Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.

No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

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.

They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan