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How I Lost My Mind, And Other Adventures

I took the bus from Iowa down to Memphis, a funny pressure in my chest, a nervous futility, an unaccountable fatigue. I walked along the railroad tracks and the streets of white clapboard houses, the air smelling of soap and tar.

Three Spheres

I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper and finally infect the wounds.

Selected Poems

Clayton

My friend Clayton died just before Christmas. He threw himself from the forty-fourth floor of the Marriott Hotel. Clayton Brooks was a poet, an actor, a taxi driver, a playwright, a drug addict, and a lover of humanity.

My Face At 1000 Park Avenue

Bag Of Wind

Philadelphia

As we waited outside the theater for Pam to arrive, the late-afternoon sun buttery and generous, I was struck by how healthy everyone looked: we could have been the bowling team, the swim club. AIDS seemed remote for a moment: distant, unreal, a bad dream from which the world would one day awaken. 

Vietnam

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, conscientious-objector declaration, the Tet Offensive

His Master’s Voice

Whenever Dad came up to Nooksack from Seattle, he took my brother and me to the movies, or to a sandwich place on the waterfront where we shot pool. He booked a motel room in town where we’d watch color TV before he returned us to Mom’s.

Getting Caught

Two wedding crashers, three strikes, four hubcaps