Maybe you, citizen, should be a jerk. Jerks get where they are going. You, citizen, what about you? Handy, dandy, where’s the jerk? Conformists. Sheep. All of you, all of us, boiling out our radiators. Spending our day, our days, our lives in coope

He disrobes; shoes, socks, shirt, belt, pants. He smells of hard work. The nude whisper of everything else.

I grew up in a little red house filled with books. Both of my parents love to read, and the proof piled up in every room. Current books in the bedroom. Books from the last ten to twenty years in the living room and kitchen. Old books from their childhood and college days on…

She wakes up with rosemary.

Newhouse returned his gaze to his wet palm, which he lifted to his nose with suspicion, sniffed again and again, then struggled to move out from under the growing stream.

Tomiko did not feel lost. Although she struggled to understand what was going on around her, she knew where she wanted to go.

I don't think you understand. A sad boy doesn't just die inside, slowly, he becomes withdrawn from certain types of lovely youthful reasoning out loud, accustomed to feeling what is expected, graded, just to be allowed to survive another…

the steady, persistent work of beauty

85% extra dark cocoa:/biting into bitter darkness

in a willow garden lush shade/drapes dark the young woman's small house/with the lone window, the white door . . .

We can apprehend beauty only/ by framing it with the photographic/ paper’s edge or the novel’s margins/ and bookends.

Light spreads its way across the sky like a drop of inkon dry cotton sheets:starts at one point and expandsas wind shufflesover bodies, seashoist your sailsand I'll throw this oneoverthe night can have itnowhear the waveshow they seem satisfiedwith their…

The last one I tipped over the edge was just like all the others: fragile, pale, humming to himself as he sat on the ledge overlooking the gardens.

Well, now it has fallen away some but I felt better about it when it was raging

…