If things are just themselves, what do we know of things?

The moon? Clouds? Herons?

Are they decorative objects?

Details on the surface of the actual?

What is a human skull worth—really, what is the cost?

I want to purchase a human skull.

I want to know what happens to desire when you’re dead—should your desires be respected?

You can have your ashes embedded in a record, so your survivors can listen to your death.

You can turn all the carbon in your body into artificial diamonds—you can want that.

My friend the undertaker wanted to be turned into a diamond, then embedded in his own skull, a decorative object.

An undertaker takes the body under, a coincidence of language. (It’s just a euphemism: an undertaking.)

What you wanted, once you’re dead, is the real without feeling.

Desires with no one to want them.

Random Assignment

It seems to want to rain but can’t.

It fades to pink, an argument.

Relinquish the dream.

You can’t ever get what you want,

You can’t please any of the people

Any of the time.

Time just lies there,

Not fast or slow,

Any more than a line.

I wonder if the very small ants are afraid

Of the big ants, if they ever cross paths.

I wonder if happiness is ethical.

I’d like to do it all again

In silence now, in darkness,

A wasp in a fig.

Stop Thinking & End Your Problems

I met a woman with a tumor in her language center. She would think about what she wanted to say, then hear her thought in the voice of the person she was talking to, so it felt like they were reading her mind.

I think there is a name for this, but can’t remember what it is.

I think “clarity” is kind of a poorly defined idea.

I think it would still work with more distance.

I think I pray a lot now; prayer just isn’t what I thought it was.

Whether or not I believe in God (I don’t), “God” is so useful, as language. I can’t think without the word God.

I think we expect too much of people, who are mostly suffering and confused.

I think we make the mistake of thinking that “history” is truer than experience is true.

I think “grateful to be alive” is a feeling you can maintain for one or two days, tops.

I think every well-meaning critique-of-war film will eventually turn into “explosions look beautiful.”

I think if you read a poem, then forget you’ve read it, and then much later you read it again, it really does get better.

I think maybe sadness and happiness are alike, but unhappiness is different.

I think pleasure is a basic human need, but eating isn’t resistance, we just need to eat.

If you order hot tea in a restaurant, I automatically think you’re not very fun.