THERE IS NEWS FROM HEAVEN

There was nothing funny in the glass case that held the fruit pies, not one laugh.

Cigarettes in wartime do not taste better than they did when there was no cable television.

She felt the Pope should bless the candy bars as yet unsold and in storage in all those sealed boxes in the back of the store, next to the back of the cooler where all the soda pop that made you frantic as a goat roping competition sat silent, unpopped.

 In related news, Jesus tired of his miracles and had another beer, a can of Coors, thinking it would make less drunk because it tasted more like flavored baptism water than an honest grog.

Work men hunched over their jackhammers in the intersection, getting off.

The miracle of our time was how the city could just vanish at the drop of a sixteen ton hat and leave the city to the wild life which would wander in from the dead forests and find nothing to eat on the cement and asphalt roads and alleys and then begin to behave in ways that would be signs of eccentric manners as the sun sets and hunger pains inflame the nerve endings that command the brain to act rashly.

He wrote the most beautiful poem the would never read and populations suffered for the lack of it.

The midwestern states dream of themselves talking in their sleep.

HER FAVORITE THINGS

She loved old vinyl albums and black and white movies made in the fifties, especially those thick, severely grooved jazz albums with covers in blaring, nervous fonts which showed white people with drinks in skewed living rooms laughing open-mawed like they were ready for a large cubes of a raw , bloody steak.,And for the films she adored, it was the old science fictions that had giant fucking spiders or actors covered in a congealed porridge with rubber eyeballs and sponge brains glued tot he exterior of the oatmeal and paste monster casing. There was a hero, square jawed, taking a blow torch to a frowny faced asparagus monster who lived in a Nevada cave across from a gas station and titty bar that dispatched bats and other vermin into the world of white America, and a woman, a pretty woman in a military issue brassiere, staying near the car, merely curious to see what kind of dance the asparagus beat and the fool with the blow torch would manage . But oh that jazz, honking, shreaking, a screaming set of tonalities having a multi-level fist fight speaker to speaker, filling the room with cries for more cowbell and box cutters. 

YOU CAN'T SIT DOWN

 Leonard told his readers that if they want to write a piece of fiction, never open up the story with a description of the weather. Fine, thought Lurk, I will open up this tale with something that Leonard said about the weather. And then Lurk lit a cigarette stub that had been crushed in an overflowing ashtray on his desk, resting there like a dry, sunbleached turd until he picked it up between the tips of his thumb and index finger, stuck a wooden match against the scratchy mortar of the brick walls that contained his office and put the flaring stick to the curled and crumpled tip of the formerly svelte cigarette. His lungs filled with the kind of smoke that coats the throat with its unique variety of briar patch harshness. Lurk coughed, he sneezed, he blew snot all over his black turtle neck sweater he planned on parading around the local house in so the babes would think him Lurk the Poetry Man and the dudes would weep into their lattes and glasses of  fresh orange juice thick with clubs of algae-like pulp,weeping becomes Poetry conquers nookie with but a whisper and the right sidelong glance. But now the black turtle neck had snot on it, glistening globs of wretched , runny mung. This won't do, thought Lurk, thinking about the weather . Then he reminded himself that the coffee shop was closed except for take out orders and the Governor said that no could sit anywhere, and that those on essential missions to get supplies needed to go home and stay there when the needed shopping was done for the day. He felt sad. There was nowhere to go but back to sleep.

NOSTALGIA

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You challenge the acres of earth you know better than the backs of strangers you see in subway cars to remain exactly as you remember it, or that it reassemble itself in its former perfection sometime soon when you aren't looking out the moving window and into the street, the problem being that you're always looking for something new that you've overlooked over the years of luxuriating in a habit of mind that no dies or goes hungry and that your years coming up to the proper height for carnival rides contained that final part of pain , suffering and hard decisions with options that make everyone cry and that the smoke would only need to clear one more time and the acres of heartache become again all the glistening beaches and majestic mountains and peerless skylines from which all great rivers and bustling originate and return to again, you kiss a crucifix, do the sign of the cross, say a prayer containing no sounds but only sounds from the stomach that get caught in the throat and sounds like the gargling chorus of electric razors in mornings when your father was home from the war and mother was smoking cigarettes and drinking her scotch neat, no nice, at parties that began with air kisses , evolved into laughter and wound up with a black eye and some broken glass in the swimming pool, this needs to stay as it was, the world cannot collapse and rise again with new ruins and imperfect poets, all those days when your eyes were closed when the garbage trucks neared with their grinding gyres, everything has been returned which was old, you close your eyes when the leaf blowers and tree trimmers rev up their versions of Shiva caustic shiver, you've holding the door open for too many years, yes, yes, this elevator is going up.

THE SAD PANIC

He was in love and then she died suddenly ten years later and he mourned her for a moment saying he had to get on with his life but then he died and soon everyone sang their song from the very tips of the tallest building and the birds weeped and the angels played sad celestial music and God himself cursed himself for letting all this happen , he was distracted by asking all the world and all the animals and all the trees in the forest to fall prey to the wind that blows and kneel and bow in his direction, such nonsense while the world weeps lovers who knew each for a minute before sharing a decade of anonymity under the same roof, as we all know, something always has to give way, whether the floor, the ceiling, the other shoe we never see, the other hand of God that is picking your pocket, and yet we see here, today, this minute, the sun rises still, neighbors in bay windows drinking the same bad coffee, the mail man coming with a letter addressed to you, and you know who you are.