Poetry braces us with words
against political violence.

Philosophy speaks lightly
into the darkness of science.

After two and a half millennia of Western metaphysics, you'd think we'd have learned to live with a little dualism.

Ignorance is to knowledge
as impotence, to power.

Freedom is to feeling
as limits, to thought.

To know your thoughts
but ignore your feelings

is like mastering your feelings
only to be enslaved by thought.

Rain is not precise. It falls willy-nilly
here-and-there. It doesn't care whose
birthday it is, nor know when to let up.

It's not as if I know not seems,
but the surfaces the mind presents
as things to do break the heart
with all the people still to see.

Try only to understand your cowardice. Let your courage remain a mystery.

Reference is to sense
as deference to motive.

Some words are indications,
others, supplications.

There are things we understand
and people we obey.