You can't shoot Winter like you can a raccoon,
Thought for months it stares at you defying you to try
When it dies, it keeps you up with its stink,
Buds bursting up from out of clay
Earth scent assaulting your senses
After five months of snow
You see it dying when you walk from your door,
Cracked brown palm snapping with flecks of green
Burning the body in pools of melting ice
Cobble stones poking up through the surface
So that the world seems to melt around you
Never to come together again in the same way
I don't hate other seasons, but I like winter's silence
Closed windows cutting off sounds of traffic
Construction and yelling kids
In winter, you can snuggle under camel hair and not think
With only the on and off of the heart to disturb you
Winter never coddles you. It never makes you think
The world is a pleasant place
Stinging your face and fingers if exposed.
But it dies so slowly, bits and pieces of its vast body
Falling from roof and gutter- Cracking as sharply as bone
You want to put it out of its misery
You want to shoot it between the eyes
But you just suffer along with it until the groaning stops
Watching spring leap over its corpse.
You can't kill spring either but that's a whole other story.
Liz looks just like David Bowie, if Davie Bowie was a girl. She loves his look as much as she loves his music and comes to the club each night looking at much like him as Pauly tries to – the band insisting he put on makeup to fit in with the new hip trend of looking gay. He hates the look as much as he loves the music; he loves the money he gets for singing even more, loves the pot the money buys -- which is why he agrees to go to Liz’s house in Montclair after our gig because she says there will be pot there. I go because I’m the one who’ll have to drive him home if Hank craps out and Garrick gets as drunk as he usually gets at these kinds of parties, only I get stuck driving Liz there first, so I don’t get lost and leave Pauly stranded. “She’ll show you the way,” Pauly tells me. “Then you’ll be able to find your way back.” This isn’t a part of Montclair I’m familiar with, not so ritzy as the places on Upper Mountain Road, but not so down and out as the rooming hous...
To this day I can't stand the smell of Chantilly perfume. She word it all the time, day and night, so thick, the cloud of it had the effect of a chemical attack. You could tell when she was in the building and how close she was to your room, the smell growing more intense, despite burning incense and towels stuffed along the bottom of the door. The hall before her room stank of it, as if leading to the entrance of some perverted garden. Very few people could breathe long enough to look in on her, let alone enter, though the smell might have been part of her defenses. She didn't like people bothering her; yet she didn't always like to be alone. Sometimes I could hear her through the thin wall that separated our room, pacing like a caged animal. Occasionally, I'd hear romantic music mumbling, too, and imagined her teary-eyed over the record player, mouthing out the lyrics from memory. She arrived at the Montclair house during my seco...
Tiger Stevens nudges me in the ribs when he finds out I just moved into the rooming house across the street from our favorite bar. Guys I drink with always talk about the girl that lives in the three-storied Victorian house across the street. Now I’m living there. I never get it, always confused by the nod and wink as if I am supposed to know something I don’t know. I guess I’m a bit of a snob. I drink with the boys I attended high school with but always assume I won’t end up like them. Sure I load trucks like they do as some Fairfield warehouse, yet I secretly scribble masterpieces into notebooks after house with the assumption I might some day get discovered. Sure, the girl, I met my first day in the rooming house is intrigued by the notebooks and asks me to read some of the contents to her each time we meet inside the house. I never do. I keep thinking I’m not ready. I tell her maybe next time, and really hope I am ready next time. Tiger hoots more when I tell him about...
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