Here with Dad for a week in the South Mountain. For two days it snowed and drizzled. Akram and I slept, slowed down from New York. Thursday we walked up Fire Tower Road—we still call it that although no fire tower is at the top … Read More →
Category Archives: Music
In my words, March 4 – 10
… Thursday after class as I walked down Fourteenth Street in the cold drizzling rain, I stopped at the Duane Reade on Third Avenue and asked, “Do you have an enema bag?” “Enema?” the Bengali fellow asked. “Enema,” I repeated. He led me to the … Read More →
In my words, January 14 – 20
… It’s Monday afternoon around two. My morning class is over. I’m home, but leave at five-thirty to teach again till eight. I’m interviewing students Tuesday and Thursday from two PM to seven. I usually have afternoons off. Monday and Wednesday with morning and evening … Read More →
In my words, January 1 – 6
Over the holidays, a friend was using a new paring knife while making dinner and cut three of her fingers and a thumb. Merry Christmas. Once, when I was a cook, I almost sliced off the top of my left index finger right through the … Read More →
Sweet Mary
….. ….. ….. ….. I lived at home as a young man full of fears that paralyze I was a believer in truth and the truth was a lie then I slept with Sweet Mary and she made me realize there are more ways to … Read More →
Songs
I wrote the lyrics for the following songs mostly in my 20s. I was doing poetry performances in Philly in the late 70s and began singing with a band, The Sea of Hands, who accompanied me, before doing songs of their own. It was a … Read More →
A Few Swimmers Appear
… Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto. A few swimmers appear in a huge whirlpool. —Vergil … … sleep vanishes When sleep vanishes then you swim. Awake is no island merely swift stroke and breath. The moon is not the sun’s skull day is not … Read More →
Poet Laundromat
Poet Laundromat was published with the help of Stephen Spera & Philadelphia Eye & Ear Press in 1983. It comes from a long poem I was working on called Fucking, but it took its own form from the larger poem and became itself. I see … Read More →
The Monkey at 9th And C
I’m not exactly sure when the monkey appeared on my apartment building’s wall. I look at it every day when I’m coming and going. No one has desecrated it just like Chico’s rattlesnake spray-painted on the sidewalk a block away. People walk by it but … Read More →
The Story of Jingle Bells
Jingle Bells was written as a Thanksgiving song by James Lord Pierpont in the autumn of 1850 in a tavern in Medford, Massachusetts, a town popular for its sleigh races. Dashing through the snow In a one-horse open sleigh O’er the fields we go Laughing … Read More →
Sonnet 209: I learned Michael Jackson was dead from the
Late June 2009. Opening my hotel door in Inverness, there was Michael Jackson looking up at me from the morning paper. I’d been thinking about breakfast and a boat ride over the deep Loch Ness. In July, back in the States, every morning I was … Read More →
Going Back to Work Again
In 1970 I was living in East Lansing, Michigan where some friends were attending MSU. I started to read my poetry at the Aardvark Coffee House. Even in the beginning I was more of a performer than a reader. I’d film the audience with a … Read More →