“(from A Love Story, Eight Takes)

8
As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,

when it would be truer to say nothing.
I've invented so much and prevented more.

But I'd like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.

To see you again, isn't love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.

This just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.”

“I'm Perfect at Feelings,
so I have no problem telling you
why you cried over the third lost
metal or the mousetrap. I knew
that orgasms weren't your fault
and that feeling of keeping solid
in yourself but wanting an ecstatic
black hole was just bad beauty.

Certain loves were perfect
in the daytime and had every
right to express carnally behind
the copy machine and there are
no hard feelings for the boozy
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,
whenever it felt right for you.

And when the moment of soft
levitation with erasing hands
made you feel dirty, like
the main person to think up love
in the first place, I knew that.
It's okay, you're an innocent
with the brilliance of an animalstuffing yourself sick on a kill.
Don't, don't feel like the runt alien
on my ship: I get you. I know
the dimensions of your wishing
and losing and don't think you
a glutton with petty beefs. But
even I, who know your triggers,

your emblematic sacs of sad fury,
I understand why the farthest fat trees
sliver down with your disappointment
and why the big sense of the world,
wrong before you, shrugs but
somewhere grasps your spinning,
stunning, alone. But you have me.”

“Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. / It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.”

“There's nothing wrong with a youthful prospective. Don't forget- no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories you have to tell.”

“The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:"Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out."And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one. ”

“If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us.”

“I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can. ”