I think it’s important not to be tone deaf about the current cultural climate. But I think there’s a difference between being tone deaf and playing a tune that people want to hear as a way of courting public approval.

“Slipping around the woman, who smiles at unconscious Caleb, Daddy Sami spends a minute in front of Frank (No. 7). Massive man, massive cigar, massive leather coat.”

They like to
say funny things
and to look at lovely things
and to feel, deeply, things.

“Recently, I’d begun to notice that my actions were only sometimes my own. Other times, they belonged to a familiar stranger whose life I’d been consigned to follow.”

“I write poems, and mostly my work doesn’t weave itself whole. There are no rhymes; no child would ever demand to hear it during snack.”

As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator.