Extra Sents.

When I write--more frequently with essays, but also with poems--I often have leftovers. Phrases and sentences that I can't find a place for, but which I don't want to delete forever. So the Documents folder of my computer is riddled with files containing the abbreviated phrase "extra sents" -- words that remain, useless. What follows is a sampling, connected.

The novel is a collection of tales that, as a whole, tells a story of upheaval.
Truth exists only in the present; the past cannot speak for itself. This, at first, seems rather trite and the reader rushes past it in search of a more inventive thought. She wants to bring the two ends of the dichotomy together and tie them in a knot, but this does not take seriously the distinctions between persons -- in the “Occasional Strings Attached” way. (An admonition just vague enough to make me think.) This self-interrogation turned supplication is a last-ditch effort to follow a path set out for him by prescriptions from a childhood that has literally fragmented into tangents in a classroom: What starts a wildfire but a single burning bush? (But with this question, he asks not of his classroom but of his neck. (That’s not a confession. Just something I’ve been told.))