“It’s hard to love someone people think is not worth loving anymore,” the

              woman says to her friend at the café. 

 

Later, they talk about dogs, how she likes to guess who the owner is when

              she sees one waiting outside. She guesses, guesses wrong.

 

I get up and go, and they go on talking. 

 

The sun is shining but not hot, not too hot. 

 

This is rare. Something is usually always too something for me.

 

This is because I am very sensitive, which is another way of saying

              perpetually unsatisfied. 

 

It is difficult to find the right balance, any balance. 

 

Good writing is not balanced but life is, good life, that is. 

 

My life is good because it is increasingly balanced, or my life is good when it

              is balanced: both are true. 

 

My balance has always been bad—that’s why I couldn’t ride a bike till I was

              12, that’s why I was always falling off horses. 

 

I am easily shaken, shaken off. 

 

“His poems were just random collections of facts about himself. They were

              bizarre,” my adjunct friend says. 

 

The sand in my pockets falls out of my pockets.

 

He is reading some of my poems now, I am guessing he doesn’t like them. 

 

I am learning about comma splices and misplaced modifiers so I can teach

              my students how to avoid them. 

 

I myself learned how to write correctly without learning any terms I can

              remember. 

 

This means I’m lying to them, my students (that’s an appositive), when I say

              it is “critical” they learn these terms themselves. 

 

I met a college student who speaks two languages and doesn’t know what a

              subject is, a high school student who thinks a noun is an adjective. 

 

They were just given language and told to use it. 

 

I guess a mechanic given tools without being told how to use them might

              eventually figure it out, but she would probably end up using a 

 

hammer to crack open a nut. It works, but it smashes the nut.