There is much of my life that is an adagio in minor keys. Composed and performed by the unhappy ones, the ones who had little choice in the matter. Unmoving upon the ground, after the fall, in their cold ways. Refugees have always been a problem in Europe. We tend to forget that. Each refugee […]
We spend most of our lives doing nothing Looking over there, touching the air The clapping audience of silence, as if important things were playing out in empty ways Let us pray to glass bottles, hollow straw, cats like tombstones Catch the river flowing from each one Over the waterfall’s edge Backward we drop The […]
There are many things we don’t understand about others. The face and body are there, but we can’t see the invisible footsteps left behind, the old heartbeats that have made them alive, soft and warm, troubled and happy, and we seldom have the time to spend solving the mystery of who they are. I’d […]
I started writing for myself about ten years too late. I had other things to do. Now I’m writing to justify my life, maybe make it relevant. There is a need to dig up old events and people. Were those days worth it? Writing is a way to judge. The more I write the more […]
Our lives are forced into numbers by others We start with one, then two, trapped in the elevator, the fading pulse, and so on, up and down The numbers are celebrated, but actual living is a wave outward and a burning inward, without order, only a pileup, a hard to see swirl of rising and […]
He was the head of office in one of the up-country districts. Dhaka had called and they were sending a representative from a charitable trust. She was an Austrian with good connections. She represented a sizable funding opportunity. Dhaka told him not to blow it. He thanked them for their confidence. He was on his […]
He was worried about his daughter in that way of doing what I say, not what I do, and she had a life of her own and it was dangerous by his standards, nothing like the risks he had taken. She was an alcoholic, hardly ever drugs, which was a good thing, but she was […]
I miss the tropical rain, those drops with my name, falling from clouds composed by the poor and the dying, their molecules giving temporary life to the clouds, a human weather without warning, everything so quick in a blinding flash The yellow pickup along the mountain road, the road towards the border, where the bus […]
That was how he liked it, the man who was generally unfriendly, except to the locals. Now in Mexico, with a wife, dogs and a number of aliments, he felt anchored for the first time in a long time. A flame tree spread next door and a jacaranda tree painted purple in the garden and […]
Nora continued spreading the cream cheese topping, the butter knife skating across the surface as though she was trying to create perfect waves on a frothy sea. She could take a fountain pen, a few dabs of watercolor and, with those acrobatic fingers, create a masterpiece. But studying art at the university had soured her […]
