from a "bio" for Atticus Review:

"M.H. is a victim of a rare and acute form of synesthesia in which all imaginary beings, however uncouth, are plain, tangible, and ordinary, while the world of things as they are appears a preposterous put-on."

'Ah, not being sundered,/ not through such a little partition/ excluded from the star-measure./ Innerness, what is it?/ If not heightened sky,/ scattered through with birds and deep/ from winds of hometurning.' --Rilke (1925)

The peace after making art--a diamond that's clear; and the peace after working hard (physically)--that's a diamond that's opaque. I wouldn't have one less than the other. But it's not these i love--they are what lets me love.

When i drove back from Fort Worth with practically no brakes, it seemed as though more people were driving across the road than along it. That's perception.

How could i not love living, when there are poets and painters and musicians to be discovered?

If a reckoning could be made, i might find that altogether i have one hour of inspiration in a year. The rest? an ordinary life--with the vanity of having been otherwise.

All our small but near worries, looming large, block any possible concern for the rest of the world's woe. Why not, you say. --Having heard it before, so many times. And one who cares, is always having to meet the same opponent, not in argument so much as inertial resistance. In these words, instead of new ones, repeated, you may measure the grip of the status quo, and its lack of freedom, of creativity, of life's renewal,--that doesn't even bother to change its lies across a span of generations, and doesn't need to. For we are not rationalists, susceptible to the finality of a logical refutation. We are clay in the system's hands, who seldom get a chance to pass through fire, by its solicitude; we are eager to confide our weakness, fearing spiritual ambition as we fear cancer, and all too clever to rationalize and cover up, reflexively, --so that your friends and family would be blind to your addiction, your creeping disease or creeping madness, unless you called attention to it --and for what? For a ghost called Happiness. Often only a name for the pain that is old and grown familiar, never seen anymore, as it might have been in the beginning a terror, now terrible to do without.

Those whom i really ought to be addressing with my art of political angst, all i know of them is their dirty license plates at eye level as they roar past me: caught in the grip of the need to pass an old car, no matter how fast it is going.