Fool me. I am more than willing. Think me a fool. I am. Be the smart one, the intelligent one, the one who knows. Hold the clear advantage. Then, with your startling brilliance, use me to advance yourself, and manipulate me to accomplish your lofty aims and goals. When you are done, cast me aside, the dry husk of your ambition. How cold, your gravestone. How bitter and lonely, your […]
The first warm weather, and suddenly the street is full of people who have been in hiding for the last five months, blinking, stretching, squinting, strolling, looking like pale ghosts. Who are these two children peddling by, and why have I never seen them before? Where do they live? I smile. My smile isn’t returned. Instead they stare. And I suppose to them I must look like a hermit down […]
Yesterday morning, the snow around North Falls posed no problem, but the ice formed by traffic on the hiking paths most certainly did. And so, after a bit of skating, we got back into the car and drove on to South Falls. Conditions there were much better. A little less altitude and a little more sun made all the difference. The paths were mostly bare. We had no trouble walking […]
Another morning. You open your closet. Which thoughts will you wear? — when, behold, you have outgrown them all. Stardust on Rye There are days when you are certain a simple glass of water and sunlight will do, when no other nourishment is necessary, when hunger is your best companion. Around noon, you think briefly about sitting down to a great cosmic sandwich, stardust on rye, but soon enough […]
I am as old now as I was when I was a child in my first pair of overalls, standing at the edge of the garden with my face near a flower. I even wear the same smile, a smile a bee might wear if he suddenly discovered he was human. And I am as old as the bee. I am as old now as I was when the fall […]
From a note written April 15, 2009: The other evening, while eating leftovers, I told my son that we should get rid of his cat and have a pet tarantula instead. I said we could keep it in a terrarium, and in the terrarium we could create a desert scene with dry sand and a narrow highway running through it — in honor of Bob Dylan, Highway 61. Somewhere along […]
This bright frosty morning, the world smells like a million lonely breakfasts. “November Postcard” Recently Banned Literature, November 16, 2008 Not a Romance, 1974 When I was hanging around at the college, there was a girl with very long hair and pale white skin. We met in passing many times, but we never spoke. She was beautiful in a simple way, like clean sheets drying on a clothesline beside […]
They approached him as if his mind were a cactus, when it was really a colorful old bus on its way through the desert. “A Sad Mistake” Songs and Letters, January 7, 2008 Night I picture a man with a typewriter in his lap, sitting on an old wooden chair beside a rusted mailbox, a field of wildflowers behind him. There is paper in the typewriter. Looking down from […]
For the first time in ages, I wound my father’s wristwatch, which I keep on my work table next to his brother’s old briar pipe. The trusty Hamilton started ticking immediately. The tiny secondhand, set in a circle built into the face where the 6 should be, started making its way around. Now, several hours later, I see the watch is still running — as am I, apparently, though I […]
2017
Canvas 1,037 — September 25, 2017
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William Michaelian 