Gnomic Utterances

Blowing the dust off old aphorisms.

Youth Is a Fugitive

that thinks it’s a hostage.
You know the labyrinth has an exit
if you can feel the wind.
Hell is an orgy of everyone you know;
heaven an orgy of strangers.
Just the faint glimmer of
the possibility of love
instantly gerrymanders your entire past.
An exotic analogy to which no one relates
but to which people wished they related
will always outcirculate an actually apt
analogy to which people actually relate.
A child surprised that a neon sign
isn’t hot the first time they touch one
knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one’s goals.
The amount of muffin left stuck to the wrapper
when you open it
is the percent of your childhood
that was the way you remember it.
Crime is a dream justice has when it sleeps.
Boredom is the cruelest aphrodisiac.
All you need is love
to have a home in every moment
and all you need is poetry
to have it be a mansion.
Desire rudders a ghost ship.
Believing in God is like believing
in an endless stream of letters following Z.
Loving anything more than yourself
is like a misquote that clears you of plagiarism.
Cowardice is the fear of suffering;
courage the fear of wrongdoing.
Nothing is purer than gratitude
and because it’s so pure
it’s the first thing to blow away when the wind blows.
Anything is possible
but everything is too expensive.
History is stranger than truth or fiction.
The eyes are teeth that see.
Grace is a diaper you never have to change.
Morning, a more convincing dream.
Life is long for a brief time
then brief for a long time.
The problem with irony
is that it is too soothing.
It suggests a pattern to tragedy
and therefore mitigates the terror that tragedy is random.
Were tragedy patternless, we’d be meaningless
and all the ironies of literature are a dam against this despair.

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Originally published in Returning the Sword to the Stone by Fonograf Editions in 2021.

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