Quote du Jour: So, you think you can write?

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The stars were shining like distant balls of gas, and you could see the janitors sitting on the roof of the library, sharing a cigarette. It was all very peaceful and beautiful with the janitors talking in Spanish and the imported words floating on top of our heads.

XXXX~ Music Through the Floor, "Essay #3: Leda and the Swan" - Eric Puchner
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Reportage: Murphy's Law

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"He felt like Murphy was so powerful that he couldn't do anything," she said.
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Reflections: The Terrorists Have Already Won

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“He is our priest, our parish priest, and whatever he’s done, we should support him and give him the opportunity to redeem himself,” one middle-aged woman said, declining to give her name.

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Rodak's Writings: A Consideration of Pride

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Rodak
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Pride

As with cops
and cholesterol
there are two kinds—

The bad one runs in herds.

All that huddled bleating
and conspicuous grazing
clogs the arteries of the soul—

Pride of place; pride of plaque.

The good kind—

though identified
and labeled
in its ostentatious paucity
by the defensive
non-comprehension
of the ubiquitous without—

having broken free, flows
straight to the heart—

essence identical
with purpose—

quietly unmoved
by its crisis-provoking
inwardness.
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Readings: One More Poem

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Here is another poem from the same Kay Ryan collection as is the one below. I find it to be, sadly enough, an apt gloss on my previous post:


CORNERS

All but saints
and hermits
mean to paint
themselves
toward an exit

leaving a
pleasant ocean
of azure or jonquil
ending neatly
at the doorsill.

But sometimes
something happens:

a minor dislocation
by which the doors
and windows
undergo a
small rotation
to the left a little

--but repeatedly.
It isn’t
obvious immediately.

Only toward evening
and from the
farthest corners
of the houses
of the painters

comes a chorus
of individual keening
as of kenneled dogs
someone is mistreating.
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Reflections: Bring Your Own Brush

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Here's a little pot of hot tar. Smear it where you will:

If they knew what was going on, they are criminally corrupt. If they did not know, they are just one more set of incompetent bureaucrats, dressed in red.

In either case, the glue now holding their gig together is called "plausible deniability."
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Readings: A Poem

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Here is a poem that I read on my recent trip:


GREAT THOUGHTS

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

~ Kay Ryan

So...any thoughts?
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