the window. What I had seen before, I concluded, was his latest acquisition. He dropped or lowered it out and then jumped after it. There was no-one else around, and destiny, I thought in the final seconds of my reverie, had placed me here on this curb to witness his crime.

I dropped into a crouch. Everything was moving slowly and I felt like Spider-Man. Staying low and keeping an eye on where he fell, I moved along the grass just off the sidewalk to make less sound. I got to the house nearest his latest target and pushed my back against the front wall, lower than the windowline, edging toward the gap between the two homes.

I reached the corner and stole a peek at the mohawk-man. He was lying on the ground but wasn't unconscience or anything. He had hurt himself, maybe bumped his head coming through the window. He was blinking his eyes and then touched his forehead tenderly.

I jumped him.

It doesn't make any sense. This person is a criminal, obviously, and prepared for something like this to happen eventually. Maybe I thought his compromised position gave me an edge. I was obviously not thinking straight myself. We struggled for a few second and he reached for the small duffle bag next to him. I tried to kick his arm as he reached and ended up overextending myself and losing my balance, coming up short. He reached the bag and swung it toward me landing a blow in the general area of my shoulder, neck and head.

I fell over and he took off. I felt stupid, but at the same time figured I had started this so I might as well keep going. I was still feeling a rush, and he wasn't running that fast. But he was running toward my house.

For some reason, I shouted as I ran after him. What I said sounded strange to my ears even as I ran. I said "Now hold on a minute" and "Hey hold up now" and other random, Andy Griffin-like things. I don't know why. The mohawk man didn't say anything.

But he was definitely running right toward my house. Then he ran around the far side along the drive way and I thought that I might have him. I took the deceptively quicker route to the back yard and thought I heard the shed door slam. I grabbed a snow shovel, which is not a good weapon, if you're interested. I kicked the door open and the mohawk man was standing there in the middle of my shed. He looked tired. I am certain I did, too.

He looked around and lunged for the spool I previously had been sitting on, nearly knocking over the IBM Selectric II. I shouted to watch the typewriter and he tossed the spool at me. I swatted at it with the snow shovel and hit him in the process (swinging a snow shovel inside a shed leaves little untouched). He went down and sprawled across the typewriter, the pile of typed pages and the mound of blank paper. I jumped on his back and tried to put him in some kind of a headlock. I was basically completely insane at this point, protecting my masterpiece like a mother hen.

Then he said, "Is this your house?"

"What?"

He stopped struggling. "Is this your house?"

I thought for a second about what the impact of telling him the truth would be. Probably erroneously, I concluded that it would be okay. "Yeah, this is my house."

"You writing the book about Stevie Ray Vaughan?"

"Wait a second. You read my book?"

"I break into houses."

"But you broke into my shed and read my book?"

He had apparently snuck into the shed one night while I was inside the house watching tv. He thought the book was going well, and wanted to know how I would end it. I was still sitting on his back at this point.

I didn't know what to do. Nobody had been permitted to read the book (not as if there was some huge interest from anyone in my house), because I probably didn't want to know what anybody thought. I got off his back and tried to sound gruff. "Get up."

"I think it's a good start. I thought about writing crime fiction, and even considered writing about my work. Being a non-violent offender, seeing the lives of these people in your neighborhood from the inside for a couple hours a day, I've become more thoughtful about my career choice." He stood up and I meaningfully brandished the snow shovel in a way I thought menacing.

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. Afterwards, I would note that he had confessed to me.

"More than half the time, I don't even take anything. It's like when you're in someone's house, and you use the bathroom. You don't even know why, but you wonder what's in their medicine cabinet, or what shampoo they use, or if they have migraines, or hair loss, or whatever. That impulse is there, even if you don't realize it. What I'm doing isn't much more than that."

"You're breaking into people's houses," I said, thinking this maybe needed to get mentioned.

"It's hardly breaking in if the door or window is open. Besides, I was tired of that same live I was living. I was worked in a loading dock, dividing up and passing time box by box. Nobody cares about the guy in the loading dock. I realized I didn't care about me either. One day I was walking around my neighborhood and noticed a sliding glass door open. In I went, and I ate an apple, and left. Nobody noticed, and I started to feel like a ghost, like I was half invisible. I never went back to the loading dock, and I don't even think anybody thought to ask where I was."

Maybe this was designed just to elicit sympathy from me. It wasn't really that sad of a story, unless you happened to have a loading dock -- or local outlet of a gigantic coffee conglomerate -- of your own. Whichever. What it made me start thinking about was that I could change it all, right now, if I took the steps to get a few things back into synch. This wasn't any way to live, and I probably had enough excuses to keep trying like this for years, but it wasn't going to make any difference. If it wasn't the coffeeshop, or this idiotic backyard writer's workshop bullshit it would be something else. Who is convinced by this?

Then he hit me with the typewriter.

doldrum haiku

I

joyous holidays
annual beacon of joy
fleeting and migrant

II

striped turf in Philly
peppered with mistakes and hurt
tear salt saturates

III

midnight green now blue
high expectations cut down
eagles nurse deep wounds

IV

friend lost a brother
hard to accept raven’s news
he mourns like before

V

circuitous wheel
continues with birth of girl
Maryland daughter

VI

tea kettle whistles
reminds me to be grateful
rain blitzkriegs windows

VII

February late
the purple promise of spring
crocus I adore

Strum and Strut

I got plumage, man.
Just how life can spawn
from a hot trashcan I manage to wake
After beers and jeers
New year’s
feathers never been better
come down and peruse
there’s a reason
I love a parade!
Still gets blurted
Furtive glances don’t get
Glanced.
Any chance you’ll come
Down?

You frown
with hangover malaise
phase one of the reconstruct
of your life begins today.
I know. At least one day
of procrastination
carried over from that bastard

2005.
Exhaust it with me and my downy mates.

Your house is warm,
but we strum and strut
with a radiance that only
Apollo can bestow.
You know
it’s been a while
since your senses
have been barraged with
a melodious one-two.
Three or four spots
have just opened up
on the sidewalk,
there’s plenty of__________space.

As we grace
Broad with tonal fury
appeasing the Petrified Penn
on asphalt grids
of his design.
Divine on his throne--
The Hall of the City
giving thanks to Thee
Quaker and Maker Of All
that you see.
Free of charge
we laud the new face
of Janus and the city
that thrives in your heart
apart from all others.
Brothers share your
flasked malt
and revel in the shadow
of the Clothespin.

It’s not cold.
You got your whiskey
and I got plumage, man.