The fruit bowl on the table convinced me that we had become more real than our paintings.  Strange, really, the power of its persuasion to this end.  Fruit bowls, usually wooden like the one on our table, were so often the quaint background to images that quietly captured someone else's profundity.  Painters like to use things like fruit bowls to say something equally simple and amazing about their subjects. Geniuses kept fruit bowls on their tables in cabins a day's travel from anywhere.  And dramatically melted, unburning candles.  Yeah, melted candles next to fruit bowls, in solitude, in ambiguously weathered kitchens in cabins in nowhere; those are places geniuses live.  That's why we paint them.

So I was surprised how little I cared about the fruit bowl or our weathered kitchen or the over-used splashes of parafin that were once candles strewn all about our cabin home, a day's drive from anywhere.  Because he left the room like he was going to throw up his heart.

Killing Troy Davis

A sentence is ringing in my head tonight.  It is a group of words that have long walked around in my mind, intimidating my other thoughts, humbling the notions I attempt to construct about the behaviors of our world. When I used to pray in the pews of my dad's church, I would often roll these words between folded palms, startled by their simple weight and all but crushed by the implications of their uttering.

"They know not what they do."

To All of Us

this is to climb a staircase to a room of sleeping loved ones,
to find a dream catcher

wriggling with strangled life

visions tangled in the lattice

this is for the clipping
let the leather dangle, dead and maimed

you, also, have wanted to rid your ankles of these laces