I sat on a Manhattan bound bus this morning. I pulled my hood up and with my seat tilted slightly back, I leaned my head against the tinted window to watch droplets of freezing rain drizzle down the side of the glass. I watched the street signs and storefronts pass as the bus moved along Route 17. After more than 20 years of commuting from the east, I now make my entrance from the other side of the Hudson River.
I looked ahead to see the Westside of New York City. The tall buildings reached upwards and pushed into the palm of gray clouds. There was something beautiful and quiet to this. I suppose the cold rain and thick clouds looked like a good reason to stay home in bed. Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Redemption
I have always wanted to feel good. Even when I behaved badly, I always wanted to feel something so explicitly pure and genuine. I wanted to feel cleansed—I wanted something to overcome and wash me away from myself.
I wanted to feel as if I were good, or healed, as if to absolve the situations in my mind. I wished for it. I wished I could find something to ease the quiet regret that Continue reading
Poem: Love and Lust
I am soaring through the pulse of your curves and moving through the swerve of your hips with an incredible fascination for your features and the way you make me feel.
I am wondering what it feels like to touch your skin with splashes of ice water in my hand as I press it against your Continue reading
From The Book of Firsts
My First Event
I walked through the glossy wooded front door that was set in a gray stoned wall. I was greeted with a smile by a tall, bald headed bouncer with no neck, hefty arms and a chub-face. He was an over sized Irishman in a black shirt with the word “Staff” printed in white lettering across the left side of the chest. “ID please,” asked the bouncer. This was nice because after we break the 40 year age barrier, it is good to be carded at the door of a bar and made to prove that you are in fact over the age of 21.
I was given a band to wrap around my wrist and a red ticket with the actual word, “Ticket” on it, which was printed in black lettering with a random number across the top and bottom edge of the serrated ticket. Continue reading
The Proposal
He stood in front if the mirror to practice his speech. He stared at his own reflection, staring an intense stare into the mirror, looking at himself to shake away the nerves. He was a man in love. Before each rehearsal, he exhaled strongly through clinched lips, rounded as if he could whistle instead of exhale. He directed himself into action and then he preformed. Continue reading
From Bedtime Stories For The Insomniac
A Way To Play
I am alone, thinking, and sitting in the kind of quiet that makes my eardrums ring because there is nothing else to hear. In times like this, I realize that even silence comes with sound. In the quietest of times and in the absence of others, I can hear nothing but the high-pitched tone of an empty room.
I guess I might as well write about something . . .
Melany came through the Continue reading
Reflection in the Rain
Heavy rain falls in waves upon the roof of my house. I swear this sound is the opposite of an alarm clock. Teams of raindrops run down my rooftop like little footsteps running in big gymnasium. The dull roar of this pitter pattering on my roof, the chattering raindrops that hit my skylight above my head, and the droplets of rainwater that roll down the bay window in my loft; the view outside—the gray sky, the hardly swaying tree branches that move in a gentle rainy wind and the empty street known as Spook Rock are all so peaceful and quiet.
Today is Sunday.
The rain changes intensity and Continue reading
When The Change Began
After the long, uncomfortable hours in the precinct with angry desk cops and detectives, and after the questions that came while being handcuffed to the side of a gray-painted steel desk in a small detective’s office—after the yelling cops screamed, “Tell us what you did,” and after the detectives smacked me around, beat me, and played their version of good cop/bad cop; after the several rounds of different accusations and the phone call home to alert my parents of my arrest, the alcohol in my system gave way to the sobering moment that I was caught. I sitting behind a chain-linked fence on a wooden bench with my left wrist handcuffed to a pipe that ran beneath the seating.
After the hours of processing, and the trip to a holding facility where I went through the normal Continue reading
Letters From A Son: The First Page
After the last conversation I had with The Old Man while he was still clear enough to speak I told him, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Pop.”
I never said the word, “Goodbye,” because the word goodbye is too permanent and I was too afraid of losing him.
I never say the word Continue reading
the sights and sounds . . .
Not always, but when I hear the sound a cigarette lighter makes after a thumb rolls down to spark the flint that starts the flame, it immediately brings me back to a time of wild chaos.
I am reminded of a place where the curtain was drawn closed and the thin off-white horizontal blinds beneath them, which were beaten and bent, were Continue reading
