drmstream[writing]

Take your heart and wing it over the hill, baby.  Lis­ten to the rat­tle and the glim­mer.  It’s the bounc­ing noise that comes waft­ing in on the spring air, that opens up all the warm spots in your hands, that sinks low in your mir­ror­ing won­ders, that slows down and makes all the sense that […]

Scene I The lights come up and reveal a grey, empty room.  Our per­spec­tive is at an angle; two walls retreat to the back of the stage and join in a cor­ner in the deep recesses of stage right. The lights dim.  Ocean sounds fill the air, the swell and wash of the water, a building […]

  You worked hard to keep us from see­ing you straight on, didn’t you? That was hard, I imag­ine, when you walked through your day with a cam­era around your neck. No, you put your­self on the other side. The other side of what, that’s what I won­der. Was it the other side of life altogether? […]

  We aren’t meant to ever wit­ness lives in their total­ity.  The long view smooths out the highs, fills in the lows, and reduces every effort to the mean.  We come face to face with the over­whelm­ing scale of exis­tence, the futil­ity of pas­sion, the incon­se­quence of our work.  We might call it beau­ti­ful, but […]

When I was a boy, my mother would tell me that she had been a fat girl. I didn’t know what to make of it.  She wasn’t fat when she said it, and even when she would com­plain that she was fat, I’d think to myself that she was small and slim and not like all […]

Part V: Greet­ings (This is Uncle Sam) I take the long way to the train sta­tion most days so I can drive past the place where the tor­nado touched down two springs ago. It was like some­one made up the whole thing when we heard about it. We don’t get tor­na­does. But one day a tornado […]

  I What use are feel­ings, but to bind you to some­thing that doesn’t exist and can never be recov­ered? II Open the hollow-core door under the stairs.  The oil heater is pushed against the bot­tom of the steps.  Indus­trial green.  Soot stained where the main­te­nance man shifted his weight to push the igniter back […]

Part IV: I Know I’m Los­ing You — Once?  You fucked her one time!  Just once?  You fucked her just once?  A lit­tle whore and you stuck your cock inside her and just once is sup­posed to mean some­thing?  Like that makes you a good guy?  Maybe that’s why you’re telling me its just once, because […]

Part III: I Know I’m Los­ing You — Your love is fad­ing. — What? — I can feel your love fad­ing. It’s fad­ing away from me. — You don’t sound very orig­i­nal, Adam. — I’m not. — What is it then? — I thought you’d know. — Don’t give me a hard time. — The Temp­ta­tions. I played it for you the […]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]