The negotiation

We must all negotiate our own concessions to life's ever-changing demands.

New poems

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Anything I thought

Anyone could have thought of anything I thought,no one of everything I thought.

Opinion

Opinion doesn't anoint a hero—or a villain.

Right & wrong

Where everything is wrong
values cannot be right.

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Society

Society must grow in the gap
between what people want and what they get.

Our inattentions

Our inattentions delineate our limits.

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On love

A careful love is an impoverished love.

The familiar & the true

As something becomes more familiar, it may seem more right, truer:  it may not be.

The only thing (Vonnegut)

The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything.  Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones and tubes?

No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time.  And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., from Unready To Wear

To stay a writer (Zambreno)

Kafka's insurance firm was full of aspiring poets, a reminder that it is fairly commonplace to want to be a writer or poet.  It is more unusual to stay a writer despite lack of status or outward success, to sacrifice sanity, sleep, positive well-being, health, to instead dwell in a life that is one of almost constant paranoia, oscillating between horror at invisibility and nausea at visibility.

Kate Zambreno, from To Write As If Already Dead

On patience

Patience is not a virtue, it's a strategy—often a highly effective one.

New poems

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Tolstoy Together

I received my author's copy yesterday of Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace, which includes some of my comments. The book releases officially on the 14th.

Assumption

If you assume the world to be concrete, everything that follows will be in error.

What is real

If what is real is no longer beautiful,
how many people will decide
that what is real is no longer true?

Illusions

Everything you believe is real is an illusion.
Do you believe illusions are real?

To what extent

To what extent are our inquiries our injuries?