Would you sell your soul to this guy?

Viktor Mirosiichenko of Kontora loan company

Kontora loan company in Riga, Latvia is giving loans to people willing to pledge their souls as collateral.   Seriously.  200 Latvians have already signed contracts pledging thei… Read full post »

What is inarticulable remains so.

Now I am told things differently
and everything speaks of you.
I have learned a new tongue
and tell you grief.

Yes, everything speaks of you,
but not for you -
sanctimonious Sunday gossip,
it is not to be trusted.

But under my own breath, hidden
and bereft of formal ins… Read full post »

Aunt Sister Mary William scared me.  She was the oldest of ten children and helped to raise my father before she entered the convent, I suspect to escape a small house filled with nine younger siblings.  She was stern and didn't suffer fools gladly, or at all.  She was interesting.&nbs… Read full post »

I was fifteen and just settling into my desk in Latin class, setting out my textbook and three-ring binder, checking out who else was there, looking up at the clock above the door with the wooden sign beneath it that said TEMPUS FUGIT and searching for my pen when the first… Read full post »

The problem was that everything required some tremendous leap. 

Even telling the story of your life meant balancing precariously on

the slippery rocks of meaning and language in the muddy and

fast-moving river of intention.  Leaps of faith, leaps of reason, leaps

of abandon - altogether… Read full post »

I am saved by the strong love felt for things familiar:
the fine ceiling crack, the tongue-welcoming chipped cup.

Fixing breakfast,  (O! graced!)  making the bed,
even the simplest act requires heavenly direction.

How else to account for the beauty of a peach
left three days to ripen on t… Read full post »

When I was a kid my mother had me convinced she knew just about everything and could do anything.  Or if she couldn't do it, she could make someone else do it.  I saw it with my own eyes.

She'd make a fist with a raised middle finger knuckle and… Read full post »

Sitting at a table in the coffee shop he called her peripatetic. That "ick" ending made it sound like a medical condition, like maybe something was wrong with her. She wasn't really a gypsy; she just moved around too much and long enough to learn the shortest distance between two points… Read full post »

After loss comes a having;

it goes beyond the whipsaw-ways of want

and settles into the seriousness of smiles.

If you live you learn to appreciate the joke, 

the way blades of grass rip into your skin.

You learn what antecedes the scar.

Not with a bandage, but badinage,

we… Read full post »

Today I read a post by  Scott Rosenberg. It's about the ten year anniversary of Salon's IPO and other things.  He remarks upon creating and developing Open Salon, and he mentions a book he wrote about blogging called Say Everything. (Interesting video there.)

It got me thinking.  Back… Read full post »

Someone I know wants me to write a story with action.  He says the problem with my writing is there's not enough action.  I know what he means.  Action is tricky for me; it's so easy to get sidetracked.  Sometimes something starts out as action and suddenly takes a right turn… Read full post »

Know that morning was not always

rosy-fingered; days if the sky resembled a hand at all

it was stretched taut with the effort to clutch

what we were sailing toward.

Home, I think.

There were even days that passed unpreserved, 

when nothing happened and I was not brave,

not… Read full post »

Standing on the curb next to Stan, she waited for the light to change.  She was warm in her turtleneck but wore it despite the June weather, to hide the bruises on her arms and neck.  She had only a vague understanding of how she'd gotten where she was: standing next… Read full post »

Original thoughts aren't thick on the ground and yet it's always what they ask for: "in your own words."  But my words are everybody else's words. They become mine because I know them, not because I own them.  I'm not attached to them.  (I'd like the rights to the word "I",… Read full post »

In high school my little sisters were friends with an exchange student from Norway.  One day they were all on the highway heading to some local place of interest when their friend got very excited and asked them to please pull over.  She leapt out of the car and started taking… Read full post »

My siblings and I fantasized about our parents getting a divorce.  Anything for a little peace, for not having to walk around on eggshells, for not having to worry about when the next tremor would turn into a full-blown quake.  The instability and tension invited cataclysm. 

Walking h… Read full post »

In making your life a quiet place to die
you are never attendant to the moment:

            in a placid pool         

                &nb… Read full post »

I was raised Catholic.  Pretty darn Catholic.  I have fifty-two first cousins on my father's side.  I had an aunt who was a nun and my father was a Jesuit seminarian. 

My mother converted to Catholicism when she was thirteen.  She was converting from heathenism or perhaps m… Read full post »

A Dutch company has created a font that uses up to 20% less ink.  It uses less ink because it looks like this:

But in a regular font size that theater marquee look is not distinguishable.  I rather like the theater marquee look.  It would definitely work for certain projects.&n… Read full post »

 A few years ago a friend directed me to this video.  I was amused.  But then it became a kind of verbal talisman for me.   Say, for instance,  I'm dwelling on sad thoughts I still have about my little sister who died young after great pain and trouble. … Read full post »

 (a big-time-belated response to Feathered Thing's Poetry Open Call)

AN ADDRESS TO THE VACATIONERS AT CAPE LOOKOUT

The whole weight of the ocean smashes on rock;
the sun hounds the night; gulls ravel the edge.
Here it is better to allow for what happens, all of it --
the part assumed, the lie that… Read full post »

I saw my doctor today and as he scribbled some prescriptions he mentioned that sometimes the medications could intensify depressive emotions to which I replied "Don't worry, I'm pretty sure I'm at my saturation levels for anxiety and depression."  Then I assured him that should I feel the need f… Read full post »

I can't sleep, my brain is whirring and clopping like a Rube Goldberg machine, many elaborate machinations to make some ordinary thing occur.  The ghosts of posts I've read are tripping the wires.  It's all about language, I think, and belief. For instance, I was thinking how consonants and… Read full post »

I called the chat-line:

talk dirty to me I begged.

He said mud, dust, grime.