There Are Many Ways To Drown, Only

By The Time I Make My Way To The Border Of Mauritania, To The Edge Of The Sahara, I See No End To Being Lost. You Can Spend Your Entire Life Simply Falling In That Direction. It Isn't A Station You Reach But Just The General State Of Going Down. Once You Make It Back, If You Make It Back, You Will Stand Before Your Long-lost Friends But In Some Essential Way They Will No Longer Know You.

Sometimes I'd See My Father, Walking Past My Building On His Way To Another Nowhere. I Could Have Given Him A Key, Offered A Piece Of My Floor. A Futon. A Bed. But I Never Did. If I Let Him Inside I Would Become Him, The Line Between Us Would Blur, My Own Slow-motion Car Wreck Would Speed Up. The Slogan On The Side Of A Moving Company Truck Read Together We Are Going Places--modified By A Vandal Or A Disgruntled Employee To Read Together We Are Going Down. If I Went To The Drowning Man The Drowning Man Would Pull Me Under. I Couldn't Be His Life Raft.

Everything We Do, I'd Imagine, Influences Everything We Will Do.

Inside Us, A Flower Taken Whole, A Field Built Inside.

That Soldiers Do Terrible Things During Wartime Should Not Surprise Us.