The way a cloud breaks, after wicking water from the sky for several days of a moon’s turn inward, and a droplet of water taps a leaf on its way to the ground, and says, I have heard you, is the way that we are blessed: with premonitions of what has already been given. My heart is Bell’s Inequality. On one side there is meaning and on the other side there is only its absence. […]
My short story “Stella’s Radio” was published this week by Delay Fiction. It’s a story about love and connection, about the awkwardness that sometimes attends the becoming of who we truly are, and about the way life’s circumstances can propel us into the open, out from the cover of normalcy and safety and little dreams. I didn’t know these things when I sat down to write it. A story begins with some little nudge of […]
I finished my first Nabokov yesterday. Lolita. I thought it was shockingly good—delicate, grimy and translucent all at once—though I’m acutely aware I will need to read it another time or two if I wish to speak intelligently about it. As I sit here and wonder how to take the seething swarm inside of me and capture it somehow on the page, I’m realizing it’s an interesting opportunity to continue the vein I began in […]
What do you think the future will be like, Hafiz? I was thinking about fusion-powered hovercrafts and molecular sequencing technologies that could produce cheeseburgers from a teaspoon of good dirt. Redrawn political borders, bullet trains that crossed the ocean, and ways to download skills and information directly into your brain. I was thinking about teleportation and glass condominiums floating in the clouds. Something you drank that allowed your body to look whatever age you desired. […]
What I told Hafiz when I opened the bedroom door and entered the main living area after my daily five or so minutes of high-intensity, mid-morning meditation on the illumined heart of being, was that I was finally prepared to commit myself to crossing the Sea of Meaninglessness– to enduring the winds of fate, the firecracker heavens, and whatever battering-about goes on out there– to gritting my teeth at the sight of hungry kraken and […]
On that summer day, that I still remember… doorways beckoned from every direction, hovering near stacked horizons as if the Beloved had hung wreaths of heat and time along our world’s borders. There were voices you could see occasionally, ribbons of them wafting up from the ends to mix with the sky like jugs of clear sap poured into whiskey, swirling and touching noses and everything at once… merging. And the air, too. The air….! […]
I’m not so naive as to think I fully understand my own beliefs and feelings, nor to assume they form an exactly rational system when laid bare by attempts at explanation. But in making the effort, I discover things– inconsistencies in thought, many of them delightful(!); powerful feelings that cannot be explained, yet explain much; ineffable inner realms I realize are part and parcel to who I am; or the existence of ideas operating one […]
Hafiz came along and asked what I was doing up there in that tree with soot all over my face and my hair in greasy knots, my feet scratched, blistered and bleeding, my wick burned down to the sputtering last, my eyes wild and leering, and talking to myself in curses and run-ons about trying one last time to impregnate the sky with the signal flare seed of the holy calvary I required. The snarling, yipping […]
I Jesus is my breath. He is the blood in my veins, the white of my bones, and the thoughts of my heart. He is the stones in the ground, the birds in the field, and the wood drifting down the river. Behind the wincing in thieves, the sighs of politicians, and the crackling static of the sherriff’s radio when no one is near, you will find him. He is the root, the marrow, the […]
This is part 3 of a short fictional series. So far the posts are all in order… So far… * * * * * They’d told me about the wire probably six months ago. The jumper wire. How it grew within us from the anode to the cathode like a clever root of ivy. The fuse of a self. A short circuit. It was a strange trick: cutting eternity out of the equation. Without access […]
Embracing Forever 