But I would sting

your eyes,

Love, and

let the tears

distort

your need for me.

The clock struck midnight,

beating her strapless,

toppling her floorward.

There, de-stooled and de-pilsnered,

stilettos askew,

she bleated karaoke

while that brute hovered smirking,

jaundiced and sour,

browning his khakis,

hacking his eulogy.

She, crumpled and angular,

spittle bejeweled,

thinks, I’m perishing anew,

hapless but christened,

my year, jinxed with bounty.

Turning,

knuckling curses,

the bloated sot trundled doorward,

out-turning his pockets,

releasing his vowels,

in those final seconds,

offloading his ballast.

Stephen Hawking asks, what is the nature of time? Why can't we remember the future? Seriously. And these coming from a fairly sharp guy.

On the first one ... well, I mean, what business has he got asking something like that? Time is time. It’s kind of self-explanatory. What’s lust? What’s blue? What’s that feeling you get when you climb the stairs in the dark and take an extra step up after you’re already on the landing? Some things are what they are because there’s nothing else to be done about it. Leave well enough alone.

The second — shit, I can't even remember to clean the filter in the dryer or how much water to boil the quinoa in even though I've done it dozens of times. Or what I was about to say let alone remember what someone is going to answer me back before they even say it. If you could remember the future, life would be one big spoiler alert. We can’t remember the future because it would fuck up everything, that’s why.

You're welcome.

These people need to sit and think about shit a while before asking dumb questions.

Good evening everyone. Good to see you looking so well. And now for today's observations.

This morning, having just awoken, I saw on my morning walk, a Pomeranian braving the rain again, a nervous little creature of which I’ve previously spoken.

She was soon overtaken by a well coifed poodle in grand display jumping a puddle, leaving the Pom somewhat shaken.

I saw later in the downpour, outside the Philharmonic, a brass horn hawker doing a tuba demo inside an Uber limo.

Under a push cart umbrella, I saw a chorus girl (Stella) with a falafel filled to bursting, dripping tahini on parts protected barely by her sequined bikini.

On the lower reaches of the High Line, with rain slickers aflutter, tourists from Sumatra expressed their utter elation in chanting and dance, interspersed with refrains of Sinatra, whose town of Hoboken they spotted across the great Hudson’s expanse.

A clutch of Koreans looking to perform Tai Chi were instead directed to a parlor for chai tea, which they nevertheless enjoyed immensely, guzzling their spicy libation before in all good humor moving on to their martial arts demonstration.

And in signature flannel and beard, a somnambulant hipster, earbuds implanted, unknowingly scaled a panel truck gangplank and so, along with the cargo, was thereby dispatched to San Diego by way of Lodi, Brewster and Fargo.

Although but a sampling of occurrences, this will I hope adequately serve, being not the most but the most notable of what I with my own eyes today have observed.

Thanks for listening. Donations accepted.

A Bessarabian haberdasher and his five sons whom he dispatched to four continents; a Litvak who in the wee hours stole horses from the Cossacks and, the next day, sold them back to the very same men; a wise merchant who took in his aimless nephew, charged him rent for three years and then, upon the young man's departure, returned him the entire sum plus interest; a slumlord who would leave his bed at any hour to see to his tenants' leaky pipes; a woman who made it to 98, outliving her husband by twenty-five years and remaining in her apartment for the entire period after his passing; and an amateur pilot who built his own plane in his basement, having no recourse but to tear down his outer wall to remove it.