Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to. At rest on a stair landing, They feel it moving Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrors They rediscover The face of the boy as he practises tying His father's tie there in secret And the face of the father, Still warm with the mystery of lather. They are more fathers than sons themselves now. Something is filling them, something That is like the twilight sound Of the crickets, immense, Filling the woods at the foot of the slope Behind their mortgaged houses. – "Men at Forty" by Donald Justice

Stewie Griffin: Now then, I'm going to do something I call the "compliment sandwich", where I say something good, then talk about where you need improvement, and then end with something good. Brian Griffin: Whatever you gotta do. – via complimentsandwich.com

this poem quite possibly defined my writing style:

I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says. But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. – Frank O'Hara

…srsly.

Mrs. Hooten: Albert, what brought you to the philosophical club? Albert Markovski: You mean the existential detectives? Mr. Hooten: Sounds like a support group. Cricket: Why can't he use the church? Mrs. Hooten: Sometimes, people have additional questions to be answered. Cricket: Like what? Albert Markovski: Well, um, for instance: if the forms of this world die, which is more real, the me that dies or the me that's infinite? Can I trust my habitual mind, or do I need to learn to look beneath those things? –From I Heart Huckabees