Short Stories, Long Odds

( I have rescued the first two paragraphs of this from something I wrote last summer, something begun and never finished.  The rest is likewise not a real narrative but rather a collection of stuff, much of which is from a notebook I’ve been writing tiny bits in since last century. It is leather-bound and has some sort of Celtic design on the cover. I have always liked the book but the punchline is that I am a terrible diarist.)

It is hot these days. It is the kind of heat that immediately stupefies you, that displaces you from your regularly ordered senses, that makes you wonder where the time went or what that buzzing sound is in your ears. If this heat were sweetness, it would be cloying. If it were fear, we would all be nightmare-paralyzed from the waist down. If it were love, it would be suffocating.
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In the fall of 1997, I started college at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I would ultimately end up attending Berklee for just three semesters. I left after the first two semesters when my hands went bad, and went back for one more semester in 2004 for one last ill-advised grab at living the dream and becoming a film scorer. During the first year I lived in Boston, it became my home and I made great friends of the people I lived with. Even these days, 12 years later, I have the rhythm of that city in my bones more than any other I’ve been to. Some nights when I lie in bed I still feel the thrum of the T.

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(I don’t normally write poetry that a) rhymes; and b) isn’t funny. Here is an example of a poem that breaks both rules.)

Frayed bends of pages
shuffle from between
the ends of ages:
a notebook, seen

through many years
of a young man’s life;
While you shifted gears
from girlfriend to wife

and watched me grasp
the bare, stripped ends
of a wish by the wires, clasped
and burning in my hands,

what you must know now.
After fifteen years in,
what you must know now.