“If chocolate could sing, it would sound like the Double Bass.”

“Sometimes I wish I could just be like everyone else my age and not think at all.”

“At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave A Message That's what my friend spokeinto his grim machine the winter he first went madas we both did in our thirties with stillno hope of revenue, gravely inkingour poems on pages held fast by gyres the color of lead. Godless, our minds did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swampuntil we sank. His eyes were burn holesin a swollen face. His breath was a venomhe drank deep of. He called his own tongue a scar, this poet who can crowbar openthe most sealed heart, make ash flower,and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelainand not a few locked doors) never touched my friend's throat. PraiseHim, whose earth is green. (for Franz Wright)”

“I would live forever if I could, but not like this.”

“Could love at first sight be real?”

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.”

“If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.”