Today, after a day kayaking with my family on the river, I visited my grandfather and he reminisced about his love, my grandmother Patricia Mees Armstrong. When my Grandma died, I felt no closure. Hadn’t she just emailed me telling me how excited she was for my visit? Didn’t I have a plane ticket…
Where would Jack Kerouac live today if he was still bouncing around New York? Answer: Bushwick. Obviously… Those who live or spend time in the area have noticed: Bushwick right now is NYC’s latest front of exciting new and emerging artists. From music, to art, poetry and prose, Bushwick is a place of dedicated artists toeing the…
Tumaini –– (Swahili Verb) Hope, to want something to happen. Here, where hope is tumaini are animals everywhere, everywhere animals. Horses on the cigarettes. Rhinos on the matches. Water buffalo nickels jingling around in your lizard stamped coin purse. Do you have a rhino to light my horse? Animals as currency. You never forget the elephants…
Some came here looking for it, asking for it, basking in it and bleeding it. They packed their bags and hopped a plane or train wearing their I’m-going-to-go-off-the-deep-end trunks. Some came here for other reasons—jobs probably—and heard its whisper rise to a cry and threw their brief cases out the office window and flipped off…
The following is a bit of prose I wrote in March on an overnight bus ride from Kenya to Uganda. Sometimes it’s the means of transportation that connects, as my thoughts jumped to three years earlier, when I was on an overnight bus on the other side of the continent, Morocco and them meandered from this to…
The bald spotted hipsters of Brooklyn. The thick glassed girls wearing your grandmothers clothing they purchased for more than she spent on her entire wardrobe at the Buffalo Exchange in today’s dollars I could write you a poem on a twenty dollar bill but not take you out on the town with it. Which is…
Home Home is tomato sauce from mom’s pepperoni rolls that no one registers enough to tell me I’ve something on my face, stuck in my beard the smell of her baking wafts like an opiate cloud that lingers in labored expressions on the pugs who will always know their needs without the muddling of articulation…
You know how the morning after a night of unkempt raging you cradle your hangover in your hands and swear to yourself and anyone unfortunate enough to be around you that “I’m never drinking again!”? That’s how I felt in the immediacy following the publishing of both my poetry collections. After each was finally ready…
Loving The Leave I love leaving Pieces of myself Everywhere There is a man Who is completely content To play checkers Until a forgotten Fanta cap skips Over its overtaken Sprite and Coke Counterparts Becoming the only Moment worth Recounting. Later When the Diligent details Call to mind The moment One possibility In a billion…
