1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.

2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

4. Go very light on the vices, such an carrying on in society—the social ramble ain’t restful.

5. Avoid running at all times.

6. Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.

- Originally published in the June 13, 1953 issue of Collier’s.

I used to wake and run with the moon
I lived like a rake and a young man
I covered my lovers with flowers and wounds
my laughter the devil would frighten
The sun she would come and beat me back down
but every cruel day had its nightfall
I’d welcome the stars with wine and guitars
full of fire and forgetful

My body was sharp the dark air clean
and outrage my joyful companion
whisperin’ women how sweet did they seem
kneelin’ for me to command them
And time was like water but I was the sea
I wouldn’t have noticed it passin’
except for the turnin’ of night into day
and the turnin’ of day into cursin’

You look at me now, and don’t think I don’t know
what all your eyes are a sayin’
Does he want us to believe these ravings and lies
they’re just tricks that his brains been a playin’?
A lover of women he can’t hardly stand
he trembles he’s bent and he’s broken
I’ve fallen it’s true but I say unto you
hold your tongues until after I’ve spoken

I was takin’ my pride in the pleasures I’d known
I laughed and thought I’d be forgiven
but my laughter turned ‘round eyes blazing and said
my friend, we’re holdin’ a wedding
I buried my face but it spoke once again
the night to the day we’re a bindin’
and now the dark air is like fire on my skin
and even the moonlight is blinding

I’m the candle at both ends
Evaporating wax in a room of friends
Blazing on through endless night
Burning out, a flash of light

“Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free …

Like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee”

- Leonard Cohen, “Bird on the Wire”

I met her as the sun was coming up
behind a shotgun shack in Taco Town
The party was winding down
She’d been up all night playing strip poker
She smelled like soft sex and hard liquor
Eyes bloodshot, she was hot
smokin’ like a cigarette
I wasn’t ready yet
But it was now or never…

So many in love
the lot of us a supercluster
of misfiring neurons
a never ending daisy chain
of misdirected emotion

He loves her
who loves him
who loves her
who loves him
who loves him
who loves her
as if circumference
divided by diameter

We, whipped forward
by the unfolding infinitesimal
chasing oblivion
wanton
with arms grasping
legs spread
cocks thrusting
our souls awash in a ceaseless
tide of fantasy
and reality
love and like
lust and indifference
sex and rejection

Certainty masquerades as confusion
reflecting in reverse
on the shimmering
saline-flooded irises of the enamored
Pheromones dangling in air
like the fine mist of the hurricane’s eye
like microscopic magic 8 balls…

Signs point to yes
Reply hazy, try again
My sources say no
And down the whirlpool we go

Rainwanderer of lost nights
Stumbling through distressed doorways
up spiral staircases to fast-fading
crescent-moonlit rooftop epiphanies
Meandering hushed through cobblestone alleys
and ancient graveyards
her brown hair cascading down my shoulder
I lift a kiss in the mist
before pausing to read the epitaphs
Cat’s eyes pierce the dark
bodyless, suspended
We move on
under the transient light of the black-iron streetlamps
time elastic, unbound

Somewhere off King Street
golden pints of beer in hand
we slip out of consciousness on a rusted park bench
down the hourglass and into strange dreams
Suit jackets, horse trailers
eggs flying through air
breaking on our unsuspecting backs

The Battery is silent at 4 a.m.
Save for the lapping water
The creak of the bench swing
The pop and hiss of a match
Wisps of smoke curling in the Atlantic breeze

I feel the stud on her tongue as our
still-teenaged lips press together
urgent, overpromising
thinking nothing of what comes next
We stand, arm in arm, atop the concrete parking deck
staring hopeful for a moment into the blazing low-country sunrise

In an unfamiliar dorm room
I sit awake, her head heavy on my chest,
rising and falling with my every breath
In a few hours she’ll be on a plane back to Portland

We are fleeting
Spatio-temporal beings
locked in our own mystery
Beams of light that intersect but once

Picking azaleas at midnight for Cherie
French exchange student
who will soon wander silent across the
ghostly lawn, her delicate shadow caressing pink-hued
centuries-old pillars
She whispers expressionless in the dark
I hand her a blossom
She is innocence
pale skin shimmering porcelain in the Charleston moonlight
Harbor breeze rustles live oaks, her hair
blonde wisps cascading from braided flower-child halo
Now smiling softly, she whispers eccentricities
of dear, kindred Fred Schneider
and calls Lindsey Buckingham “genius”
She is Mercury 210