21. Sometimes a sign is like a chess move. It has history, like an etymology; and what you do next, adds to the record of the chess game.

22. Usage against usage. When it becomes a counter-tradition, as in slang. Then: reclaiming the word. A word that carries both its détournement & its reclamation. An array of such words.

23. Trying to say something using only the given words of a fridge magnet poetry set. Sometimes i feel that way about the half a million-plus vocabulary of English.

24. Recurrent feelings as i parse my small routines. It is hard to find a spur to write in these. Then i pull back my focus and see a huge, imminent catastrophe looming. What is there to say about that? --And this too becomes habitual feeling. (Which is the subject of all my poetry lately, i'm afraid.)

25. What you write when you're certain it will never be read.

26. Joining a group in order to have a shared language.

27. Works that are only read in school. The works contemporary to those, that exist in their shadow. To make a canon of overlooked authors. To write in this tradition. And how will others read you, who only know the works read in school?

28. My argument with Browning. My argument with Plato. My argument with myself.

29. This weather--cool, gray, a little misty, with more rain in the offing--inheres in what i write today, if you could only see it.

30. I write to provide the instruction manual for an escape device, while you must imagine first the need to escape.