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I was all alone in a little room, nothing but that big gun in my face.

Am I here without me just as I was before when stars spoke.

Getting answers is easy. The difficult thing is knowing the right questions.

I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact.

I wish to see the land release my heart from the corpse of longing.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.

“One of my genetic gifts, and don’t you want to know what the other one is?”

Vultures liked to perch on the austere ledge outside my window.

I looked out at the busy world, and I saw nothing but its ugly bones.

He phones from across the country after lying in the grass with another.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio.

“You are a strange one,” she says. “Do you want to see my new tattoo?”

Song where a house becomes a dandelion in a puff of savage wind.

It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task.

Books are territory of the hands, hands that shook my spine.

We loaded the packs and started down, into the bluing of dusk.

She says, It’s so difficult to find a good guy. My lips form a half smile.

I fell asleep wondering to whom the tree might have been writing.

He touched her bruise more softly than an elevator button.

“Why don’t you call yourself Butterfly?” he said. “A pretty thing like you.”

The handwritten first draft pages of Robert Olen Butler's first novel.

Handwritten drafts of “Byzantium,” “Easter, 1916,” and other poems.

Up north people hunt bears using gummy bears as bait.

I returned to Vietnam with a tape recorder to collect ca dao.

The purpose of all rules of piety is to extend revelation into ordinary life.

I am wet with circuitry. And I doubt I could ever save anyone.

The mortician who painted our girl was not a somber-suited officiant.

“Are all the girls really beautiful? Is it true you make out in the showers?”

I’m a theatrical lyricist. I would never choose to look fat in public.