As of January 27, 2006, Western Union discontinued its telegram services, thus sounding the death knell for one of the first forms of more or less immediate long-distance communication.

I was just watching Don Letts’ excellent punk documentary Punk Attitude, and within ten minutes it had underscored a very key idea: the punk spirit ultimately boils down to a resounding, life-affirming NO.

The artist Mary Mattingly started working on the Water Pod and the Wearable Water Home a few years ago: “I was just really scared.

I owed my father a thousand dollars for twelve years.

These 900 pages would not exist without Johnny Ball.

Edith told herself she wasn’t going to date now that she was a grandmother.

Doris joined the Ziegfeld Follies Chorus at a salary of $10 a week.

He would have no objection to the study of nations.

When we consider everything we’ve failed / to do, does it really matter that our progeny / will know us only by the lists of things / we intended to buy?

What and what and what and what / reiterate the clouds

Everyday I wake blindly / to work so as to live

As if he once was someone’s son / but not now.

There remain whispers. These were, are.

Bring me the sunflower so that I might / transplant it into burning fields of alkali

Sarcastic reparations     find Chile on the map     find Oshkosh / find the family farm

Over and over the word fragile.

This morning I received a letter ostensibly from my friend Niklas Nummelin.

In Cartagena, Luis says, the beach is gray at dawn.

I used to think of Russia as a giant and unfortunate jellyfish—a hapless invertebrate, throbbing with ancient cells, which keeps having skeletons dropped on it from above: “Become this!”

As an ordinary ancient day began and the sun lit up the tense green of the country, Firs was summoned to the Tsar of Kutemalia.

Vladimir Arkhipov is a self-taught artist who works in the genre of objects and installations.

No one recognized me.

You might have been expecting a note from me sooner than this!

some people passed across freshly fallen / wet snow and where their soles / touched down / the earth turned dirty black

“A dangerous battle is taking place in the air…”

in a TV report / about the victims of the war in Chechnya / there are shots from a hospital

… along the shore of the noisy sea walked the soldier Ay Bee Cee.

The old horseradish, he already longs For nothing, I mean, this strangeness.

How easy it is for a person to get tangled up in insignificant things.

The quiet water swayed at my feet.

Come over here towards me, if you please.

“In Europe, in past centuries, a judge put on a black hat to proclaim a verdict,” I tell the next group.

We were each like a tree grown in a cage.