Here I was, holding on to my attentiveness.

The suburbs of the avant-city appeared to me suddenly speckled with singing colors, papered with charming surprises.

Which is to say, a big struggle begat a little struggle begat a boy who dreamed of living in America, struggle free.

"Bodies are difficult," said the woman when the child finally slipped inside the dream.

Exile had a way of provoking contempt. One lived far away because one couldn't live inside.

A cheerful optimism and an expanding economy have fostered the idea that technology can be harnessed to overcome any difficulty.

How can matter tell a story?

Art does not have to "work." It is. It's not created, necessarily, for the public to decide whether it "works" or not.

They pray for inspiration. Some of them even have a muse.

Stop the presses! I thought of a better word! Almost the right one!

It's a question of time. Sooner or later, somebody will show up.

And then what, they all say together, and repeat it again and again, and then what, and then what, and then what.

There are people who are frightened by the very idea of being part of an audience.

All the days you have / ever breathed are swallows / shooting between trees.

To give oneself is a way to say one’s self can be gifted, like the hollowed-out horn.

if I loved you for your beauty? / there are worse reasons to love

That this is love’s profession, our scents / on pillows displace our alphabet to grass

But each plate obliterates the last / until I no longer mourn the destroyed plate.

And, although inaudible, still they are calling you.

I will love because it has been detected as the second / brightest octave to exist in the sky

All those miles down the boulevard, numbers counting down by twos.

The articulation of a word dissolves, and the most carefully strung together sentence falls apart.

She had never liked the dark and the feeling that anything could be in it.

This belief that luck was attainable.

Longing saturates the world.

I still don’t know how we had come to this.

The world pivots around Main Street.

The human heart is more treacherous than these waters.

The animals of the zodiac do not determine destiny.

These are the original ceilings. They attract our eyes.