Grub Street Grackle Store

Will you sink to the floor, beside the checkered table?
Will you clutch at the tablecloth, toppling the salt in your hair?
Will you beat your breast, and wail, and frighten the cat
With the wild histrionics of your despair?

"No, don't you know that with the trappings of my words you can fly off the edge of the world like the logical butterfly?"

As every experienced student of meditation knows, the first step in taking stock is to relax, clear your mind, and realize that you have to use the bathroom. By means of this elementary technique, one may avoid all of the intricacies of self-exploration and advance directly to the cleansing moment of release, or, in the case of a particularly successful bowel movement, a true euphoria.

Everyone undergoes transformations in life; I was born a Protestant and am now a Roman Catholic, and Johnny found Jesus and became a Protestant. But what concerns me more is Johnny's transformation of a song from mere words and music into a spiritual yet tangible reality, which is the goal of the artist and a power that I believe Johnny Cash possesses in some small way.

A piece of the soul has a hurt, not necessarily from something done to it or by it but a hurt nonetheless, something ever in need of satisfaction.

We left at midnight. Our journey had begun. But perhaps in our ardor we had forgotten that every epic begins, not with a single direct thrust at its final goal, but with a radical displacement: ships get wrecked, Troy gets burned, the hero finds himself lost.

I realize that many of my readers are suspicious of my data since I don't have conventional credentials behind my name, like Ph.D.. In fact, I would have a Ph.D. behind my name, but I don't want to let any of those free address labels they sent me in the mail without Ph.D. go to waste.

Yet, I could no more give up my idea
than Dante, facing three beasts on the hill
of his dark wood, could for that cause despair
of coming out of it. For Virgil said,
in Canto Two, line ninety-one of Dante's book,
he would do well to try another road;
more recently, or deeper in the past,
depending on one's view of history,
a motley fellowship was well advised
to take their course beneath--when cruel storms
forbade their way above--the mountain range.

You never know what to expect when you go to visit someone in a hospital, except that it will be sure to have that smell of overwhelming sterility that blissfully covers up the smell of death.

Yet not for sitting still
and wishing I could be
on both ends of the trail
will time defer to me.

Perhaps, however, slipperiness is not quite the right term for the quality of my mamillary bodies; it might be more accurate (as well as less obscene) to call it finickiness. It is not that I remember nothing at all, it is just that I tend to keep only those facts close to my neural bosom (as it were) that satisfy a peculiar requirement of being sufficiently ridiculous.

But let Truth discern, that can choose with indifference,
how distant my words are, for all their advances, how distant
reality is from the way I designed it.

Trembled by the muscles' clustered grip
On each shaft's head, the sprouted wood began
A bird wing's measured beat, as if to fan
The crisp air with the lifeblood's giddy clip,
Pulsing the measured rhythm's rise and dip,
And flapping the awkward scaffold of the man.

The child is ordinary, blotched and ugly.
She told him of the angel: he believed her,
Believes in visions: had one of his own.

The coincidence of my eye turning to a flock of birds just at the moment of their breaking free of a telephone wire is a coinciding of two ordinary events in such a way as to make contact with the extraordinary.

Unlike other creatures, angels will not be startled by sudden events. For as they rest in the embrace of "perpetual velocity," suddenness is the accustomed texture of their enviornment.

For mortals, fate comes in the form of death, and the paradox of death consists in this: when death comes, it disappears.

the battle had been fierce, the fish eight times
his size; all morning long he had pursued
the predator, and when the sun was high
had caught its tail, and climbed, forgetful of
safety, onto the beast’s back, holding fast
first with his fingers dug into the wet,
thrashing flesh, then by clasping with both hands
the back fin.

The glory of the physical is its particularity: the enemies of particularity want everything to be the same, and its perverters are the very images of nauseous anonymity.

The rest of the ride is a long and somnolent passage in which nothing happens, like a conceptual poem composed entirely of the results of parsing a manual of agricultural statistics (“Noun participle preposition article noun: numeral / Noun participle preposition article adjective noun: numeral,” etc.).

A preening of the cold black grass

I began to believe as I do now that Mt. Monadnock, which was in view from my hosts' backyard, is only the emergent forehead of a force that spreads far out underground, reaching up everywhere around the mountain to unite the land's inhabitants in a craggy fellowship.

That strange unrest that enters the nostrils right from the beginning of such a day, that tantalizing promise of something to come which starts in the excitement of a morning wind's whistpering, and crescendos so loudly that its mystical echoes can be traced on the moonlight of a new face, can also be, as it had for so long been for him, an inarticulate burden which drives one first to envy and finally to lonely despair.

This was about as funny as drowning in tar.