deeper embarrassment fate took motherly dumpy never a gleam of sympathy relinquish thimble far from yet friday salt fish rain at Villette son of my dear   my plain prose to bear and hear cannot pay you in affection

to me once reasons why you never did his face is enough punched or foolish not questions answer to an unasked question use up the dream paper thin facts and artifacts not water hardly dead no grave, no urn a small boast

unwashed and short hospital stay worried friends

“Life is painful, nasty and short – in my case it has only been painful and nasty,”  Djuna Barnes 1978-1981 by Hank O’Neal The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katherine Smyth Normandy Stories by Guy de Maupassant Molloy by Samuel Beckett Herman Melville by(…)

travel-sized toiletries tubes and jar-lettes iron shirts taut point isn’t always restaurants on rue je ne sais quoi blustery clumps wasn’t reading, she wasn’t listening butter over truth is terrible Athena out of Zeus’s in itself is  

the villages of fifty years ago interest has disappeared possibly, grandmother   by fitting thoughts to be sure   unsightly necessaries   a time, a key fiddles and all every note as if   round like a turnstile vulgar sweaters make an honest waistcoat an expression of great sin   beginning with six hands down(…)

While taking a shortcut at dusk across Central Park, the day darkened with a snap of earth’s rotating fingers. We’d just retarded our clocks back to standard time, and here we were once more, in the dark at 5 in the afternoon . The many and varied park trees along the sloping hills were ablaze(…)