Arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next. Those may seem cynical sentiments, but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defen...
Why don’t you try to make me feel bad?
What kind of trees are those? I asked.Heartwood, my father said. They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear strea...
What happens outside of us doesn’t count. That’s something we don’t have control over. It’s what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that’s important.
We’re wayfaring strangers. We’re born alone, we die alone.
We’re going to call him Mr. Adorable. No, we’re going to call him Snuggs,
The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was los...
The Great Whore of Babylon is a commanding mistress. Once she widens her thighs and takes you inside her, she never lets go.
THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.
She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris...
People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.
No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It.
Jansenist
I’m tired of sackcloth and
It’s funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and join the Earth’s old dance through the heavens.
It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors...
If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of...
I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree -- it eventually finds the teeth...
I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going...
I messed my pants, he said.