Frozen morning's bedside lamp an intrusive klieg light slicing away sleep's velvety privacy. Cold air rushing in through the window frame, shiver of snow outside. Blurred plume of car exhaust toreadors up in a lazy nebula spotlit underneath the alley streetlamp, drifts like tangled strands of hair into the thorny crocheted lace of bare trees.

Late afternoon light's lazy drizzle palely honeycombing in. Sticky glitter braising the cat's fur, sallow yellow striping floorboards, brush of shimmery butter basted on the bookcase.

Tungsten's photons brightening in winter's early fade-out; gas flame's blue fandango; Coltrane's sax a hot gilded bird tracing radiant orbitals.

The cool glow of this screen. These words burnished pennies refracted into an inverted beam and slide-projected onto the lens behind your retina: electric filament glittering along the optic nerve, sizzling upward where the light of your mind will coppersmith them into jingle and shine.

See how the reflected wedges of rapidly-dimming windows kiss the handblown glass into some kind of quiet incandescence?

What I Wish I Was Doing this Afternoon:

1. Writing, writing, writing

2. Reading Murakami

3. Confessing all my secrets to the river, and secretly trysting with the sky

4. Sipping absinthe in the bathtub while listening to Thelonious Monk humming in the bright gilded spaces underneath the keys

5. Transgressing

What I Wish I Wasn't Doing this Afternoon:

1. Preparing an important, but frankly-sort-of-completely-fucking-boring document

2. Grading and commenting, and grading and commenting some more

3. Procrastinating grading and commenting, and grading and commenting some more

4. Self-flagellating in completely tedious/predictable/not-even-vaguely scintillant way re: procrastination of grading and commenting, and grading and commenting some more

5. Resisting transgressing

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Recent Linky-Lou Who's:

Interview with Superstition Review

Poems in Fall 2008 Issue of diode

Poems in coconut 14