“The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. . . . I put down mountain, then I'd go, no—valley. That's better.”

“A ‘truth’ detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.”

Our life stories are scary and droll,
Like masks children wear on Halloween
As they go from door to door

I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you

In my spiderweb
You got caught,
My precious.

Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

Bald man smoking in bed,
Naked lightbulb over his head,
The shadow of his cigar 

 

Grandpa loved crawling
Under the skirts of his mother’s friends
As they sat on the porch

Sat up
Like a firecracker
In bed,

The name of a girl I once loved
Flew off the tip of my tongue
In the street today,

You’ve been paying visits
To that hunchbacked tailor
In his long-torn-down shop,

Dine in style tonight
With your misery, Adele.
Put on your silver wig

The long day has ended in which so much
And so little had happened.
Great hopes were dashed,

Bad luck, my very own, sit down and listen to me:
You make yourself scarce for months at the time
Making preparations for some new calamity,

I’m the uncrowned king of the insomniacs
Who still fights his ghosts with a sword,
A student of ceilings and closed doors

It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store—
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief

That was the year the Nazis marched into Vienna,
Superman made his debut in Action Comics,
Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries,

This couple strolling arm in arm
Must be figments of someone's revery.
They stop often to linger over a kiss,

That night they all gathered on the highest tower:
Astronomers, mathematicians and one magi from Syria
To read in the stars the glory of the King of Kings,

The Eskimos were ravaging Peru.
Grandfather fought the Hittites.
Mother sold firecrackers to the Bedouins.

What you know, O fool, no one else does.
And what no one else knows,
I am not equal to.

It’s raining, it’s pouring,
And your heart is sad,
But you’re not about to say it.

 Stale hunk
Left for us
On a plate

Like a busy street scene
Reflected in a butcher’s window:
Trimmed head of a large pig

For asking, why is there something
Rather than nothing?
The schoolmaster sends the little punk

No one has seen me today 
as I too have seen 
no one 
not even myself