May 2013
6 posts
1 tag
30th & Dreaming
The people;
they are walking
en masse
down
Market Street.
And there are rowers
in the
Schuylkill
under light rain,
then heavy rain.
It is humid
and the buses are
pulling away.
And the girls,
the girls are fine
to look
at
as they pop
their umbrellas
open like
Bubblegum
above their
heads,
some with
men
most without.
As the
traffic on
76
merges like
a hive of bees
I...
In the Afternoon
“I don’t know where this feeling comes from. It rushes at me all at once and makes me feel smaller than loneliness, my organs collapsing into themselves in pain. It is the most ashamed I ever am. Shriveled up. And not shriveled up into something sweet like a raisin but something sad like the end of a mushroom cloud.”
2 tags
Beaujolais on Easter
Beaujolais on Easter
I took the wine to the window and looked out at the empty town. There were only a few cars parked in the street and the storefronts were all shuttered as if a great storm was coming and everybody had evacuated. I liked when it was quiet like that. Hardly anything moved and I poured a glass of easy-drinking Beaujolais, feeling the soft humid rain drizzling...
Pour It Quietly While the Bees Smack Against the...
Drinking
alone is
meditation;
ignorist asked: I hope that your life is awesome.
“We spent time talking about all the things we would do. And then we never did them—that was the ultimate sadness.”
April 2013
4 posts
2 tags
Something to Hold On To
“Remember when we drove through the banana fields? You were close enough, you figured, and I watched your balled up fists reaching out of the Jeep. Then you opened your hands for them and instead grasped hot air. You cried and I snapped a big bunch off and handed you two. Up past the plantation we stopped and you looked up into the Golani sun as if you had soap in your eyes, double-fisting green...
2 tags
A Morning at Miquon Station
And then came the hard pellets of freezing rain. They cracked open on jackets like cold little asteroids and a flat gray sky gathered toward Manayunk and then Philadelphia. There was forest on either side of the tracks and fog hung in low between them so that you couldn’t see the trains coming until the last minute, their lights like Anglerfish coming through the dark...
manateesandmermaids asked: I've already left you a rather hero-worshipping-type ask before, but I simply wanted to remind you that your writing is phenomenal. I fall in love with words rather easily, but your words are some of my current favorites. And I'm presently also slightly worshiping Kerouac and Salinger, so this is serious.
I Know You're Inside Even Though It's Beautiful...
I know, I’m here for you.
http://acceptlossforever.tumblr.com/ask
March 2013
9 posts
2 tags
The Conversation is Over
“You know that you are such a child.”
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
“I’ll talk to you however I want to.”
“Just because you’ve had some wine doesn’t mean you can talk to me like that.”
“It’s shitty wine anyway.”
“Hey, you bought it for me.”
“Yes, I bought it for you.”
“Even though you didn’t like the brand?”
“Yes. Isn’t that what people who are in love are supposed to do?”
“I am not in love with...
2 tags
Yuma
Colorful things in the sky were invading Yuma. As the train inched up along the side of South Gila Street, I saw the hot air balloons scattered above the desert like great big teardrops and didn’t know how to feel. We had until midnight until the train left again. Once off the train, I headed into City Hall where all of the people were. There was jazz, food, and strangers bustling...
todayiwillwrite asked: Favorite book and author, and why.
lxxepicxxl asked: Top three writing inspirations?
Anonymous asked: Are you in a frat?
A Late-Night Talk
http://acceptlossforever.tumblr.com/ask
2 tags
I didn’t know what it felt like to be a man until I met Florence. Up to that point, women confused me and I reacted coldly to them because I couldn’t make sense of what it is they wanted from me. I tried, I really did. I adjusted, said I was sorry all the time. They had to know they were loved, and if I had written about them then they knew they were loved immensely. But I wrote about all of them,...
2 tags
On a Beach, Thinking of Everything
There was nothing to compare between the temperature of American beaches and the temperature of that beach on Kiryat Yam. I had never been in water as warm as that. At the edge, it was clear and the jellyfish, colorless, wiggled aimlessly into the bowl of the Mediterranean toward Cyprus. On the left, in the distance, a part of another town stuck out into the water. The houses were...
Anonymous asked: I'd like to know you
February 2013
22 posts
If any of you ever take my work, black it all out except for a few choice words, and make a poem or something out of it like those stupid newspaper black-outs, I will literally haunt you from the grave and/or kill you while I’m living.
2 tags
We're Gonna Get on the Kiss-Cam
“I’ll have good, clean hands one day momma.”
And then, it happened. Exploded man. Exploded woman. Even the scars on my hands. All blown up on tens of millions of colored shards in the ballpark. The big lights were on and the big bugs flew toward them, dying at arrival, dropping into unsuspecting cups of beer. I ran my finger lightly across her jaw to turn her to me, moving toward her, the lips...
Anonymous asked: Is your writing based on your life events?
2 tags
Boxer
She walks into the ring, a good and inspired energy. Tapes the gloves on. Digs her shoes into the canvas. A strip of light comes through the window of a warehouse in Philadelphia. Traveling, she has seen the language and ability that preserves culture. Like bullfighting in Spain, and hockey in Montreal City, and soccer everywhere else, knowing that each of them carries a language of their own....
On the train, I had a coffee and a little snack of crackers with cheese. Every half hour or so, I’d get up from my seat and go to the bathroom where I swallowed down mini bottles of wine and then marched back out to my seat, feeling good and able to enjoy the sunset slightly numb. We were somewhere, churning through Texas. Behind the crops, the sun was going down red and defeated and...
“The thing about people is that they chip away at me. Even the good ones.”
manateesandmermaids asked: I don't want this to be one of those pretentious compliments where people say, "You write very well, but I am also rather beautiful," though I fear it's going to turn out that way. At any rate, you should probably know that I am currently running a fever and I really need to go get up and take some medicine but I can't because I'm simply too busy reading your work....
2 tags
Day Drink at Girard and Second Streets
“You have a girl?” she asked.
I looked in my wallet for a picture of Elle. None to be found.
“She won’t return my calls,” I folded up the wallet.
“Does she have a big nose?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I knew she would. You like those big noses.”
She laughed and her nose scrunched up at the top like it did, ass...
1 tag
Alone
And, most often, it is the very small things that do it for me in solitude.
A small ache A single word The last bit of a beer
I am letting the big picture rush by me
I am not full of ideas like that. I enjoy silence, a still hum, a gushing torrent of quiet like the muted picture of waterfalls on the television in my apartment. It is better than the parties that woud never have me the women who...
2 tags
Beaupré
It is something that we do, a puzzle unto the Earth. On the rooftops drinking beer, sequestered, under purple sky that after a few bottles gets you thinking that it is just the long, eternal bruise of god after a hard day at work. Out across the town there are playgrounds and then a gas station where I could see long, white propane tanks behind cages in the night, right up...
neverendinghope1 asked: What inspires you?
I left her there, something of a stranger. And the red heels were on the bed with the straps loose. When she placed them together, they looked like collapsing lungs.
Ask
Send me your vibes, universe.
http://acceptlossforever.tumblr.com/ask
7 Beers Ago
I was on my eighth. A good, cold number 8. Some golden voice on the radio tells me she was born in the wrong era; she is the old beauty, the old soul. After awhile, I tossed in bed. The heater made me sweat, and I listened to the report of her divorce. 2 years was all it lasted and all the averages said it would last. “It’s amicable and mutual”. She sang then, on the radio, dropping out with the...
Sometimes, love was like being lost on the highway and still driving as if you knew what you were doing.
Women, I loved you all. And I have loved each of you with my entire soul and not just the scraps of it no matter how long we were involved. You should know this is important. Some of you simply take up more space in my memory. If it was for seconds on the subway, I felt an ache that we would never see each other again. Or, if it was for years, well then you know the story of us and how it ended or...
“Writers write about failed loves for a while; it makes for good reading. But...”
– Anonymous (via gmarengo)
Nailed it.
I write in the same way I eat my steaks: cutting the fat off to get to what I am really aiming for.
“Love is simply war dressed up much prettier.”
Writing is the second sex.
January 2013
19 posts
Relationships
The only thing I have ever gotten out of a relationship was solid, honest writing. What I have never gotten out of a relationship was an actual relationship. Every woman has seemingly been a muse and a muse alone and I am just now making this distinction. Do not come near me. This will only hurt.
2 tags
Untitled
And so, the violent Oakland morning under which everything burned and burned red and orange, seizing peoples’ breaths between hollers of mid-west vernacular, calmly swept up the spick-and-span sky, beige and baby blue roofs sitting centered in soap-white window frames, raw, beat and throbbing, paint flaking from the bright white sun scorching from a puffless nest above; the college grounds...
2 tags
Cake
As I drove down the Burnt House Road with Ann, the radio started to fuzz out. I struck it a couple of times with my hand. “When are you going to replace that thing?” she said. “When we have the money,” I told her. This was something I said often and it was often never realized. People who had money never had to say such things. We were driving on the way to Jane’s house—a college...
mort0n asked: Your writing intrigues me, and it seems we share somewhat of a love for Philadelphia. Tell us about yourself?
2 tags
Fixed
I thought about that fine, warm ass. How it fit like Latin America and Africa as we slept. There are all these people with money and we just didn’t have any. We just had sleeping and fucking and drinking and smoking. Eating, but not very good eating. Even the fucking was lousy from time to time. The blinds were shut. We each had our sides of the bed and it was hard for me to sleep and I thought...
2 tags
Tangerine
Mike goes, “See that girl behind the counter?” He waves a french fry in her direction. She’s small and pretty and wearing a tangerine top. Mike has grease on his fingers and that shit-grin he gets when the whiskey starts to sit in his belly. “Yeah,” I go. “I see her.” I raise my pitcher of beer and drink again. We each have pitchers. It’s the kind of night for things like that. “Well?” Mike...
1 tag
Forgetting
When I lost you I wrote about you and you didn’t come back to me.
Now how could I have thought that would ever work?
When the magazine accepted the first of my works, they were all about you and you didn’t come back to me.
Now how could I have thought that would ever work?
When I sat and could not write anything more about you I knew you were never coming back.
This worked...
acceptlossforever:
Writing is better when the writer is in love or otherwise falling out of it.
