Might as well relax. It’s going nowhere and the scenery in that place never changes. But, the pattern embossed, I’m sure, alters freely when my back is turned. It has no respect for me.



Time for a new New-Year. One without empty frames. A year whose reflection can be caught beyond tangible irony. So, here’s to it and all who pass through it. Cheers!

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.”

~ Toni Morrison, Jazz

Dark clouds are smouldering into red
While down the craters morning burns.
The dying soldier shifts his head
To watch the glory that returns;
He lifts his fingers toward the skies
Where holy brightness breaks in flame;
Radiance reflected in his eyes,
And on his lips a whispered name.



You’d think, to hear some people talk,
That lads go West with sobs and curses,
And sullen faces white as chalk,
Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.
But they’ve been taught the way to do it
Like Christian soldiers; not with haste
And shuddering groans; but passing through it
With due regard for decent taste.

~ Seigfried Sassoon

I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The little blue-green speck of sock lint I’m trying to dig from under my third toenail, left foot, hates you.
The history of this keychain hates you.
My sigh in the background as you pick out the cashews hates you.
The goldfish of my genius hates you.
My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you.



My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.
My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.
My pleasant “good morning”: hate.
You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate.

The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it.
My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you.
Layers of hate, a parfait.
Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,
I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure.
My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you,
Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

Julie Sheehan

THE BOY Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.
The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn.
Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers
build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.

The rain beats on the windows
And the raindrops run down the window glass
And the raindrops slide off the green blinds down the siding.
The boy Alexander dreams of Napoleon in John C. Abbott’s history,
Napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged, Napoleon in his life wronged
and in his memory wronged.
The boy Alexander dreams of the cat Alice saw, the cat fading off into the
dark and leaving the teeth of its Cheshire smile lighting the gloom.

Buffaloes, blizzards, way down in Texas, in the panhandle of Texas
snuggling close to New Mexico,
These creep into Alexander’s dreaming by the window when his father talks
with strange men about land down in Deaf Smith County.
Alexander’s father tells the strange men: Five years ago we ran a Ford out
on the prairie and chased antelopes.

Only once or twice in a long while has Alexander heard his father say “my
first wife” so-and-so and such-and-such.
A few times softly the father has told Alexander, “Your mother … was a
beautiful woman … but we won’t talk about her.”
Always Alexander listens with a keen listen when he hears his father
mention “my first wife” or “Alexander’s mother.”



Alexander’s father smokes a cigar and the Episcopal rector smokes a cigar
and the words come often: mystery of life, mystery of life.
These two come into Alexander’s head blurry and gray while the rain beats
on the windows and the raindrops run down the window glass and the
raindrops slide off the green blinds and down the siding.
These and: There is a God, there must be a God, how can there be rain or
sun unless there is a God?

So from the wrongs of Napoleon and the Cheshire cat smile on to the
buffaloes and blizzards of Texas and on to his mother and to God, so the
blurry gray rain dreams of Alexander have gone on five minutes, maybe ten,
keeping slow easy time to the raindrops on the window glass and the
raindrops sliding off the green blinds and down the siding.

~ Sandburg

It’s a warm night with a gusting breeze. Like winter in summertime, I’m feeling Bronte. Charlotte, mostly.

I worry, on occasion, about the places I’ve been, yet I still have the ability to carve futures from flotsam. Sentenced to fantasy, those crimes weigh heavily.

I’m smoking with the night sky and I can’t see you from here. The Rishis tell me it’s better this way.

Malus brings me back to earth. Shedding, staccato, in ones and sixes.