Every Life Deserves A Certain Amount Of

The Only Thing Poverty Does Is Grind Down Your Nerve Endings To A Point That You Can Work Harder And Stoop Lower Than Most People Are Willing To. It Chips Away A Person's Dreams To The Point That The Hopelessness Shows Through, And The Dreamer Accepts That Hard Work And Borrowed Houses Are All This Life Will Ever Be.

But I Hope I Will Never Have A Life That Is Not Surrounded By Books, By Books That Are Bound In Paper And Cloth And Glue, Such Perishable Things For Ideas Have Lasted Thousands Of Years . . . I Hope I Am Always Walled In By The Very Weight And Breadth And Clumsy, Inefficient, Antiquated Bulk Of Them, Hope That I Spend My Last Days On This Earth Arranging And Rearranging Them On Thrones Of Good, Honest Pine, Oak, And Mahogany, Because I Just Like To Look At Their Covers, And Dream Of The Promise Of The Great Stories Inside.

And Sandy Martindale ... Dated Elvis Before The Rhinestone Jumpsuits And The Drugs, When He Was Sharp And Cool And Jagged, Like Porcelain That Has Been Hurled Against A Wall.

It Was A Good Moment, The Kind You Would Like To Press Between The Pages Of A Book, Or Hide In Your Sock Drawer, So You Could Touch It Again.

This Is A Place Where Grandmothers Hold Babies On Their Laps Under The Stars And Whisper In Their Ears That The Lights In The Sky Are Holes In The Floor Of Heaven.