…I have two new poems up, "My Girl" in Clutching At Straws and "Her Name On A Grain of Rice" at Short, Fast and Deadly, as well as here under "Words In Print."

…I like this true story:
One bad winter in the Arctic, and not too long ago, an Algonquin woman and her baby were left alone after everyone else in their winter camp had starved. Ernest Thompson Seton tells it. The woman walked from the camp where everyone had died, and found a cache at a lake. The cache contained on small fishhook. It was simple to rig a line, but she had no bait, and no hope of bait. The baby cried. The woman took a knife and cut a strip from her own thigh. She fished with the worm of her own flesh and caught a jackfish; she fed the child and herself. Of course, she saved the fish guts for bait. She lived alone at the lake, on fish, until spring, when she walked out again and found people. Seton's informant had seen the scar on her thigh.

…"It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them." Julian Barnes

...The name Barnes makes me think of Barnes and Noble. I love that place because I love almost any book store. I could live in a book store the same way Tom Hanks played an imigrant that lived in the airport. (I forget the movie's name.) Bookstores make me feel safe--all those words and bindings, those thick volumes padded onto mahogany shelves. It gives me shivers.

I hear B & N is for sale. Wouldn't it be fun to be CEO of B & N? I think you could remake it, reinvent it, Appleize it, so to speak, to where each store became a kind of stunning place with theater on the walls, throbbing music, lights and clips of authors and new books--ENERGY--as opposed to the antiquated, antiseptic, clinical vibe it mimics from libraries.

I'm biased, of course, but I think the world would be a better place if more people read. If EVERYONE read, well, hell, if everyone read, then I think we'd all be safer, happier, more imaginative, creative, more fulfilled, open to deep discussions not dependent upon substances. We'd be thinner and less uptight. The economy would flourish. For sure, we'd be sassier and sexier because we'd be reading all sorts of things that instill sass and swag, like poetry and and truck loads of vampire erotica. If everyone read, there would undoubtedly be world peace because who would have time to build an IUD, let alone explode a vest-bomb, when they were dying(no pun intended)to get back to that fast-paced thriller they'd just picked up? And anyway, by reading so much, we'd understand each other better. "Hey Couz, what up?" If you go back far enough, you'll see that we're all cousins or brothers or sisters from different misters. Reading would reveal that. We'd realize that underneath each of our mottled skins-- young or old, Hindu or Jew, tatted or pierced, pruned or botox-blasted--we are all the same flawed beings seeking out a sense of engagment in something outside ourselves that great writing shines a light on. Books and stories and poems--they make us want to sigh or cry, sing or scream, gasp or clap. They make us want to dance a hot salsa, a sloppy jig, an awkward high school slow dance.