One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.