“When someone arrives suddenly, standing straight-backed on your front lawn in full military dress, not even bothering to ring the doorbell - just standing there squinting in the sun, waiting to be noticed - when someone arrives unannounced like this you can be sure he’s come to change your life.”

                       

                     ~ Hello, I Must Be Going

“The times are strange, and the ways we kill ourselves even stranger.  In the course of a year we receive letters from our missing fathers - men who have worked their whole lives as lumberjacks, gravediggers, butchers, fishermen - but now these men send word they’re recovering from strokes in government funded rehab centers, elastic bands cinched around the upper arm, serums shot into blown veins, the glorious state of bed sores and perpetual pajamas.  They write this with their left hands, their script wild and slanting across the page, like lost kites.”

                                                                                          ~ A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw

 

"We were poor, our lives filled with the

stupid things that poor people did, all the brutalities we committed against each other, the violence, the petty victories we claimed over one another, crabs topping each other in a basket instead of trying to climb out of that basket: the desperate, impulsive lurches we made at love, no matter what the cost to those around us or how fleeting we knew that love would be: the indifference; all that we drank and smoked and shot into our veins: the hours we spent at grueling, mind-numbing jobs, one day after another, how, in order to survive these jobs, we scraped our minds clean like plates, cleared them of all thought; our prayers, if we prayed at all, sent off in rages, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Goddamned Christ. We were poor.”


        ~ Elegies for the Brokenhearted