Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

An illicit charge runs through a list of "the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother's folding money, the poet's anus, the black holes in his heart-where his life went out of him." Not lift your arm to shield the light. [...]the mind begins to fustigate in its casing. The title Cooling Time is a legal term defined in the book's epigraph as "a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time 'to cool' after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder."