I do not tell young lovers I am getting divorced or that I am married, but soon not to be. I would not want to suffer some doubt in their idyllic world.

“The first thing I can remember, I’m two years old and I’m in my little white dress and I have my purple gingham little kitty kat in my hand, and I’m standing on the back stairs of my grandmother’s house in Mississippi, and my mom and grandmother are hanging laundry to dry on the clothesline. It was two or three lines strung up from one of those T things. I can feel the breeze, warm across my arm.”

As all poets must, he is fascinated with women. Poets traffic in beauty, and for some, women are Beauty’s currency.

“- because I’m anemic.”

“Beats and carrots are good for that? No. Not carrots, but beats, and what else?”

“Beans and stuff, but you can’t eat beans in my family. If you eat beans, they lock you away for everyone’s safety. It’s a genetic trait.”

“Ha. My brother is pretty talented in that area.”

“My father isn’t soo bad. You’re forewarned, but my mom — My dad’s are loud and not too bad, but my mom’s are either loud and okay, or silent and deadly. If you’re around my mom and your nose starts to tingle, run. Just get out of there. If you feel your nose hairs start to curl, ohmagosh.

“My dad, when I was a kid — ohmagod — he was so bad. We’d be in the store or at Walgreen’s and he’d just drop one right there and move on, cause it lingers — that used to be my song for him, that song by the Cramberries — ‘do you have to… do you have to… do you have to let it linger‘ — he did that once, and I turned to my sister and sang that song and she just cracked up — and you’d be several aisles over and you’d hear someone cough hack hack!“

Whenever the appreciation or practice of art interferes with commerce, art is outlawed. Amongst those of self-declared moral or ethical codes, the fundamental opposition between art and commerce highlights the hypocrisy founding their worldviews. One cannot pretend towards moral life and condemn art of any kind. All ethics deify creation, art’s defining act; constraining art constrains creation; constrains the constrainer. And like the serpent who consumes his own tail, you swallow yourself, you consume into oblivion. The consumer’s only recourse is Oblivion.