Poem on the Fridge

The refrigerator is the highest honor
a poem can aspire to. The ultimate
publication. As close to food as words
can come. And this refrigerator poem
is honored to be here beneath its own
refrigerator magnet, which feels like a medal
pinned to its lapel. Stop here a moment
and listen to the poem humming to itself,
like a refrigerator itself, the song in its head
full of crisp, perishable notes that wither in air,
the words to the song lined up here like
a dispensary full of indispensable details:
a jar of corrugated green pickles, an array
of headless shrimp, fiery maraschino cherries,
a fruit salad, veggie platter, assortments of
cheeses and chilled French wines, a pink
bottle of amoxicillin: the poem is infectious.
It's having a party. The music, the revelry,
is seeping through this white door.

"I have thought a lot about being things since trying to be an onion," Harriet writes in her notebook. "I have tried to be a bench in the park, an old sweater, a cat, and my mug in the bathroom. I think I did the mug best because when I was looking at it I felt it looking back at me and I felt like we were two mugs looking at each other. I wonder if grass talks."

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet you can't win.

Dear Truth

I do not love you.
I am running away
with my beloved
illusions. The sweet
nothings. Nothing
is what it seems.
I love what seems.
I am crazy in love with
the painfully obvious
transparent surface.
I am simply hungry.
You keep the house
and everything in it.
I am taking the dog.
And the windows.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Be wise, because the world needs more wisdom. And if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.

It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.

I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled.

...I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.

...I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.

(The Beatrice Letters)

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

If I could sum it up in fifty words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

Sure it's simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard - by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.