Will

Fear & Loathing

to pass the time, I am going to read a chapter every day (14 chapters, 14 days), from Hunter S. Thompson’s splendid insanity of a book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Please tune in – Hell, share this link (more…)

Sprung

I stand at the counter, listening to the rain.  Coffee cup empty, waiting.  The kitchen, still groggy, offers up its best, tawny yawn.  In the dark just outside, fat, spring drops indulge a swollen, soft-shoe on the deck timbers.  I (more…)

The Phoenix

The paper in the window of Vern’s Barbershop went up with little fanfare.  The lazy snip of scissors has gone silent.  Across the window paper, scrawled in dozens of hands, are the thanks and best wishes of family, friends and (more…)

Under Covers

Daybreak junkies
sit on busses,
pull close trench-coat recollections

door hinges in need of fixing,
island getaway cruises, 
a where, a who to call their own

Cock-crow attendants
thumb newsprint strategies,
     curse behind steering wheels,
spill coffee (more…)

Coming Clean

At first, the offering of a single toe
     breaking the mer,
releasing a surface tension
built of 330 million miles square
of earth’s surface

     not too hot; not too cold

In a pile discarded,
soiled, faux epidermis
abandoned to mustify (more…)

Dreaming of East Beirut

I.

Up an aisle, a bag of Huggies
and an issue of People beneath an arm,
an AK-47 shoulder slung
Like Warhol, he parses
the significance of row upon row
of brightly colored soup cans.

II. 

Skateboard kids carve (more…)

Making Sense of Headlines

A pressure cooker percolating
20,000 years, maybe more.
A caldera itching to blow
the lid off a new age,
to smother yet another 
Iowa cornfield in ash
three inches deep, 
to at long last cast
California into the sea

There’s (more…)

The Greatest Little Boozer

to the greatest little boozer …~ the Pogues

It’s a certain kind of scribbler who seeks to write in a bar (reading in a bar an altogether different psyche profile).

It’s not proximity to a beverage of choice, (more…)

Pots and Pans

Let’s Get Cooking

Grocery shopping ahead of an evening of cooking can involve a certain joie de vivre. Especially when my friend the Baron is in town.

Passing through the city every coupla months, he always seems to be en route to (more…)

Missouri is a Ghost Shaped Thing - Cover

Missouri is a Ghost Shaped Thing

Literary Journal
Essay, Naturalism,
by Jason Vaughn and w.e. leathem
Spartan Press, 2019

… of a feather