There are two important foundations upon which my poetry stands: (1) Epistemologically I am an empiricist, not a realist; (2) my poetry is not empirical. That is, it operates in the realm of the thought experiment –the laboratory of the mind. This demon is a good analogy to how I write poetry. I usually get the urge to write a poem after thinking about a question, or a fact. In Maxwell's gedankenexperiment the fact is the second law of thermodynamics, and the question is: What if a demon partitioned the fast and slow molecules in a box? Hence, there is this gedankenexperiment, and this is the general movement of my poetry. The poems begin with facts and/or questions, which arise from contiguous, often disparate events. Like Maxwell's demon, much of my poetry, and I suspect poetry in general, performs the activity of organization. But this is not all –the poem is an experiment. When writing a poem the mind puts things into a system, or takes them away, and then observes, and through observations transforms.