Reaching out from under
my brother’s bed grabbing
his leg and screaming

Don’t get me wrong, I like people
once in a while and in moderation,
I like people who are high
in energy and low in calories,
but never more than one or two at a time,
because I am way too easily influenced.

Bridge may be icy, or not.
Its reputation for iciness is renowned
but don’t get your hopes up
if you’re an ice aficionado
and its slipperiness is nil.

Every knightly order has their little quirks, and Her Majesty’s Royal Order of the Beard is no exception. Aside from moral fortitude and all that boring stuff, knights of the order are required to have a full and luxurious beard–one free of the crumbs of iniquity or the tangles of untruth. Winslow, truly, is not worthy.

I overheard what I think was a three-person writing group in a coffee shop the other day. There was a woman talking about all of the interesting things that had happened to her in her past, and how whenever she tried to write them down, the “voice” was wrong; it came out all wrong and it wasn’t any good. I thought, why didn’t she just write that down instead of saying it to her friends: that was, the way she told the story, just then, was surely as good as the story was ever going to be, so why not write it down, or record herself telling it and transcribe it later, and look at it to see if it’s a good story, or nearly as good as it would have been if, when you’d written it down, the voice had been right and it had been good.