I went to a gypsy fortune teller and she told me that I would end up alone and destitute. She read it in my palms, confirmed it in her crystal ball and anxiously verified it by tea leaves. As she was reaching for her tarot cards, I stopped her. Enough, I said. It’s okay, I…

She said, “My life is a slow poem that has lasted years.” I nodded but the gesture was lost over the telephone line. I thought, There are poems of words and poems of acts. Our lives are longish poems of acts. Silently but irrevocably, without our knowing how, the isolated acts of our lives are…

I stood alone – Don’t we all? – Waiting for you to touch me I wandered alone Down endless aisles Yearning for a destiny, any destiny I whispered alone In a vacant chamber Longing to hear someone sing I dreamed alone Conjuring lovers Whose bodies dissolved in the night I woke alone My body wrecked…

I received several letters this week addressed to my harmonica. It seems the recent account of our adventures together (“Travels with Harmonica”) had the unintended effect of thrusting him from my pocket out into the limelight. An unusually shy and private instrument, he nonetheless authorized me to tell the story of our meeting and how…

The first time I stuck a harmonica in my pocket and headed for the open road, I was twenty-two. I hitchhiked from Oakland to New Orleans. It was the start of a long list of harmonica-inspired voyages which featured me chasing the perfume of poetry and sin across the globe. I was raised on hobos…

Looking back, I find it strange – and charming – that I always thought I could be as eccentric as I chose and still belong. In junior high school, like everyone else in my hometown, I would go to the Friday Night Football games. But to make it more substantive, I would take War and…

I write to you summoning all the reservoirs of honesty I can gather. (Sometimes, I confess, they are not much.) Honesty for me is not something willful or controlled. The greatest lies are those we tell when the truth is something we cannot even pronounce in silence. As a friend once told me, “I do…