I'd written a lot of songs with hummingbirds in them. None of them ever came to anything, but I did write a few lines last month. It went like this: 'Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me'.

Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.

Take one step to the side and it's all absurd.

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios.

How bitter were the Prozac pills of the last few hundred mornings