#1993 #AmericanWriters #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned
The next day I sat in the hall in my green tin chair, waiting to be called. Across from me sat a man who had something wrong with his nose. It was very red and very raw and very fat and...
I met an old drunk on the street one afternoon. I used to know him from the days with Betty when we made the rounds of the bars. He told me that he was now a postal clerk and that there...
I used to hold my social security… up in the air, he told me, but I was so small they couldn’t see it,
I took women either to the boxing matches or to the racetrack. That Thursday night I took Katherine to the boxing matches at the Olympic auditorium. She had never been to a live fight. ...
I wait on life like a pregnancy, p… the gut but all I hear now is the piano slamming its teeth throu… brain
The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under the...
The boys on Dorsey station didn’t know my problems. I’d enter through the back way each night, hide my sweater in a tray and walk in to get my timecard: We had a game going, the black-w...
Sara was preparing the turkey dressing and I sat in the kitchen talking to her. We were both sipping white wine. The phone rang. I went and got it. It was Debra. “I just wanted to wish ...
I feel gypped by dunces as if reality were the property of little men with luck and a headstart, and I sit in the cold
the vultures at the zoo (all three of them) sit very quietly in their caged tree and below
a poem is a city filled with stree… filled with saints, heroes, beggar… filled with banality and booze, filled with rain and thunder and p… drought, a poem is a city at war,
In the morning I heard her walkin… It was about 10:30 a.m. I was sic… She shook me. “Listen, I want you… “So what? I’ll screw her too.” “Yeah,” she laughed, “yeah.”
the legs are gone and the hopes—th… and I haven’t shaved in sixteen da… but the mailman still makes his ro… water still comes out of the fauce… myself with glazed and milky eyes…
the motion of the human heart: strangled over Missouri; sheathed in hot wax in Boston; burned like a potato in Norfolk; lost in the Allegheny Mountains;
remember, he told me, that when I… years old my mother was always tak… to the doctor and saying, “he hasn… she was always asking me, “have yo… pooped?”