To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

Love, we are a small pond.

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.

It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.

Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak from the air brush maggots lie under if i should die before if i should die in the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soapflakes or tunafish wait the undreamt of.