Before (Gold)

Paradise would be if I could hold them
Before not behind my eyes.

Arthur Gold, from "Chest Cancer"

On consciousness

Consciousness is a puppet show
performing the dialogue of accident.

The truth of nothing (Bakker)

Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.

R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

New poems

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Purpose

Purpose is based on perspective.

Picking cherries

Concealment

The casual conceals the vital.

Endless flight (Bakker)

Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world.

R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

On influence

To admit influence
is to acknowledge a splinter.

Only the texts (Ferguson)

It seems that a reader can only read the texts that say what he already knows.

Frances Ferguson

A different result

A different result requires a different input. Or different conditions. Or an intervention of chance.

Refuse

Refuse to be trained,
do without the reward.

Truth ==> Freedom

No one is free who is denied access to the truth.

On truth

Truth is not answerable to the hierarchy.

Laughable (Iyer)

All society is something of a burning house...and the very notion that you are "master of your destiny" is something of a laughable illusion.

Pico Iyer

On responsibility

If you condone it, you commit it.

The momentum (Bakker)

A curious halfness deadened the man, as though his thought lacked the momentum to become speech.

R. Scott Bakker, from The Darkness That Comes Before

On conservatives

Conservatives are inherently insecure. Those who fear losing themselves to change fear that society will be lost to it as well and work to inhibit it. Those, on the other hand, who see themselves as that which will survive and transcend all change are less resistant to it, as it is not an existential threat.

Convictions (Spark)

I don't believe in convictions. They are generally hypocrisy.

Muriel Spark, from Reality and Dreams

Loss

Loss is the only transgression
worth mentioning.

Don't start

Once one starts to self-cannibalize,
there's rarely much incentive to stop.

Your enemies' weapons

There is no greater debasement than to provide your enemies' weapons, except to do it for profit.

The choice

Doubt cleanly drowns;
faith, that filth, confounds.

Overcomplicated

You've overcomplicated things
if you've found yourself back at appeasement.

Blind spots

Cultivate blind spots
to maximize surprise.

On purity

Purity is only a designated state of filth.

Advocates

Advocates are no more neutral than opponents.

On capitalism

You have a right to compete,
but not a right to profit.

Obligation

Obligation is inclination
soaked in consequence.

Comparison & contrast

Comparison is safe; it's contrast that can be deadly.

Neutrality

Neutrality is ignorance or apathy

Psychology

All psychology is probability.

Limp in triumph (Gilbert)

We have slept with death all our lives.
It will grind out its graceless victory,
but we can limp in triumph over the cold
intervening sand.

Jack Gilbert, from "Seen From Above"

Memory

Memory remints nostalgia into currency.

Shrinkage

God is synonymous with the unknown;
the more we learn, the smaller god gets,
the less we need him.

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Burning in time (Gilbert)

We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed. Each is the product
of his spirit's refraction, of the inflection
of that mind. It is the pace of our living
that makes the world available.

Jack Gilbert, from "Burning (Andante Non Troppo)"

Icarus (Gilbert)

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert, from "Failing and Flying"

Wasted

I long to see poetry wasted on conversation.

Skillet cake

From this recipe.

Some

Some abstractions are concrete in some minds.

Boston Poetry Magazine

Boston Poetry Magazine has published four of my poems ("Garbage," "Real Luxuries," "Suggestion, Recommendation, Injunction," and "Oratory") on their website and is considering them for their print volume.

Enjoyment

Enjoyment is often sufficient benefit.

Delight (Gilbert)

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

Jack Gilbert, from "A Brief for the Defense"

One true

Give me one true poet, one true poem,
over a thousand examiners of verse
who discourse in the appropriate jargon.

Not used to (O'Brian)

They might not always like what they were used to, but it was dead certain that they would always loathe what they were not used to...

Patrick O'Brian, from The Fortune of War

Unwise

The only unwise love
is to love he or she who cannot love.

Citizenship

I want interstitial citizenship.

Judgment

Anyone who wants to judge me
had better stand ready to be similarly judged.

Ask

Ask not for condemnation, but for help.

Language (Gilbert)

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite.

Jack Gilbert, from "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"

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Pickled vegetables

Jicama, celery, carrots, cucumber, cauliflower.

Of the ordinary (Gilbert)

But how could he dare, this opulent Buddha
with his temples and everyone adoring,
preach to me of the ordinary?

Jack Gilbert, from "Byzantium Burning"

The hideable

That which can be hidden is incidental.

A moment

There is a moment where the possible still is:
and then, gone.

Rage

Nothing enrages like thwarted expectation (even of the smallest variety).

Give up writing? (Barber)

How could I give up writing? You might ask
a man to give up breathing, or a hawk
to drop a strip of fillet in your hand
and starve itself. I am compulsion's fiend.
And thought is as an irritating itch
that can't be reached except in pen and ink.
I covet paper. Nothing inside is still
till I empty out my mind and order it.

Ros Barber, from The Marlowe Papers

On error

Error should fall away
where accomplishment aggregates.

9th Annual Independence Day Poem

        Liberty & Justice
               For All

I spy
with my little eye
people trying to get away
with murder
and more than murder

approved force
is not
legitimate force

forcing invisible corpse-sized
vivisections of containment
written in code and law

pathetic patriotism
standing in for paternalism
perverting the impulse toward loyalty

no more pretending our exchanges
are consensual, not coerced,
purchased

who for the benches
and who for the podia?!

information wants to be ubiquitous
not proprietary

if copying is stealing
then every baby owes a debt of atoms and bits

it's unprostitutional
to want to be free

a citizenry should be
a self-assembling mob of tolerance,
shifting alliances that acknowledge
and adapt to change

I want interstitial citizenship—
there is power, too, in the stutter

"Elegy for Edges" - The Fieldstone Review

My poem "Elegy for Edges" has been published in the 2013 issue of The Fieldstone Review based at the University of Saskatchewan. Check it out! (The last line shouldn't be italicized...I'm hoping they'll fix it.)

Becoming the best (Grutter)

But I also note that when I become a collector in some special field of knowledge, other sections of my world view get dull and obscure. Might it be for this reason that some of us intuitively resist becoming the best at anything?

Theo Grutter, from Dancing With Mosquitoes

Damnation

Damnation is the judgment that you never did
what you should have done
and your chance is gone.

Refuse

To resist is to lose;
don't resist, refuse.

We adore

We adore only what we can destroy.

History

We resent history because it's immune to us.

Complexity

Too many behave as though they lack the capacity for complexity, settling for complication.

New poems

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