Poetry: n; (1) any literary form that is not prose.

There is more to it than repeatedly jarring the reader's brain with 1 1/2-pica falls,
thump
            thump
                        thump
                                     to the next line.

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Birdsong, 5:48am.

Eyes closed, drowsily aware of the staccato dripdripDRIPdrip of one of those delightful rainy San Francisco mornings. Grey from ocean to hills. Not like yesterday. Yesterday, sunny and sixties, clear and bright. Perfect top-down weather. Not like today. Drowsy dissolving into warm flannel. dripDRIPdripdrip.

5:50am, mourning doves laughing at me. Cold feet and cold fingers, wet knees kneeling in the puddle in the driver’s seat, runoff from the top cold blossoms across my back.

Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth — that requires a heroism which is transcendent.
    - Henry Ward Beecher

I wonder whether he worked at that phrase, or whether it was handed to him peeled and sliced by a Greek woman wearing Carmen Miranda’s hat. If I ever find my muse again, I’m going to knock her down and handcuff her to my plumbing.

Last Thursday I walked through the Financial district around two in the afternoon. Suits wrapped around helpless bodies caromed through the streets all around me, and I felt like a midwestern boy on a nude beach for the first time. The guy playing the piano was the only element of the scene that somehow seemed familiar to me.

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