“Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. ”

“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,And you must not be abased to the other.Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turned over upon me,And parted the shirt from my bosom bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart,And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of the creation is love,And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elder, mullein and pokeweed.”

“Voice is not just the sound that comes from your throat, but the feelings that come from your words.”

“I have never heard any of your lectures, but from what I can learn I should say that for people who like the kind of lectures you deliver, they are just the kind of lectures such people like. Yours respectfully, O. Abe.”

“If a man is only as good as his word, then I want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours.The way you say dicey and delectable and octogenarian in the same sentence — that really turns me on. The way you describe the oranges in your backyard using anarchistic and intimate in the same breath.I would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue wrapping around your diction until listening become more like dreaming and dreaming became more like kissing you.I want to jump off the cliff of your voice into the suicide of your stream of consciousness. I want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die. I want to map it out with a dictionary and points of brilliant light until it looks more like a star chart than a strategy for communication. I want to see where your words are born. I want to find a pattern in the astrology.I want to memorize the scripts of your seductions. I want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments, in the haiku of your epiphanies. I want to know all the names you’ve given your desires. I want to find my name among them,‘cause there is nothing more wrecking sexy than the right word. I want to thank whoever told you there was no such thing as a synonym. I want to throw a party for the heartbreak that turned you into a poet.And if it is true that a man is only as good as his word then, sweet jesus, let me be there the first time you are speechless, and all your explosive wisdom becomes a burning ball of sun in your throat, and all you can bring yourself to utter is, oh god, oh god.”

“I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn't understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.”