Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.

Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at that time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't just stand around with your hammer in your hand.

Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?

Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust.