Lost souls. Orange hair. Everyone believes we are on the ledge. Of something. I turned 70 and my wife flipped some pancakes. Somewhere between joy and anxiety. I don't know how Trump survives himself. Why are some of us worried about the future and others want to trade hockey cards. These poems are snap shots. On the old Kodak. A black box with a shutter where we used to hide our memories. Now they are splashed all over the known universe. I feel like Soren Kierkegaard walking down the str...

I went to an all boys Catholic high school. Boys from many different backgrounds. Rich and poor. In uniforms. Controlled by a series of rules on conduct and appearance. Our English teacher introduced us to many fine poems. And then there were lively discussions. Some points of view came from left field. Others were well beyond that. But it all came to a cacophony of voices. The conflicts of the school yard focused on a class discussion. A poem in itself.

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit players. Making cameos in your story. This is a book about these cameo players. But the central figure in all of these relationships is missing. There is no hero. This is the story of the crowd.Stories and illustrations of people I hardly...

"The stain on the cement stared back at me. I wanted to go home and get a pail of hot water and wash it off. Several ants were grazing on it. I looked around. Everything was the same as it had been a few days earlier. The telephone booth. The newspaper boxes. The Six Points Plaza across the street. The plaza was empty. Business was bad. Several of the stores were abandoned. The stain was the only sign that something terrible had happened."Detective Sam Kelly is in the last days of a...

The Trailer is a novelette, Part of a multi series of books under the banner THE INVISIBLE MAN. This story concerns a retired cop who now works as a crossing guard and has become the object of two students' school assignment. They want to make a movie about him. He is not enthusiastic but his dead wife who talks to him everyday is. Bleeding out from this story are the other novelettes in the series. The series itself is a kind of Bosche like landscape of stories. Some stories are comic, ot...

Scientists now believe that the virus was present decades earlier, in the 1950s. in the flight to suburbia and the mass introduction of television. Tittering had slipped into the modern consciousness. Memories were now harvested to sell everything from soap to opera. It was the advent of the stand-up comedian and the news commentary. Everything was so funny.Reality is too complicated. I read that in a book I had gotten from the library. It was called "Two P.M." The author maintaine...

Thoughts on a life well attended. I may have been tardy but I was awake.'I wish I was handsomer. I wish I was taller. I wish my bank account would grow. I wish I didn'tsmoke. I wish I didn't forget so many things. That's right, I don't smoke. I wish I was smarter. (Isthat even possible?) I wish I'd met Trudeau. (Pierre) I wish I'd been more successful. And my parentscould have seen it. I wish a lot of things that I don't really care about it. Someday I'm going t...

Murder is a book that unwinds like a movie with each poem a scene. We open with an introduction to the killer followed by the killer's introduction to the victim at the murder scene. We read a report on the victim and then are introduced to the murder scene, the body at the morgue, the meeting of friends and relatives at the funeral. The police round up a group of suspects. An innocent man is charged and brought to trial. The judge, the prosecution, the defense lawyer, the spectators in th...

The magic of film is recreated, taken apart, examined and lovingly satirized in an unusual work of fiction. David Halliday imagines a BBC documentary about 'the well known Canadian film maker Samuel Bremmer'. We see moments of the films themselves; we hear the words of the actors, the designers and the commentary of the director, Samuel Bremmer. The illusion of film, and how it is created against a backdrop of money problems, personality clashes, jealousies, ambitions, love and vanity. Ori...

It's a good place to think. A BENCH. To mull over ideas. That's my madness. Everywhere I look I seepatterns. Patterns are someone's idea, someone's creation. Order is recklessly rearranging the furniturearound us. Old buildings being replaced by new buildings. Old people dropping dead at the feet ofchildren. Order giving birth in the ashes of death. Order is my God. Patterns are His skin. I need auniverse in which everything makes sense. What else is consciousne...

A young boy is disillusioned by Christmas. All the gifts have been unwrapped and everyone has gone about the business of cleaning up. And yet he feels sad. He and his best friend, Ludwig Van (the invisible dragon) take off on a journey into a wintry day. In the depths of despair they find the truemeaning of Christmas.A children's story. Part of a series called A Box of Chocolates.

A series of poems investigating the other and how we reach it. The self is a prison. Out there may be a phantasm. Outside the hive are nightmares. And darkness. We are the round stones on the shore who have eyes."pontius prophets playing plastic prayers as yndala zam exhumes a hole in her lap 'out damn's spot, out' for those of you whose profession it is to browse over this world tongue in cheek jotting your thoughts on parchment singing aquarius waiting for jesus to come out of the...