After graduating from Columbia University with an MFA in Film Direction and winning the Academy Award for Best Student Film, Mark spent many years wandering the vast desert of Hollywood development hell before resurfacing as a screenwriting professor at NYU Film School and the Dysfunctional-Male-in-Residence at Men’s Health Magazine. His humorous columns for that magazine begat his memoir, The Patron Saint of Used Cars & Second Chances.
I have fallen in love with winter, / with the day that ends at 3:45 in the afternoon. // with the man striding along the path grasping / a pink plastic bag that glows incandescent / although it only contains dish soap / and the cat food he carries home after work …
...you wonder again about the soul, / Where it hides, where it ventures. / There's always one you have to bring to oblivion...
I wanted to be gray-faced / and hated by the Yankees / in the suburbs past Carleton.
Once he’d made the long, impetuous trip, / once we were there, evening air billowing my skirt / over the Pacific, surf sweeping like brushes over drums, / I knew we’d marry.
I lived by a river with tides unresolved / Under the house a sewer under a wooden board it ran / Sometimes a tapping sometimes a hum in the night like a motor
and I dream of a young woman from Prague / standing beside a red motorcycle as if so much / depended upon it...
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