Fragments

Criticism works away at what one knows; if it is to have any value whatsoever, an erosion of faith must be the inevitable result.

Man is nothing around which he practices a precarious posture before an abyss that is his immaterial birth.

Coffee is the philosopher's sacred mud. It sustains him in his state of agitated repose.

I would choose Blake over Shakespeare because his innocence is greater, though it is Shakespeare who exhibits more violent charm.

Poetry consumes various insults in order to produce one singular shame.

The writer needs at least three cats who will torment him with their greed, beauty, and magnificent indifference to Art.

The writer is first and foremost a reader.
Page after page of scrawl: the miseries of an ecstatic failure.

lines from a notebook written in a rented van at night during a thunderstorm in an Ontario provincial park

1

Whose bright idea was rain?
Who invented rain?

Please don't let me get sick.
Though I deserve it.
I won't get sick.

Thunder shakes the van.
My daughter asleep in her tent.
I can barely breathe.

Why won't the rain stop?
Why are you slamming the door?

Waiting for lightning to singe the page.
Lightning. Rain. Thunder.

A man can't sleep.

2

Mr. Nature slept all night in the van.
Now his neck hurts, he is slightly unhinged.
New Day! New Beginning!

3

"How did you sleep?"
"Not bad. And you?"

4

My hands tremble.

5

It is pleasure in the form of ordinary catastrophe.

6

One day you wake to find yourself
remade
into a new bent gull.