Every Good Morning

The outlying calm of most people is a happy occurrence but there are some shudders in the air too. Long lines at a local gun shop, a nasty argument I witnessed at a nearby grocery store over a bottle of wine and a driver’s license, the scapegoating of Chinese people as the ones to blame for this crisis (if this goes very badly, calling it the Chinese Virus has the […]

  Two days in since gym and work closings, since friends and family began to bunker up, and my body feels trapped inside itself, the energy churning and twitching out in irritability and an incapacity to go quiet, to reconcile with a prescribed stillness. My normal, acute restlessness is becoming more intense. What does one do with a body that creates more energy than can be used, that begins to […]

The Greeks and Shakespeare understood madness. Look at how Regan and Cornwall go to work on Gloucester’s eyes in III, vii of King Lear or how the maenads tear apart Pentheus in Euripides’ The Bacchae. Real madness is rage that does not diminish, one that keeps finding sources of more rage. It becomes an instrument of perpetual motion made of flesh and endlessly producing malice. It strikes out at anyone […]

I have been writing poetry for five years and have achieved mediocrity — if that — a knowledge I can think of wryly, having come to an age when it is more and more inconvenient to tell myself lies. As if I were in a sinking raft in treacherous waters, I start looking around to see what I can salvage, what will help me swim and ward off sharks. Pretending […]