I love what's left after love has been tested.

A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.

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

The world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind some poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I'm always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

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’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.