A poem called: getting the girls to laugh. Drawing from life. Flush with light, saturated flesh exuding ideas, spilt and wasted on the ground.

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The title of a poem’s always the first line. But, as if mere stage directions, smuggled in, foolishly overlooked, as mere text in a poem.

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Hide it in how you say it. Strategy is power. Withholding is winning. Oh reader, my enemy, have I intrigued you?

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A writer who’s too smart revels in a private satisfaction, tickling nothing softer than his own desire for that softness. It hardens him.

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E pur si muove!

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To cross the line, to build a bridge during the movement of leaping itself, and to land, firma terra—Caesar with the soul of Aristophanes. To see, to come. To plant a seed within a flower.

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A daisy birthing daisies. Bouquet upon bouquet.  How the white laughter's in her mouth, red as roses.

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Loving the delicacy of his own subtlety, his loneliness rages against an unmoved tenderness.

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Counting is for slaves. Henceforth he will divide stanzas only by stars.

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A little boy charges at the seagulls on the pier to watch their supple gathering break against the double blues of water and sky and then reconfigure a stone toss away, nervous for it to begin again.

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How pleased, his face.

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Seagulls are hungry, base, and winged. You cannot fly with them.

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The other, seated in a desk behind them all, sees how it’s done. He wonders at the mystery and screams against the walls, doomed to his infinite ciphers.

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Youth is not lost more on the young than the thought of it spoils what of it the old still have.

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A boy in the classroom makes the girls laugh. The miracle jokes that it’s not the joke. The world is changed.