"Maturity begins to grow when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself."
-John Macnaughton

"God is infinite and without end, but the soul's desire is an abyss which cannot be filled except by a Good which is infinite; and the more ardently the soul longeth after God, the more she wills to long after him; for God is a Good without drawback, and a well of living water without bottom, and the soul is made in the image of God, and therefore it is created to know and love God."
-Johannes Tauler

"What is sacrifice? I believe it is nothing other than the boundless, no longer limitable resolve of a human being to reach his purest inner potential."
-Rainer Maria Rilke

"Each time anyone comes into contact with us, they must become different and better people because of having met us. We must radiate God’s love. We must know that we have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved. Love does not measure ... it just gives."
-Mother Teresa

Query

In that black pout
where you live,
do you really think
someone will come
to pull you out?

And if rescuers should
by some miracle appear,
would you hear them
above your whining
reptile tears?

And if they extend
weary hands to help,
will you be wise
and take a chance
for life to rise?

In a world so wide,
why would you choose
to forever dwell
in your own
private hell?

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

"Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery."
-A.S.W. Rosenbach

This and That

I've been thinking of friends
and how they come and go
and how I enjoy knowing
you

I've been thinking of games
and how we all play them
and how no one ever
wins

I've been thinking of love
and how it's a bastard
and how it's what we live
for

I've been thinking of the future
and how it keeps coming
and how we try to hold it
off

I've been thinking of joy
and how it likes to surprise
and how all the old cliches are
true

But mostly I've been thinking
how life isn't perfect but good
and how I love it and love
you

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

From Red Hot Sinner Man

   Alex wasn't what she'd been looking for. Abby hadn't been looking for a guy at all. She had joined Gallant and Sons to build a resume. She needed to rise above the rank and file and she needed to do it yesterday.
   She hadn't been able to finish college. She applied for grants and loans and worked two part-time jobs, but the money wasn't enough to pay for school and to take care of her younger brother and sister. So she quit school and worked days at the local Taco King and weekends at Gilbert's Git-N-Going convenience store. In what time she had left, she tried to be mom and dad to her siblings. It wasn't enough, but after a rough two years, Davie was making better grades and Alissa had stopped crying over every disappointment as if her heart had broken.
   It would have been easier if her parents had siblings or any close relatives, but their only living relative was a cousin who moldered in a nursing home and another cousin who lived halfway across the country. At eighteen, Abby became the head of their little family. A couple welfare workers had scared her by talking of taking Davie or maybe little Alissa, but Abby's fierce protectiveness and the fact the workers had too many children they had to rescue from abusive homes to worry about two orphans who were clean and well-fed. Occasionally someone would drop in and check on them, but the kids knew the drill.
   Last year the insurance company finally settled the suit from her parents' accident. Enough money to allow her to quit the Get-N-Go and look around for a better job. One that might let her earn more money and be way to an even better job.
   Her official title was Customer satisfaction Representative. From 8:30 to 5:00, she took phone calls and answered questions from The Gallant's customers. Some of those calls she handled, others had to be bumped on up. It hadn't taken her long to realize that the number of calls dropped some each month as the Internet help system became more sophisticated. Soon management would look around to make cuts, and as the newest CSP, she had only job insecurity.
   So during her breaks, she had taken to wandering the halls, trying to find a place that she could move to. She smiled and said hi and networked, networked, networked. She made copies and ran errands for other departments. She had a ton of "If I hear of anything, I'll buzz you immediately" and lots of "I wish they had hired you to do that job instead of whoever."
   That's what she had been doing when Alex threw up on her shoes.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2004.

"Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth."
-Victor Borge

"Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable."
-Augustine Birrell

From Red Hot Sinner Man

   Richard had owned the world until now. Always been that way. In school, he made all the teams, made the good grades, got the hot girls, drove the best cars, attended the right parties, he was cool. College was the same. Oh, the parties were wilder, the classes harder, the girls more numerous, the cars more expensive, but the McConnell's little heir deserved the best and he got it. He couldn't remember it any other way.
   Now, the Gallant -- the company that had been in his family since the 1700's and that had paid for all that college, all those cars, all those girls -- was going down with him at the helm.
   His grandfather and his father had made mistakes. They bought high and sold low too many times. They waited too long to moderize and didn't wait long enough to see if changes would help. Oh, success hadn't passed by the Gallant completely; otherwise, it wouldn't have survived, but too much red ink stained its pages over the years. And even though the mistakes of his predecessors caused the decline, he would be the one who would be blamed. The Gallant would go down on his watch.
   The choices on his desk: Close the Gallant or sell it to Van de Meter and Horn. Either selection would make his father spin in his grave and his mother spit on his shoes.
   He was beginning to think he didn't drink enough.

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

From Red Hot Sinner Man

   "So what is your problem?" Tony asked. "What did I do to you?"
   Andrea turned away.
   He hung up the phone. "I don't love you. I don't have to love you. It's my right to not love you."
   "That's not it!" she screamed.
   "Yes, it is," he said. "You've got your feelings hurt. You've got your friends saying that I should love you, that I'm a fool to not love you. But I'm not. I just don't love you! What is so damn hard about that?" He stood and threw his phone across the room.
   She jumped and took a step toward the door but stopped.
   "I don't love you," he said, breathing hard. "Does there have to be a villain? Is your world so limited that it can't have two people who care about each other, but aren't lovers?"
   "But ... but ... but I love ... you," she whispered.
   "Okay, you love me," he said sofly. "But that doesn't mean that I love you. I wish I could. I really wish I did. But I don't."
   "Why?" she asked, but she was already running out the office door.
   "Andrea ..." he said.
   She was gone.

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

"Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive."
-Archibald MacLeish

"Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life."
-Henry Miller

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. ...Step by step, the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing."
-Robert Frost

"The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always."
-Willa Cather

From Orc War

To the surprise of most people, orckind have honor. Admittedly a rough sort of one, but once an orc befriends you, he stays your friend to death and beyond. An "Orcfriend" is known in the orckind tongue as a "Nahgrumna." Orcfriends are rare, even among orcs and even more rare with other races. Ruan Ta'Hisvin, for instance, was the "Nahgrumna" of Tor, the one-time commander of the City Guard, and was the first Orcfriend for Tor's clan in over a century. There are even stories of an elf being an orcfriend, although most discount this as myth, considering the eons old war between the orcs and elves."
-Baron McFeddes, "Lecture on the Habits of Orckind"

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

"You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime."
-Dale Carnegie

"To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it -- this is a hard lesson."
-Bruce Catton

"We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you."
-Natalie Goldberg

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."
-Robert Frost

"Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
-Gandhi

"The value of compassion cannot be over-emphasized. Anyone can criticize. It takes a true believer to be compassionate. No greater burden can be borne by an individual than to know no one cares or understands."
-Arthur H. Stainback

"You've got to sing like you don't need the money. You've got to love like you'll never get hurt. You've got to dance like there's nobody watching. You've got to come from the heart, if you want it to work."
-Susanna Clark

"A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others."
-Leo Rosten

Tryst

And in these places
we meet, breath
and sweat joined

frantic mouths
hungry for touch
that burns us

no words enough
no sounds but
soft thrilling cries

gather our clothes
turn out lights
leave slowly

it's better if
it stays dark
in these places

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved

If I meet
You suddenly; I can't
speak -- my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass.
-Sappho from Fragment 2 of her surviving translated works

Today

I thought of you &
smiled
a surprise
that
time worked its way
with all the
pain
all the tragic
waste
the pure dreams
lost
the kisses never
tasted
the passion never
spent
but time doesn't
care
so
today
I thought of you &
smiled.

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead."
-Clarence Day

"Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, -- where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!"
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape."
-Arthur Christopher Benson