And into the great empty quarter of America I went. Like a bottle of malt liquor or a boy’s asshole, America is. Sing that, Walt Whitman. My country ‘tis of thee … Oh, bountiful.

If I were God, it’d be a whole different story, dropping fruit at will. Let them eat apples.

I felt my heart crack slowly like a pomegranate, spilling its seeds.

How many of these children would one day be queer? How many would be felled by the acronym? How many by something else? How many would forget the circus? How many would never see it at all? How many would join?

The world is your oyster, they say, so fill it with pearls of semen.

The only good soul is a lost soul, and only a lost soul can find its way home.

Jaded. I never understood the term. Jade is pretty and worth something, yes? I was rusted if I was anything. Too long in the rain. Going out in an orange blaze of muted, anonymous, common-as-dirt oxidation.

Everybody has a place.

Love was actually more like calculus or physics. What was the half-life of love? Did it have cosigns and slopes, or quarks that morphed from wave to particle faster than you could say, please don’t leave?

Yellowdog, where does sorrow go?”He held his heart. “Lives here, in each of us.