---
title: Autocento of the breakfast table
id: first-lines
subtitle: index of first lines
genre: prose

project:
    title: About Autocento
    class: meta
    next:
    - title: About _Autocento_
      link: about
    prev:
    - title: Index of common titles
      link: common-titles
...

[A dead man finds his way into our hearts](deadman.html)
[a dog moving sideways is sick; a man moving sideways is drunk.](movingsideways.html)
[ART and CRAFT are only the inside and outside of the same building.](building.html)
[Abraham, Abraham, you are old and cannot hear:](angeltoabraham.html)
[after searching for days or even months](big-dipper.html)
[and you were there in the start of it all](and.html)
[apparently typewriters need ribbon.](tapestry.html)
[Bottom of the drink: they had](ex-machina.html)
[contents of the shed](paul.html).

["Can one truly describe an emotion?"  Eli asked me over the walkie-talkie.](statements-frag.html)
[Case Duckworth is the cowardly but lovable Great Dane who solves mysteries on TV.](about_author.html)
[Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle](last-bastion.html).
["Do you have to say your thoughts out loud for them to mean anything" Paul asked Jill on his first coffee break at work.](question.html)
[EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME](planks.html).
[EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME](swear.html).
[God is love, they say, but there is](love-as-god.html)
[hymn 386: jokes](window.html).

[He builds a ship as if it were the last thing](shipwright.html)
[he chopped down: a sapling pine tree and looked at his watch.](sapling.html)
[He couldn't find a shirt to go to work in.](toothpaste.html)
[He didn't go back into the shed for a long time.](wallpaper.html)
[He didn't have any polish so he spit-shined the whole thing,](deathstrumpet.html)
[he dropped the penny in the dryer, turned it on, and turned around.](underwear.html)
[He is so full in himself:](squirrel.html)
[He looked down at his hands idly while he was typing.](hands.html)
[He said at the beginning, "It's like rolling yarn into a too-small ball.](ouroboros_memory.html)"
[He sat down at his writing desk and removed his new pen from its plastic wrapping.](writing.html)
[He shrugged the wood off his shoulder, letting it fall with a clog onto the earth floor of his Writing Shack.](leaf.html)
[He walked into the woods for the first time in months.](stump.html)
[He was born on a few separate occasions: green traffic lights at night](about-the-author.html).
[He woke up after eleven and didn't go outside all day, not even to his Writing Shack.](cereal.html)
[He would enter data at work for fifty minutes and then go on break.](yellow.html)
[He wrote JOKES on the top of a page in his notebook.](joke.html)

["Hello Paul this is Jill Jill Noe remember me" the voice on the phone was a woman's.](phone.html)
[His first chair was a stool.](leg.html)
[His mother drove him to the Hardware Store on a Tuesday.](hardware.html)
[His mother ran out of the house in her nightgown.](fire.html)

["How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite," Jack Gilbert opens his poem "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."](words-meaning.html)
[How does one describe a poem?](on-genre-dimension.html)
[I am a great pillar of white smoke.](i-am.html)
[I can walk through the rain, that rare occurrence](walking-in-the-rain.html).
[I didn't write this sestina yesterday.](exasperated.html)
[I don't care if they burn he wrote on his last blank notecard.](snow.html)
[I hear the rats run](in-bed.html).
[I lost my hands & knit replacement ones](roughgloves.html).
[I need a plant.  I need a thing](plant.html).
[I only write poems on the bus anymore.](sense-of-it.html)
[I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.](epigraph.html)
[I saw two Eskimo girls playing a game](weplayedthosegamestoo.html)
[I think that I could write formal poems](onformalpoetry.html);
[I thought I saw you walking](i-think-its-you.html).
[I turned off the TV as soon as the end credits began.](dollywood.html)

[I want to say I take it all back](i-want-to-say.html),
[I wanted to tell you something in order to](i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html) ---
[I was away on vacation when I heard ---](howithappened.html)
[I wish I'd kissed you when I had the chance.](time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html)
[I'm writing this now because I have to.](poetry-time.html)
[If Justin Bieber isn't going for the sixteenth](sixteenth-chapel.html) ---
[if you swallow hard enough](listen.html) ---
[importance is important.](philosophy.html)
[Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.](riptide_memory.html)

["Is man the natural thing that makes unnatural things" he thought to himself as he looked out the kitchen window at the shed.](father.html)
[It had gotten cold.](dream.html)
[It was a gamble](stayed-on-the-bus.html);
[it was one of those nameless gray buildings that could be seen from the street only if Larry craned his neck to almost vertical.](telemarketer.html)
[It's all jokes Paul wrote in what he was now calling his Hymnal.](hymnal.html)
[January.](january.html)

"[Like 40 as I challenge anyone to come too!](call-me-aural-pleasure.html)
[Look, I say --- look here ---](found-typewriter-poem.html)
[Lost things have a way of staying lost.](amber-alert.html)"
[Man of autumn, cold wind,](cold-wind.html)
[memory works strangely, spooling its thread](last-passenger.html).

["My anger is like a peach," he said.](peaches.html)
"[My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.](spittle.html)"
[My head is full of fire, my tongue swollen,](the-night-we-met.html)
[nothing is ever over; nothing](nothing-is-ever-over.html) ---
[nothing matters; everything is sacred.](proverbs.html)
[Now the ticking clocks scare me.](boar.html)

[Of course, there is a God.](prelude.html) ---
[Okay, so there either is or isn't a God.](purpose-dogs.html)
[On your desk I set a tangerine:](seasonal-affective-disorder.html)
[Paul began typing on notecards.](notes.html)

[Paul only did his reading on the toilet.](toilet.html)
[Paul took his axe and went out into the woods to chop trees.](axe.html)
[Paul was writing in his diary about art.](art.html)

["Paul, you can't turn in your reports on four-by-six notecards" Jill told him after he handed her his reports, typed carefully on twelve four-by-six notecards.](reports.html)
["Riding the bus to work is a good way to think or to read" Paul thought to himself on the bus ride to work.](stagnant.html)

[Say there are no words.  Say that we are conjoined](elegyforanalternateself.html):
[silence lies underneath us all in the same way](music-433.html)
[it's the fucking moon.  Big deal.  As if](apollo11.html)
[two hyperintelligent pandimensional beings](creation-myth.html)
[feel as though I am not a real writer.](real-writer.html)
[Somewhere I remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone, at least that in the early stages.](words-irritable-reaching.html)

[Swans fly overhead singing goodbye](swansong.html):
[THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES](man.html).
[TREATISE ON LITERATURE AS "SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE"](treatise.html):
[the definition of happiness is _doing stuff that you really like_.](likingthings.html)
[The look she gave me (Half-hours in heaven are three times that in hell)](table_contents.html).
[The moon is drowning the stars it pushes them](moon-drowning.html) ---
[The moon is gone and in its place a mirror.  Looking at the night sky now](moongone.html),
[the other side of this mountain](mountain.html):
[the problem with people is this: we cannot be happy.](problems.html)
[The radio is screaming the man](worse-looking-over.html) ---
[the self is a serengeti](serengeti.html) ---
[there are more modern ideals of beauty](todaniel.html) ---
[there is a cave just outside of Flagstaff made from ancient lava flows.](what-we-are-made-of.html)

[There is a theory which states the Universe](initial-conditions.html),
[this book, is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be lived.](howtoread.html)
[This poem is dry like chapped lips.](swansong-alt.html)
[Tonight, as I look up, the stars](finding-the-lion.html),
[waiting for a reading to start](the-sea_the-beach.html),
[walking along in the dark, is a good way to begin a song.](lovesong.html)

[Walter rides the bus into work on Wednesday morning when he realizes, with the force and surprise of a rogue current, that he is in the home-for-death phase of life.](lappel-du-vide.html)
[We found your shirt deep in the dark water](theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html) ---
[what did he do when he was in the woods?](options.html)

["What do you do all day in that shed out back" his mother asked one night while they ate dinner in front of the TV.](shed.html)

[What is a poem?](manifesto_poetics.html)
[What is poetry?](arspoetica.html)
[What secrets does it hold?](largest-asteroid.html)
[When I think of death I think](death-zone.html),
[when Ronald McDonald takes off his striped shirt,](ronaldmcdonald.html)
[when he finally got back to work, he was surprised they threw him a party.](punch.html)
[When he said Bible I heard his southern accent](boy_bus.html):
[whenever you call me friend](100-lines.html)
[while chopping a tree in the woods with his hatchet (a Christmas gift from his mother) a bird he'd never heard before cried out.](x-ray.html)
[While swimming in the river](no-nothing.html):
[YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART ART MUST BE CREATED he sat on the couch at home while his mother watched TV and smoked.](early.html)

[You never can tell just when Charlie Sheen will enter your life.](feedingtheraven.html)
[You think building Hoggle's a hard game?](hard-game.html)
[Your casserole dish takes the longest:](when-im-sorry-i.html)
[in mammals the ratio between bladder size](something-simple.html)
[has been a part of the Unix toolset since the late 70s.](collage-instrument.html)