All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't fell accurate.

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.

Desire can make anything into a god.