Patiently waiting for that person to return. We find ourselves talking too much. Sick of the sound of our own voice. Self-consciousness restricts creativity. Better to write nothing at all?

‘Little architect of the universe’. Anything can shrivel up, disappear, cease to exist. You may be bigger and stronger than everyone else, but the abyss could swallow you tomorrow.

Did your school have this procedure for your homework? A digital file wasn’t the ‘real thing.’ The text became real when it was on paper.

I always have. But even if I didn’t, the U.S. government could find me. Traits I believe are ethical are what authoritarians target. Being ethical is not safe. In times of political upheaval, it never is.

‘The deduction came in a rush: I had been alive before’. ‘I could just as easily have held my tongue, or saved my comment for another time. This realization came, as always, too late,’ Abby says in ‘Gyre’.

With the background of how I wrote it. I didn’t know what to do with three poems I lost and half-forgot. Now I hear Jacob’s epiphany as a kind of rude magic. The poems come back to me.