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I get irrational if I'm trying to go to sleep alone. I need a light on, and music, and no windows open, even if it's dadblamed hot. Otherwise ninjas with grappling hooks will steal the KitchenAid, right?

Ritual self-deprecation is like knocking on wood. Self-confidence, like praising your own child, is taboo.

If you swallow a watermelon seed, a melon will grow in your tummy. Quit your individual computer programs before hitting Start to shut down Windows and your PC. If you're a good little child all year, a magical man on a big sled will sneak into your house as you sleep helplessly, to give you gifts.

A darker-than-intended sonnet that's been sloshing around my head for weeks if not months, finally put down on paper in front of Lincoln's statue in Union Square:

Like ivy on a plaited trellis wall,
We climb up cities -- but we build them too.
If ivy could create more height to crawl,
We'd drown in it -- the poison of kudzu.
Like limbs, each building serves as human's tool,
Each skeleton bound to a certain cause.
Offices, flats, the classrooms of a school.
Architectures force behavior more than laws.
	The scaffolding you ride past in your car
	Grows up, makes cities, makes you who you are.

I visited Hiroshima.  The bank
Stayed standing, there, even after the blast.
The workers died, the neighborhood went blank.
All flesh was grass; that skeleton held fast.
An electronic pulse, a neutron bomb --
What fossils will the humans leave behind?
A signature, a bone, a bust, and calm?
We used up Earth and left an orange rind.
	Will ivy grow on that bank's granite wall?
	Our blood and treasure, slaves in cancer's thrall.