Paddy McAloon, take a bow. I now can’t stop listening to Life of Surprises. As with many things, I don’t know why. “Never say you’re bitter, Jack/Bitter makes the worst things come back.” A Life of Surprises, the album, collects many of Prefab Sprout’s best songs, from Two Wheels Good to Andromeda Heights. On several …
I ask, as Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “not out of sorrow, but wonder.” My old hand drew familiar lines: hairlines, tightly spaced, scrolled at the ends. It paralleled how I like to approach the world, gentle and controlled. This hand is a stranger in a bar, offering to buy me a drink, and at first I …
I think this atm’s customers are poor shots. Or blind to blue. I myself am quite used to missing the obvious.
Chasing the morning I always lose. Passing buses sigh smoke and strangers hunching forward, each into his own day. With the dust, a face settles into my eyes. He is a painting in a traveling frame, one that will never stand still before me, but will find me when I am ready.
Anger, I had not known you could be white. You are a line on my lip, a ripple of knuckle. You have never visited me this silently. I had forgotten you liked the rims of my eyes. I would walk with you tonight. We have much to talk about, and do not need the moon …
“Through the gutters there’ll be water running wilder than the sea…” That was a quick Mark Lanegan William Topley break, before I proceed to the topic of this post, which is the green Parkette Deluxe Butch let me pick out from one of his many junker boxes. One man’s junk is another woman’s new favorite …
My past has been quite present, lately. Mr. Mercado, founder of Basic Advertising, the man who used to throw me into various metaphorical bodies of water with a beatific smile and high hopes, passed away eight years ago. His family invited us to his death anniversary mass, followed by dinner, last Friday. It’s been many …
I HAVEN’T BEEN TO A BEACH FOR A WHILE I haven’t been to a beach for a while. The last time, it was newly night. Sand found its way between my toes, wet with its daily dose of sea. There were pieces of moon abed on blue, a deep blue I didn’t know before but …
Sand and fire make glass. I think of this while looking at Chiqui’s gift from Venice, a glass pen that looks like amber, with a surge of turquoise sea and gold foil inside. Glassworkers stretch the glass on iron rods while it’s hot and taffy-like; they know to the second how it will twist and …