Though chains be of gold, they are chains all the same.

The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.

Resisting the powers that be, we are keeping things from getting worse than they otherwise might be. And that effort is very much worthwhile.

All these years of thinking, ending up like this: In front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.

I watch the confusion of friends all numb with love moving like stray dogs to the anthem of night long conversations of pulsing rhythms and random voltage voices in spite of themselves graceful as these raindrops creeping spermlike across the car window.

In between effect and cause and just beyond the range of normal sight, this glittering joker was dancing in the dragon's jaws.

A number of Iraqis told us they had welcomed the U.S. forces as liberators initially but in the intervening months, they had come to feel that they had swapped one oppressive regime for another. The Iraqis did exchange one oppression for a lighter kind, in some ways.