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Joshua used humor to keep people at arm’s length — which was funny in itself, because his arms were stunted from polio at an early age and now lay close to his body, twisted and next to useless.

This Day

Dance Lessons

My parents were dancers. Though practical and predictable in all else, they let their passions surface in the rumba, the tango, the dances that conjured up exotic places and smoldering emotions.

Sunbeams

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Alan Watts

Sunbeams

Why do you go and build a monument to a man who sends electricity through a wire? Does not nature do that millions of times over? Is not everything already existing in nature? What is the value of your getting it? It is already there.

Vivekananda

Tattoos

A small, blue quarter-moon; a flying penis; “white power”

A Primer On Forgiveness

It might be a lot easier to forgive someone if only he or she would show signs of changing. The paradox is that we are unlikely to see signs of change in others until we have forgiven them.

Off The Map

Last fall, after two years of escalating entreaties by my girlfriend, I finally agreed to move from the city to the country. More precisely, from San Francisco to northern New Mexico, to a desert of lunar silences and nights so black that I rediscovered my childhood fear of the dark.

Why We Are All Addicted

I maintain that the essence of addiction is craving for an experience or object to make you feel all right. It’s the craving for something other than the self, even if that something is within the realm of the mind. Addiction is fundamentally human; it affects everybody.

Selected Poems

Our first appointment late / on a Friday, the therapist / ought to be tired. Instead she’s honed / like an old knife ready to skin / us cleanly out of our marriage.

—from “High Priestess”