Man Wonders But God Decides When To

Families Without Songs Are Unhappy Families.

American Men Are Allotted Just As Many Tears As American Women. But Because We Are Forbidden To Shed Them, We Die Long Before Women Do, With Our Hearts Exploding Or Our Blood Pressure Rising Or Our Livers Eaten Away By Alcohol Because That Lake Of Grief Inside Us Has No Outlet. We, Men, Die Because Our Faces Were Not Watered Enough.

To Describe Our Growing Up In The Lowcountry Of South Carolina, I Would Have To Take You To The Marsh On A Spring Day, Flush The Great Blue Heron From Its Silent Occupation, Scatter Marsh Hens As We Sink To Our Knees In Mud, Open An Oyster With A Pocketknife And Feed It To You From The Shell And Say, 'there. That Taste. That's The Taste Of My Childhood.'

Rape Is A Crime Against Sleep And Memory; It's Afterimage Imprints Itself Like An Irreversible Negative From The Camera Obscura Of Dreams.

...when The Words Pour Out Of You Just Right, You Understand That These Sentences Are All Part Of A River Flowing Out Of Your Own Distant, Hidden Ranges, And All Words Become The Dissolving Snow That Feeds Your Mountain Streams Forever. The Language Locks Itself In The Icy Slopes Of Our Own High Passes, And It Is Up To Us, The Writers, To Melt The Glaciers Within Us. When These Glaciers Break Off, We Get To Call Them Novels, The Changelings Of Our Burning Spirits, Our Life's Work.