Culture slithers forth, tastes the air, tests it, before ascending the throne. Haughty, sinister, the word sounds like vulture, stinks of well-powdered carrion in my nostrils. In the name of the concept, I smile, I bow; meanwhile, the gorge collects itself, preparing to mount an assault.
The seeds of my life are stories. This journey has bloody, vital roots but ends in banality.
My grandparents gathered secretly along a cod-stinking wharf, in a basement Fado bar in Porto with other plott...
Ghostwriting is a terrible way to live, but there's all sorts of crap people do to pay the bills. First of all, some of us have what's called a "faulty decision-maker". We believe we have greatness inside, and we don't want to spoil the deal. The theory then goes on to describe how sinking into a couch, while holding a soggy beer cozy that sports the logo, '"Welcome to Moronville, population: YOU" in your hand leads to greatness more readily than seeking gainful employment.
Some of us, on ...
My mother's father, Reuben Hoffman (you can look him up), had a defect in his color-responsive cells, the cones of his retina--making him colorblind. He passed the X-chromosome to my mother, and she forwarded the darned thing on to me, and to my younger brother, too. You get a lot of you-know from people--friends, family--everyone, for the most part, when they find out about the colorblindness. I mean, you're not missing a leg or commoding into a bag. They can make fun of you if they like an...
A Sense of Time
A strange sun follows me where I go
trying pale white water paint
to pretend colors I cannot believe:
a pale blue mountain side
becomes a thin, pale sea.
I am in the forest underneath the trees
where the rivers run
under a lazy, speckled sun
running through river bells
to a moonlit, soundless sea.
Tossed far into the running winds
my way of life passed into dreams:
should one death hang me so?
I hang, dripping from the sky
into the tremendous wealth
and inev...
Crestone, Colorado
something living here
in the death of winter.
what lives buries its belly
next to the earth
sticking stalky roots and stems
into the ice
ducking below
the shallow air.
this stubble of plants clutch
to something i cannot understand.
I am nothing, here
nothing acknowledges
my boots in the snow,
the snow is ice,
gives nothing to the texture
of my boot soles,
gives nothing to my weight
or heat, silently breathing wind
to dry away my voice
and i am gone.
...
You're the Writer
why does he have to die
you're the writer
she said
looking up from the dark
with a finger
scratching there
and here
and i say what
because i had forgotten
with the smell of apples
in her hair and all
through the room even
as the fan blew
rotating blasts of wind
rhythmically around
the night inside these walls
which forever
are forever
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Ta...
when it happenend
she told me he turned from red to blue
he gasped for air reflexes
she was crying, too,
mind (hers) couldn't take it in
but it did get
in daryl is
dead.
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The Phallic Suggestion
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Somebody's Mother
Early on in her life, Susan Sanders found she was left out from the Marxist revolutionary activities of her parents, while her older, aggressive brother was earmarked for significant participation. Disenchanted with her parents’ social vision, she rebelled against the rebellion, and her father turned a neglectful shoulder while her mother became abusive.
She attended Clark College briefly, but soon fled the institutional stagnancy in order to follow a young man who shar...
innate people
i have waded through the ancient nile
and driven north to the end of roads.
why She asked and i told
her about it in a letter.
not everything
is a beginning, i write.
worlds wrap their way around
the old, withering bend,
a ruinous, curving blue
that is sky and sea
and also nothing, always
the same, circling like the ancient Eagle
around the fact of death.
there are people whom i love, but
such people are ideas with blurry faces,
silent reverberations of promis...
illusions
Bright brows, rising and waiting,
you wed my moment to silence;
a darkness that brings beauty,
that is what you mean to me.
You lower blond locks over your lips
smiling and saying illusions aloud;
these illusions i hold to me as truth.
They are all i see of you.
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Sad
I can see things the way they always were:
once, her stepfather mowed their yard with a push blade
just two wheels and the rusted blade
churning up the grass
and when she touched the clippings
the color was like cider on her fingers
and he let her try to push,
the handle high above her head,
the heavy iron weighted irrevocably to the earth.
It was like that with everything after awhile,
pushing hard at things much too large,
her young body too soft to understand
things like ...
Ten Minutes
little or no time at all
this boot comes off
and candle lit like so;
something moves on the wall
something in your eyes
pillow propped
blanket dropped;
our last night spent
in ten minutes.
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End of Something
It is monday or anyday
on the sidewalk summer’s end
a young woman smiled at me from her porch today
as I was walking my way to work.
Monday like any other day
and I am where I always am.
The wind attends to the leaves
and the shadows diffuse without the sun.
A hundred people walking today
at the end of summer’s month
young woman sips her cooling tea
and watches where I pass.
Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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I'm in this way. It's like a way, sort of, when things happen over and over and you begin to suspect that this is the way things are. It's not good. But it's not really bad. Or, at least, it's not as bad as you expected "bad" to be. You're not way out there, you're not on your way; no, you're just in this way.
When it's like this, you have to begin. You have to look for some place to start and then, when you realize there isn't any place, you just, you know, start to begin. You ju...