Click on the links below to read and hear poems by Lex Thomas:Stopping for Gas in Pulaski, NY
Back to the Lex and Eric Thomas page
Back to the OpenMike Poetry homepage
Notes on the audio links: The audio links for each poem lead to different file-format versions of the same audio content. The "ASF audio" link will generate "streaming"-type audio which will download and play at the same time (no waiting!) This seems to work best with Internet Explorer. To play "ASF" files you'll need to have installed version 6 (or later) of the Microsoft media player, which can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com.
With some browsers, clicking on the "ASF audio" link will still bring up a "Save As..." window (even after the version 6 Microsoft media player is installed.) If this happens, use the "Save As..." window to pick a location on your hard drive to save the file (which will end in ".asx") into; then find the file with the "Windows Explorer" and double-click on it to download and play the content. (Granted, this is not the most elegant work-around; but it's still faster than waiting for the entire audio download to finish before playing it.)
The "MPEG-3 audio file" link allows you to download a higher-quality MPEG-3 version of the audio (but you have to wait until the download is complete before playing the content.) The version 6 Microsoft media player will play MPEG-3 files. The Winamp player will also play these. (The smaller-sized "alternate ASF audio" files can also be played using MPEG-3 players.)
The "ASF" file was generated using the Windows Media Encoder found in the Media Tools which can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com.