Participation

Life requires our participation, not our willingness to participate.

Edit

Rage (not outrage) and loneliness (not solitude) are the two emotions I would edit out of the human genome.

The frustration

The stronger the will, the greater the frustration at the confrontation with the world.

With the right people

Conversation, with the right people, is the most addictive thing I have encountered.

New poems

+15

What is so

Even what is so is only provisionally so.

Every moment

Every moment contains a birth
and at least one death.

The price & the cost

The price of life is to grow a soul;
the cost of death is to lose it.

The new thing

If the old thing satisfies you, you'll be less likely to notice the new thing.

What is real

If only what is real were as committed to realism as we are.

Memories

Memories are scars.

Is also

The truest tradition is also a lie.

More sense

Our lives make more sense as narrative threads than as autonomous individuals.

Not wrong

People who interpret something differently than you do are not necessarily wrong. This fact does not, however, imply that they are not wrong.

If not the chair

If someone whose behavior or ethics we found wanting made a chair, would we reject the chair, claiming it was tainted? If not the chair, then why a work of art?

New poems

+30

Blame

Should we blame the one who lights the match for another's disappointment that it goes out again?

Difficult to reconcile

What is difficult to reconcile may have been mistakenly conceived as oppositional.

Validation

Validation is retroactive. Don't look for it along the way.

Judgment

I am less concerned with an excess of judgment than with a dearth of it.