I'm probably going to be a mad scientist,
and make the original recipe for creating life on earth:
the genealogies of English kings,
the birth names of all five Marx brothers,
the Köchel numbers of the major works of Mozart,
the batting averages of the top-ten all-time hitters in both leagues,
the differing effects on Superman of the various colors of Kryptonite.
What are you doing?
I don't mean what are you doing with your life,
or in general,
but what are you doing right now?
I’m reading right now a novel of dragons, know what I’m saying?
All I could think of was underwear, pens, eye drops,
the endangered Japanese night heron and the threatened lakeside daisy,
the prairies lost,
the wetlands lost
the glaciers lost,
the species lost,
the diminishing and despoiling of entire ecosystems,
dump truck,
dump truck in rain.
A very sad list.
I felt relieved to be in a restaurant that wasn't trying too hard to seem like it wasn't trying too hard.
I was hanging out with people who'd say,
"We're having a wine auction!"
Ornery pigeons, opinionated drunk people,
car alarm set off by other car alarm
upstairs neighbors watching "Hellboy II."
Maybe it was during one of those evenings
that he first devised his plan to become a hermit.
I don't blame him.
He had to do it.
He was too nice to people.
They would have eaten him alive if he'd stayed in a well-populated area.
"Oh, Rose, we're sliding!" I called out,
sounding apologetic,
because it appeared that I'd killed us.
Overwintering stink-bugs navigate like nine-year-olds in bumper cars,
making as much noise as possible and banging into everything in sight.
I had never seen color until I saw it in those Skittles.
Their everyday perfection was somehow dumbfounding.
Barker might as well have made a documentary about the upkeep of the Empire State Building
in the months preceding the arrival of King Kong.
The twin brothers in the garden
are savvy scenesters earning punk yuks.
Wonderments consort with clunkers
Writing, like dying,
is one of those things that should be done alone
or not at all.
Jerry Springer--
it's a stretch to call him a host;
how do you host a brawl?
He lies to slander and seduce,
he lies to profit,
and he sometimes lies, it seems,
just because.
The Faroe Islands, an austere, mountainous archipelago marooned in the North Atlantic two hundred miles nort of Scotland, has a landmass of only five hundred and forty square miles, and is sparsely populated with fifty thousand people and seventy thousand sheep. But, looked at another way, the country
It's a slasher-flick variation on the sex lives of ordinary teens,
during a stage when people often take risks because they don't know what they want,
other than for something major to happen.
It's very hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.
