Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.


Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?
Ron Koertge

so Edgar didn't rush off

If age teaches you anything, then one of the lessons is certainly not to hurry if you're already late...

Day Watch
Sergei Lukyanenko

I dont belong here.

I want you to notice
When I'm not around

Creep
Radiohead

welcome baby peters!

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Romeo and Juliet
Act II Scene 2

In the end,

In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides

fall in love with the sadness of another

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another

The First Dream
Billy Collins

a second chance

She closed the door behind him but he didn't hear it lock.

Cold Pursuit

T. Jefferson Parker

Tegan Olivia 8lbs 13oz

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Elizabeth Stone

Before She Died

When I look at the sky now, I look at it for you.
As if with enough attention, I could take it in for you.

Before She Died [excerpt]
Karen Chase

the vehicle that drove my spirit forward

...my father used to say, "If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die." I thought about these words during my journey, and they kept me moving even when I didn't know where I was going.

A Long Way Gone
Ishmael Beah