If we knew what was good for us, we’d never benefit from placebos.

The root of all conflict is in perception.  In as much as words have to do with perception. Some of the dumbest people I know are brilliant.

There is a human faculty which ceaselessly seeks to unearth all previously acquired notions and diminish their strength and influence in the consciousness.  Realizations, moments of clarity, become indistinguishable from past uncertainties no longer present.

The track homes have been held off for now. They are a third through and now sunken plots framed by gravel drives make up the dotted line. They are gray, they are identical. The dark windows straddle an angled entry that appears to me an ominous sneer. A green mountain stops abruptly beyond the field. A perfect orb, an exhausted turtle who’s collapsed at their pier blocks. A bald stripe tears across it’s entire middle. A disturbed patient, dumped in his robe in a mountainous back-alley.

The mosquitoes are dive-bombers. They are the size of small wasps, but their bodies are so thin, like strands of taut silk inspired to sting. They go for the ribs. They are big enough to snatch out of the air. To carry a wiffle bat and pock its surface with bloody splotches and crinkled wax paper wings.

All I know is my eyes are like tiny pockets. I see so little and have been so lost.  I am not from here, but I wish they would let me take up residence. 

The range of words

spanning  fears and freedom buzzing

clutter the space

where dustballs stagger like ancient ruins

eroding beneath the clawfoot

She doesn’t want my eyes

which makes it easier to pour

their peril through tiny

portholes, iris

A rigid kiss I wish would melt

and cover my body like hot wax

I shy from language

and we speak of pain

with beating hearts

and trailing tips that

dance the ridges

we take turns sleeping

facing out, pressing our backs

accepting both that

we are not our best

always in winter 

I have swallowed

many a wish

yearnings from my belly

she would cradle

my divisions

and I’d

become bouyant

like a ship resealed

Morning Edition, January 18, 2008 · Anna and Joseph Wise, childhood sweethearts, were married for 57 years. They met when she was 8 and he was 11.

“I was madly in love with him and I thought surely that I would marry him when I was old enough,” she says.

How did she persuade him?

“Well, I was sassy,” she says. “I turned on all the tricks that I knew, and winked an eye or two now and then.”

On their first date, Joseph Wise took Anna to a baseball game.

“I was perfectly willing to go there or anywhere else,” she says.

On their dates, they “danced the night away,” she says. “We went to speakeasies. We did all things you’re not supposed to do.”

In 1933, the couple “just sort of agreed it was time to get married,” she says.

After nearly six decades of marriage, Joseph Wise lost a leg to diabetes, then died due to complications from the disease in 1991.

“We never know what diseases are going to catch up with us,” Anna Wise says. “It’s amazing the things that people can live through when they have to. So you get through it.

“And you get through almost anything and you live to be 96. And sometimes you wonder why. But then … you look up at the blue sky and think it’s going to be alright.”

Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?