I didn’t learn to type in school. With the help of a book from the public library, I taught myself when I was in my early thirties. Prior to that, I used the time-honored hunt-and-peck system. I’m a fair typist, not a good one. I can type these lines without looking at the keys. But if I need to incorporate numbers, I have to look down. Once many years ago, […]
you pause and listen as my pen strikes out each and every line until it comes to the place where your face says love Recently Banned Literature, September 11, 2015 . [ 1208 ]
Pen and claw — old friends scratching out their autobiographies. August 15, 2021 . You Are Here As intimate as you are with yourself as imagined by others, imagine imagining yourself as you are, when imagination itself imagines changing course — that is, imagine a river, imagining an ocean, imagining an imagined star — as intimate, as you imagine, you are. Somewhere, there is a familiar old coat on a […]
To spend a lifetime moving words around, only to find, in the end, that they have moved themselves back again, is one more reason for gratitude. . Last Leaf Wanting Last leaf wanting of a letter that you wrote, and I, a tree, in a dream, unclothed, beside a street, lined with honeycomb. Recently Banned Literature, August 30, 2015 . [ 1193 ]
I am on my feet; the laptop is resting on four sleeved volumes — two containing the work of Nora Zeale Hurston, and the others, nine novels from the Harlem Renaissance. The left side of the computer is above and partly hides my old Royal typewriter. To the right, The Life of Langston Hughes. Behind them, Plutarch’s Lives. Behind them, the complete writings of Robert Browning. And behind all that, […]
This morning I saw a hairy spider crawling on the edge of the counter in the bathroom. It was in no hurry. I found the small plastic jar we keep for such situations, guided him into it, covered the top, then released our surprised friend outside, where he trundled off through some dry moss. I try not to sit very often or for very long. I feel better when I […]
After writing for so many years, after devoting so many pages to pixel and print, it’s only right to ask myself what, or how much, I might be keeping hidden — not from those who are kind enough to read them, but from the one sitting here, tapping away at his keyboard. It’s not simply a matter of confession. Even if I were to divulge the most private and personal […]
A little before four this morning, it was cloudy with only one star briefly visible; then, a few minutes later, between the birches and firs, through a break in the clouds just above the neighbor’s second-story roof, we caught a sustained glimpse of the full lunar eclipse, as the shadow passed and the moon began to emerge. Now there is a robin singing from the chimney-top. It comes to mind […]
somewhere in this scroll / lies / the truth / I know March 10, 2021 . Belated Birthday Haiku Old cat warm against a sunshine wall — Kerouac licks his aching paw. Poems, Slightly Used, March 14, 2010 . [ 1044 ]
Sometimes, as I sit here writing in the dark, I feel as if my hands belong to someone else working just beyond the veil — a parallel realm in which objects roam free of any given meaning, and the sound of a passing train — I hear it now — is that someone’s remembered childhood. “Arrival” Poems, Slightly Used, February 18, 2010 . Revival . . . and now / […]
William Michaelian 