The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.