The wordhouse is not a birdcage

1. The whole house is sick with something.

2. It's the water in the shower that makes me sing.

3. The horse in the dream is called Flaming Tonsils. That's the name he has received. We can change it to something more sophisticated but that would be a lie.

4. Justice is understanding; punishment's something else.

5. Memory's the kid who didn't read books but wrote aphorisms almost daily, not knowing the word "aphorism," as if the world needed to know his wisdom born of ignorance; who wrote down his failing thoughts as if there were power in them, feeble mind cranking out simplicities like "Violence is not an answer, it's only a prayer."

6. Irony, that mercenary, combining the head-on march of a pawn with the jump-over hook of a knight.

7. In these days of the Clean Skies Act and Operation Iraqi Freedom, it's the warriors—soldiers and hawks—that are called the children of God.

8. Sitting on the crapper, I close my eyes and see Flaming Tonsils in silhouette against the big bald sun.

9. Life in this world is blood in the stools.

10. The whole house is sick with something. In the end, there are those who cry and those who want to.