...you look at me like an emergency

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.