“Papaya.” A melodious, sexual word. Like “wahini,” “Tahiti,” “Oahu.” The syllables, sweet on his tongue, promised luscious meat, juice like ambrosia, better than anything.

started from unpretentious beginnings
and hasn't, in fact, come very far along—
still occupies the back wall of the bedroom,

Whenever I passed Saks Fifth Avenue
I would stop at a certain window.
They didn’t acknowledge my presence—they just stared.

I used to believe that nobody was really crazy.
That people were all basically good. Sometimes it was
A question of coaxing them, a little, but in the end

Imagine a town where no one walks the streets. Where the side walks are swept clean as ceilings and the barber pole stands still as a corpse. There is no wind. The windows on the brick buildings are boarded up with doors, and a single light shines in the all-night diner while the rest of the town sits in its shadow.

You are the secret conscience of the age.
Your power is confirmed
in the milkman's punctuality.

Its intentions are clear as the air in a bee hive
It is not a surrogate for a kind of absence.
It declares itself like a finger. Cicero

It begins simply with nail scissors, clipping, the ends of a few hairs from the edge of his beard. Finally, after a week, he begins to notice that his beard isn’t growing.

In my younger and more existential days, the most innocuous of phrases—the ubiquitous “how are you,” for example—would cause rockets of nausea to crash in my belly. There was a time, to be sure, when I could answer “fine” with the best of them. Daily vomiting rapidly cured me of that. 

This ramp is not a pedestrian walk.
Violators will be disciplined.
This ramp is the fruit