Monday, September 19, 2016

me in the studio


when you die


WHEN YOU DIE, and youre wandering through the bardos, youll be terrorized by various demons. Youll be very very afraid. But the important thing to remember is that, however terrifying the demons seem to be, theyre not real and they cant hurt you. Remember that. Just keep going. Theyre not real and they cant hurt you.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

twig


lycan


indestructible dog toy




MARY says this new indestructible dog toy, for once, is actually indestructible. So far, at least, her dogs have not succeeded in destroying it.

i am a bunny



THERES A BOOK called I AM A BUNNY. Its about this bunny named Nicholas who lives in a HOLLOW TREE, and when you turn the pages he hops from season to season.

the wisdom of the body


BOTH BUDDHA and Jesus showed us that the surest way to propagate wisdom is to embody it. God embodied in human form, in the case of Christianity. And in the case of Buddhism, realizing through contemplation and meditation that the ultimate seat of intelligence is not some lofty conceptual fabrication.

very moist lichen


Sunday, May 22, 2016

sisters on the run


INTRIGUED by a small headline in the state roundup section of the newspaper this morning — Sisters arrested for stealing from casino. What a delicious little Louisiana story, I thought to myself, grabbing my cup of coffee and sitting down to read more. Nuns stealing from a casino! I do love a good nun story. Then when I read the article, turns out the sisters weren't nuns. They were just sisters.

indestructible


MARY says this new indestructible dog toy, for once, is actually indestructible. So far, at least, her dogs have not succeeded in destroying it. Which reminds me of my own indestructible toy I played with when I was a young boy. Fast-forward forty years — I can pull it down from the closet upstairs and play with it just like I used to. One of those chunky plastic oblong stackt cubes games where you have to shuttle a small white ball from one end of the oblong to the other with a TWIST of the yellow KNOB, a PIVOT of the green DIAL and an in-and-out SLIDE of the red LEVER, or maybe it was blue. Forty years of use, and it still works just the same. When it turns sixty it'll still be working. So far — indestructible. Not many toys you can say THAT about. To me that’s what a good poem is: an indestructible dog toy. You can use it over & over but you can never use it up.

Friday, April 29, 2016

picking up the pieces


ONE OF MY PATIENTS is a young man, twenty years old, who sustained a brain injury last year after shooting himself in the head. He cant remember how it happened, which is commonly the case with injuries of this magnitude. Theres often a chunk of memory from the days or hours leading up to the injury thats lost, as well as a period of time after the injury during which the person cannot remember any details. Sometimes the amnesia goes back for months, often erasing major events such as getting married, the loss of a family member or having children. In this case, he can't recall what led him to shoot himself, so it has remained somewhat of a mystery.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Friday, April 22, 2016

rose hill

BEFRIENDED a roadrunner on my bike ride up Rose Hill this morning. This is not a dream. I actually met a roadrunner. Ok, maybe befriended is too strong a word, but we definitely had a moment together.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

author note


STEPHEN KING likens the job of a writer to that of an archaeologist. He’s come to the conclusion, after writing the books he’s written, that writers don’t make up stories as much as they unbury them:

Thursday, March 10, 2016

visitation

A CROW cawed. Were haunted by crows, I thought. But the thought escaped me before I finished thinking it. Then the crow left.

Friday, January 8, 2016

the sunrise


THE SUNRISE was pink glaze scraped across lavender gingerbread, a nuclear orange jellybean playing peek-a-boo through the treeline. It was rippling lavender bayou water mirroring the sky’s pink sugar. It was a duo of bluejays reconnoitering overhead, squawking like pterodactyls.