People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim,...
My father is dead! As soon as he'd said it, Fiskadoro saw he'd made it true again--again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn't simple. It wasn't...
It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among the rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair ba...
It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn't go to 'take it in.' I went to be convicted.
I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding...
He’d come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he’d seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now.
He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.
From a Berkeley Notebook'~Denis JohnsonOne changes so muchfrom moment to momentthat when one hugsoneself against the chillair at the inceptionof spring, at night,knees drawn to chin,he finds himself i...
Employment in the Small BookstoreTwelve Poems, 1975The dust is almost motionlessin this narrowness, this stillness,yet how unlike a coffinit is, sometimes letting a live one in,sometimes outand the ai...
But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in...
And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming,...
All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.
A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.
When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside—jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We
We stared at him and felt like old maids. He, on the other hand, was the bride of Death.
WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM
Three Rules To Write ByWrite naked. That means to write what you would never say.Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it.Write in exile as if you are never going to get home again,...
The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, whilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been...
The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We're stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine.