Though it changes appearance and even direction there is, in the end, one road and that is Love, paved through with kindness, peace and mercy. This is the road that leads us to God, and to each other.

These performers: the pay is not spectacular so how can that be what keeps them doing this? Or is it merely the sex? No, a man can easily have sex with another man in a variety of ways and places. If that’s what he wants. But there is some deep need to engage in this emotionally exhausting and psychologically risky deed of fucking and being fucked publicly, letting someone else see your strive naked with yourself, with another human being. Offer up to the public the most private deed you can do making fantasies real.

I really want to be a poet
I want to be a drunk ass bitch
I wasn’t to sit around butt fucking naked
Smoking poetry and reading cigarettes
Just like I am now
I really want to always
Always be like I am right now
And change forever
And everything I’m saying makes sense
Then I’m doing it wrong
Cause no one around here makes any sense
And if I’m clinging to things
I’ve been clinging too long
I really want to take all of my clothes off’
And roll around like a ball of dirt
I really want to shock the shit out of you
You never needed that shit anyway
And all I needed….
All I needed….
I am afraid that God gave me everything I needed.
And doesn’t
want me jingly jangling about
with anything I don’t

The long look is the one that serves the public best.

We are in this predicament called life together... we have no choice but to come to the help of the fallen.... ALL the fallen.-- June Calwood






To me every writer is a journalist, to write is to tell the truth, to give it the very long and examined look. Fiction provides the longest look. That is the power of the storyteller. Every storyteller is a poet. There is no poet who doesn't have the right to escape the lightning rod, and if we haven't jarred someone then we haven't done our jobs.

There’s not going to be a soul to thank me for these dreams--I’ve kept
I did not make them up
they fly on in
the din of weeping princesses fills this tenement
the lament of the drunk outside
becoems mine
whisky and wine
while I sit--while I lay on my back
naked--tracing shadows alone’
four in the morn--and light another
cigarette

ah--forget it!
you think the writing life is easy
how’s it easy?
No validation
this permanent vacation from the world
anyone else knows

Andn ow again--I know love--which is to say I get laid
and curl up in the widnow
hands wrapped aroudn ankles--to watch the rain roll
down on Reilly Street
I see one man below
--walking slow--to spite the storm
I learn
I learn the secret--life is lonely
No--only some of the time

When you came over the loneliness melted away
you said--you said putting your hand to my cheek--
give me your lonely--your tired--your poor!
thrust them into the door!
And in the dark I thrust them all night
My God! The door was so tight!
I imagine that a world was made in that explosion
I can’t imagine how you held me, my body tossing
the next morning your hand touching--
that spot--that bone--that place on my hip--
your arm tossed over me
your breast there to feed me.

And I thought and I thought
now there’s nothing else
Now--
I am really naked
and she understands me

And the bus rolls below on Reilly Street.