When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

All good poems are victories over something.

Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

There's a certain pleasure in violating the strictures of your education. The trick is, if you're going to explore ideas in a poem, to be suspicious of ideas and suspicious of your own mind at the same time. It's often a matter of orchestration and pacing. Of shaping some kind of dialectic flow.

I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.