Don't think you are gonna get one that you don't have to play backwards no more. Hope you are staying warm in Finland! Thinking about you from the good old USA!

"All these places have their moments/with lovers and friends I still can recall/some are dead and some are living/in my life, I've loved them all"

Shoeless You Came

I don't if it was because you thought
you didn't need them or because you didn't
have them, but you came in shoeless

on a cold day in February. We found
some flipflops, which you loved
so well and seemed happy to wear.

And the sweat pants were a good fit
for your small frame. You ate well,
and it was hard to wake you in the mornings--

you who had not slept in so many nights.
I knew so little about you, but more
than many. You loved your mother and your

dogs. You did not complain. Tenacity
should have been your middle name.
Tonight, the medical examiner studies

what is left of you and tries to piece
together this puzzle. My mind does the same.
Goodnight, sweet woman.

The Aureole
(for E)


I stop my hand midair.

If I touch her there everything about me will be true.
The New World discovered without pick or ax.

I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.
I saw it as a girl but didn’t know I was taking in myself.

My hand remembers, treading the watery room,
just behind the rose-veiled eyes of memory.

Alone in the yard tucked beneath the hood of her car,
lucky clover all about her feet, green tea-sweet necklace
for her mud-pie crusty work boots.

She fends off their spit & words with silent two-handed
twists & turns of her socket wrench. A hurl of sticks &
stones and only me to whisper for her, from sidewalk far,

break my bones. A grown woman in grease-pocket overalls
inside her own sexy transmission despite the crowding of
hurled red hots. Beneath the hood of her candy-apple Camaro:

souped, shiny, low to the ground.

The stars over the Atlantic are dangling
salt crystals. The room at the Seashell Inn is
$20 a night; special winter off-season rate.
No one else here but us and the night clerk,
five floors below, alone with his cherished
stack of Spiderman. My lips are red snails
in a primal search for every constellation
hiding in the sky of your body. My hand
waits for permission, for my life to agree
to be changed, forever. Can Captain Night
Clerk hear my fingers tambourining you
there on the moon? Won’t he soon climb
the stairs and bam! on the hood of this car?
You are a woman with film reels for eyes.
Years of long talking have brought us to the
land of the body. Our skin is one endless
prayer bead of brown. If my hand ever lands,
I will fly past dreaming Australian Aborigines.
The old claw hammer and monkey wrench
that flew at Brenda Jones will fly across the
yard of ocean at me. A grease rag will be
thrust into my painter’s pants against my
will. I will never be able to wash or peel
any of this away. Before the night is over
someone I do not know will want the keys
to my ’55 silver Thunderbird. He will chase
me down the street. A gaggle of spooked
hens will fly up in my grandmother’s yard,
never to lay another egg, just as I am jump-
ed, kneed, pulled finally to the high ground
of sweet clover.

Nikky Finney
From Head Off & Split

Ok...a little hard to post this, sitting in my beautiful house, in this room which contains the litter box, trying to get into some music and such just after little kitty kitty decided to make such a stink. Yikes! Gotta get outta here! Of course, that is the reason. What other reason could there be? Same as it ever was. Same Same Same as it ever was.

One more Black Keys for now. More to come.

Made the boring drive on the BG Pkwy go by faster...