Like most of my poetry and short stories, I had not set out to write about what eventually formulated on the page. But unintended threads often turn out to be the ones most worth following.

I’ve always been a fast reader, apt to gulp pages whole. But engaging in this practice of copywork—with a gaze like my children’s, eagerly soaking up every brushstroke—forces me to slow down.

“The first stanza of “Parable” is true. I heard this line—“Where you live is more important than where you die”—and couldn’t put it aside. It struck me as one of those punch lines that are the end result of a life story, a parable.”

“The Coat on the Rack” is not entirely fictional; it grew out of my real life. My daughter is a devoted Harry Potter fan. She not only read the entire series but also watched every movie again and again. When she was five years old, after watching the films, especially the scenes with the Dementors, she became too frightened to sleep at night.

As I saw the carpet, the dog came forward. Someone stopped and said they also had such a dog. I can’t heal the dog, but by my willingness to witness both him and my own powerlessness at least he’s no longer lost.

Now that my wife and I live nomadically, including the last two years in Southeast Asia, I have developed a fondness for what I have coined, “Photo-Haikuism.” This allows me to integrate two spontaneous and place-oriented creative mediums into one holistic artistic synthesis. 

In a way, writing “If I had a ‘real’ penis, I’d name him Sting” was healing. It wasn’t healing in the traditional sense of the word—nothing was “fixed,” nothing “made whole”—but it did help restore at least a semblance of control, of autonomy.

Time is always being marked at a thousand different speeds around us. From the slow passage of landscapes to the instantaneous flesh-flash of a paper cut, our perception of movement from “now” to “now” to “now” is entirely subjective.