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It’s armed savagery. It’s out in the street. It’s all around you, in your face, up in your lunchbox. They kick down your door, grab your sister by the hair and push her out into the street. It’s a madhouse, a madhouse. The wave after wave of strangers marching in the streets, arms linked, chanting.

It filled the earth, it reached out into space and tickled the nostrils of each satellite, it found a place in the grass, and buckled under the pavement, saying, Smell me! Smell me! The fragrance of time, smelled fresh, in its passing, proved more now than it ever did before or since.

It came apart in my hands. One day there was a pipe that connected water to the house, to the bathroom, to the sink, to the dishwasher, and I dug it up from the front yard and it simply dissolved. One day I had a problem with water seeping into my kitchen. Solved that one.

Stretching on, out beyond the trees, out in front of both of them, and endless array of time, and endless vista, and endlessly twisting roads, all of which curve into each other, and then there are the ends of the endless, and there are forever ends, which is when endlessnesses meet up and curve.

They thunk off you, the cleats hitting the ground, the clods of earth kicking up into your teeth. They thunk, the clattering feet running down the pitch, ball in hand, a herd of boys running after. The bewilderment. Why care? Why do this? Why compete? What has that team ever done to me?

She had long hair and a lithe, slender body, my cousin. And I knew I shouldn’t look at her that way, but I did, and she saw me looking, and she smiled back at me, and I didn’t know where this was going but I wanted it to go there.

The trees are coming into spring like something almost being said. Their wakened buds relax and spread, their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they grow young? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain. — Philip Larkin (a poet you should check [...]

Up up up up over the moon. The cow jumped oooover the moon. oooooover the moon. His lips rounded as he repeated after me. Ooooooover the moon. Oooooover the moon. Then the cow landed in an abattoir and was cut up into neat little steaks.

The airplanes flew overhead, and we had never seen and airplane before, so we didn’t know what they meant. “You see those trails?” someone said. “They’re for keeping us calm and unconcerned. They’re fattening us up, you see. Like, for the slaughter.”

He stood in place, and finally understood what came of faith, and the absence of faith, and everything in his life that he had ever believed or wanted to believe came shining back to him in the bright gleam off the side of the polished chrome of the guillotine’s blade.