I am repetitive function, he said, and you are decorative. Existence depends on quality of performance. To avoid termination, I must not err, and you must not break.

Peter Sakievich's biography claims simply, "I am alive!" We couldn't have said it better.

"I'd say I have an auditory mind—I hear all the scenes in my head, the characters speaking, the background sounds, and so on. I also hear the flow of the narrator's words. . . ."

in the speculative poem, the poet presents an unreal world as though presenting the real one. This may seem an easy piece of nonsense. It was, however, an extremely hard kind of nonsense to achieve. A poet could not truly do this until society, or at least an important part of society, was capable of perceiving the real world for what it was.

Not clean light, after all: not sweet atomic / absolution of our myriad sins / in one swift Lenten smear of ash, faint thumbprint / shadow on a shattered concrete sky.