How to tell a poem from a joke: read it backwards. (Works
with books, too!)

As it is that i have only noticed my body heat on rare
occasions--so insulated has been my usual environment--
also only rarely do i feel the power of love; but in this
case it's noise that covers it up, rather than an abundance.
And loneliness is when your noise level suddenly drops
and you find out how little loved you are. Unless you have
learned to love yourself, you'll be forced to scamper under
the nearest dense illusion: this is what we really mean by
"the power of love"...

How i am with influences. --I dance in the skin of the lion, i
dance in the skin of the deer. I even talk with someone an
hour and come away borrowing their cadences in my head.
Is this weakness? I think it is strength--to leave my ego by
sympathetic projection and be secure of returning. --Then
why don't i know it when i'm doing it? (I almost never detect
my influences till much later...) Maybe: i don't have to. Maybe:
identification is the other side of knowledge.
   And "subjectivity" is the myth that
conceals this fact.
   For, as Reason was discredited by
bad thinking, insincere identification led to too much
undependable inner-knowledge...

A streetpreacher: "Y'all are highly organized, but still
stupid!"

"Then there is Dallas. Perhaps in no other city is there so
great a distance between what a city actually is and what
people like to think it is." --Wayne King in NYT Book Rev
8-5-84

In my book i would change all the appearances; & keep the
meanings. The City of Magnificent Splendors ("that city
of all great cities which alone has no reason to be there").
Describe the City by its Lights.

"In my opinion caricature reaches its height only in periods
of decadence or when art cannot rise to the heroic." --George
Grosz

"Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought
to be at once mysterious and picturesque." --Macaulay

magniveté - between jest & earnest

A triad- knowledge, ignorance, mystery.