Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

The first step... shall be to lose the way.

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version

Let our scars fall in love.

The first step in the journey is to lose your way.

Is there a mechanism of death, that so mutilates existence no one, gets over it not even the dead?

I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry - eating in late September.