Nobody Likes Children, Your Mother

You Try Every Trick In The Book To Keep Her. You Write Her Letters. You Quote Neruda. You Cancel Your Facebook. You Give Her The Passwords To All Your E-mail Accounts. Because You Know In Your Lying Cheater’s Heart That Sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

Used To Be In The Old Days, Only The Pulp Writers Wrote Like Machines. Now Everybody Is Expected To Be Literary John Henrys. So In That Context Someone Like Me Is An Anomaly.

To An Outsider, I Just Seem Like A List Of Accomplishments. To Me, All There Is Is How Often I Fail.

New Jersey Is To New York What Santo Domingo Is To The United States. I Always Felt That Those Two Landscapes, Not Only Just The Landscapes Themselves But Their Relationships To What We Would Call 'a Center' Or 'the Center Of The Universe,' Has In Some Ways Defined My Artistic And Critical Vision.

I Can See Myself Watching Him Shave Every Morning. And At Other Time I See Us In That House And See How One Bright Day (or A Day Like This, So Cold Your Mind Shifts Every Time The Wind Does) He Will Wake Up And Decide It's All Wrong. I'm Sorry, He'll Say. I Have To Leave Now.