Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

At mile marker six, I spot a raft hung up, abandoned. Its gray ends flapping against the current like a sweating dog's tongue. The wind is my only external companion as I try to remember how to use all the 24 gears at my disposal. Other cars, most loaded with rafts overtake me or meet me on the road, but the SUV with the two kids waving at me out their back window-- a mixture of awe and revery strikes me as entirely fitting. There's so many adjectives that I could use, and I could load a sentence down with metaphors yet only create something that while new, neither adequately describes this area or soars enough off the page to make these words more than merely evocative or imitative. Words, despite the pretense and lie of insisting they were the beginning are just our way of understanding, piercing our perception of reality and making it make sense. If our awakening consciousness was the "word," then the sentence, the poem-- was ...

About ten years ago, I came up with the following idea:  what if I wrote with my left hand?  I suspected my penmanship would improve over time as I became more versatile with it, but would what I wrote and how I wrote about subjects change? As a general rule, the left hand is connected to the right hemisphere of the brain and the right hand is connected to the left hemisphere of the brain.   Would this be noticeable in my writing?  I don't know.   So in April I begin this rather unscientific study by, most mornings, just simply writing in a big sketch book with my left hand. April 4th, 2011 The idea that my writing, my penmanship, will improve is a hopeful one. Another one is the idea that I'll tap some otherwise unused portion of my brain because my left hand is wired differently than my right. Science supports the idea of different hemispheres connected to left and right, but surely it it thinks much, much faster.  It might even be faster...

On Being a Writer                 I’m not sure why, but at an obviously weak moment when I was 17 years old I sat down at my desk and wrote a story.   And after no editing, revising, creative writing classes, or real encouragement from any real writers or teachers, no ambition, discipline or any reasonable degree of aptitude  announced –to myself mostly –and my best friend, “I want to be a writer.”                 I wish I’d never uttered that phrase.   Some ____ years later, I’m saddled with the weight of that phrase.   I had no idea what I was getting into.   I mean, this is America.  No one really writes anymore, or at least how I imagined writing to be.   Stephen King or Mary Higgins Clark don’t write; they work:  8 hours a day, complex formulas, books out on deadlines, b...

Finally putting this one up here. Far B3y0nd Th3s3 Pris0n Walls H3y, T3d! T3d! Wak3 up! D0 y0u h3ar that v0ic3? that dis3mb0di3d v0ic3? + Star3 0ut th3 wind0w. D0 y0u s33 th3 sm0k3 3nv3l0ping skylin3s? th3 fir3balls 3rupting fr0m high ris3s?       th3 str33t signs buri3d und3r rubbl3?       th3 airp0rts and r0adways b0ttl3d up with tanks? = Th0s3 ar3 f3nc3s and walls s3parating n3ighb0rs,            w0rds flashing fr0m signs, bursting fr0m radi0s,                             B00MING fr0m l0udsp3ak3rs. / D0 y0u s33 th3 primary c0l0rs paint3d 0n 3v3ry str33t c0rn3r? th3 g30m3tric patt3rns and shap3s us3d 2 3ntic3? th3 numb3rs in fr3qu3nci3s, angl3s in buildings, f0rmulas in tr33s? <  D0 y0u r3c0gniz3 this w0rld wh3n y0u 3m3rg3 fr0m y0ur cabin? D0...

Originally written shortly after the protest in 2003, an audio of this was broadcast on KUNM on the year anniversary of the war's inception. Hopefully, reasons for writing about this will become fewer and fewer. The Day the War Began.             Three deep and two dozen across, the Albuquerque police department blocked eastbound Central Avenue. They wore Army fatigues, gas masks and helmets, held black batons, yet had no badges or name tags that identified each as a person, an individual. Judging from the surrounding army of police cars and police horses, and the four cruisers that closed Central further to the east, their function was clear. Not only do the authorities want to silence dissent, but they want to keep those not politically vocal from becoming aware of dissent at all.             One of the cops held what looked like a toy water cannon and swung it back and fo...