The blind man’s wife was dying.

He told her, Before you go, I want a plaster made of your face so your likeness will always be with me.

When the sculptor came, the blind man’s wife could not resist tinkering with her nose, which had a bump on the bridge that she had despised ever since she was a little girl. In her lifetime, she dismissed plastic surgery out of hand, but now as she lay dying, she found the whole notion of a statue prolonging her imperfection through the ages intolerable.

Fix it, she insisted.

On the day that the plaster cast was completed, the wife drew her last breath. The blind man ran his fingers lightly across the statue’s face, lingering around the mouth, eyes and brow. As he slid his index and middle finger down the slope of the nose, he noticed immediately that the bump was not to be found.

What have you done with my wife? he shouted.

Nothing the sculptor said would sway him. He had the bump glazed on top of the cast. For good measure, he had a prosthetic bump made from a durable resin-based material.
There was a brief, morose period when he paid women to wear the prosthetic, which he would stroke absently while listening to his wife’s favorite bossa nova albums.

As the years past, it was more consoling to rub the prosthetic bump between two fingers, as one would a raisin, or a balled up piece of paper, than to touch the entire face.

A Cure for Sleep Addiction

She started to worry that she slept too much, not because sleeping was necessarily bad, but because it is often cited as a symptom of depression. She sought remedies for sleep addiction, which included:

Wearing pants that constrain the abdomen
Sitting on uncomfortable chairs
Staying away from cats, who are sleep enablers
Listening to loud music

In fact, was while wearing tight jeans perched on a stiff chair at a coffee shop blaring the Ramones that she met a man who would keep her up most nights with his terribly flawed logic and small bladder.

The Alleyway

This narrow alleyway was renamed for a famous author on the tenth anniversary of his death. On most days you will find his mistress parked there on a plastic milk crate, her face swollen by bargain spirits. She charges five bucks for a look-see at two love letters the famous author wrote her when the going was good and he was away. The papers are heavily creased and strung together in some places by yellowing Scotch tape, but the handwriting , the pitched H’s and anemic A’s , if you follow such things, is unmistakenly his.

In one letter, he gripes about the blandness of the egg sandwiches at an artists’ colony in upstate New York where he is holed up for the winter, and refers to her genitals fondly as his kitty-cat, at which point you look up at his mistress, hoping to see a shadow of beauty play through the wreck of her face, a delicateness that surely must have been hers for the great author to have expended his prodigious talents on, however prosaic the content.

A few months ago she began insisting that customers don latex gloves before handling the letters, the same kind the girls who work the registers wear in Chinatown. If you spend longer than two minutes reading the letters, she will pluck them from your grasp like the guillotine door at the peep show. You will turn away, but be drawn back by her offer to have a stroke of a hat with a nutria fur shell, the same one the author wore in the photo that accompanies the first edition of Velvet Bombs.

Subtitles with Self

Today I am as undone as a balloon animal on Chrystie St., a slack twist of sausages



The cafes are shutting down in Paris. Multimillionaires are spending less on their mistresses



Simple conversations with perfect strangers are not the same, but not necessarily better than, strange conversations with perfect people



I’m like a city girl writing country songs with a chorus of half-poisoned roaches mocked by crickets



I’ve got one for you:



I believe everything you say



I gave up collecting cigar boxes
Now I smoke cigars



President Obama, I’d like one of those green jobs
I like the feeling of wind and I’d like to see
wind do more good than capsize ships



I’d like to be part of the future
so I can make sport of the past



A security worker for a solar wind mill company starts a black market for wind, which he sneaks away in a spaghetti sauce jar. This is the stuff, he likes to whisper. He gives them different names for intensity: Turbo, Flutter, Trust. I’m not too proud to say I didn’t visit him once in a while but I never got caught up. When the cops came busting down his door, the story is he tried to dump the wind down the toilet and was drowned by the tiniest tsunami in the world.



Today I’m as undone as the wind to your sea