by Tennessee Williams

After you’ve been to bed together for the first time, without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance, the other party very often says to you, Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you, what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you lying together in completely relaxed positions like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, until the oh is just an audible breath, and then of course

there’s some interruption. Slow room service comes up with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror. And then, the first thing you know, before you’ve had time to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story, they’re telling you their life story, exactly as they’d intended to all along,

and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming no more than an audible sigh, as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left, draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion and stops breathing forever. Then?

by W.S. Merwin

by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider — lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

by Tony Hoagland

Remember teaching yourself to spell February? You had to pronounce it in your head before writing it -- Feb-ru-ary, the ru is silent.

Oda Iselin Sønderland, “The Will”