... a piece of trash.

I feel the inexorable gravity of the entity's psychokinetic grasp tugging at my guts and howling at my mind.

—by a trashy novelist who will go unnamed. I love that it's the grasp's gravity that howls (!!??).

Whenever I feel bad about my own day's writing, it pays to read trash.

... a blank-verse play.

How brisk am I! My body moves on springs! My stature gives no inch I throw away; my supple joints play free and sportfully; I’m every atom what a man should be.

—Sir William Fondlove, in James Sheridan Knowles’s The Love-Chase, Act V.

... a euphemism.

He waved the glass of water away, and me, and sat back in that yellow armchair, and he simply died. The silence in my husband's ear was never more to be broken.

—Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination, p. 81.

... an erotic tale.

"I would like, for my entire life, to be within the walls of a prison, where only you and I would be, where we are united so thoroughly and you are hidden in my arms so well, that not one eye would suspect you were there. I would like to be the fruit that you eat, the fragrance that gives you pleasure, the sleep that enters under your eyelids, the love that enlivens your body." ...

The wind intermingled their hair.

—Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite, chapter 6. Translated by Mary Hanson Harrison.

... most of a paragraph.

From its stationary position, Mr Norfolk's car began slowly to move and Gerald could discern the bent figures of the boys [pushing] at the back of it, trying against inertia and gradient to get up a reasonable speed. Mr Norfolk himself sat motionless, hands on steering wheel, with a detached yet anxious expression, as of an artist showing his creations to an important critic.

—Roy Fuller, The Ruined Boys, p. 136.

... a speech from a play.

Galileo: Yes, I am dissatisfied, and that's what you'd be paying me for if you had any brains. Because I'm dissatisfied with myself. But instead of doing that you force me to be dissatisfied with you.

—Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, Scene 1. Galileo is complaining to the university procurator that they don't pay him enough, so he has to waste his precious time teaching to make ends meet, instead of solving the mysteries of the universe.

Sounds like the dilemma of every writer!

... a paragraph.

We were driving from New York City up the Saw Mill Parkway toward the Taconic and listening to the Wanderer Symphony of Schubert on the radio. I begged you to slow down, but as slowly as you drove, we were still losing it in the static, long before it finished.

—Carole Maso, Ava, p. 7. A perfect short short story contained in this lovely, fragmentary novel.

... a sentence.

I felt the beautiful tree come alive as the wind swept through it; then I wrapped my legs even tighter and pressed my open lips on to the hairy nape of a branch.

—Pierre Louÿs, The Songs of Bilitis.

... an article.

It was in the hope that we should remain in some respects unlike that Nature made so many of us and put us up in separate packages. Yet for one man who expresses his own taste we have a hundred missionaries to other people's.

—Frank Moore Colby, "Conventional Plays."

... a sample voice.

I want to talk to you 'bout bumpin' your head. You're still bumpin' your head, son, against the wall, 'fore you go to sleep. I don't like it. You're too old to do that. It disturbs me. I can hear you in there, when you go to bed, bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. It's disturbing. It's monotonous. It's a very disturbing sound. I don't like it. I don't like listenin' to it. I want you to stop it. I want you to get ahold of yourself. I don't like to hear that noise when I'm sittin' in here tryin' to read the paper or whatever I'm doin', I don't like to hear it and it bothers your mother. It gets her all upset and I don't like your mother to be all upset, just on accounta you. Bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump, what are you, kid, some kind of animal? I cain't figure you out, kid. I just flat cain't understand it, bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. Dudden't hurtcha? Dudden't hurtcha head?

—Donald Barthelme, Sample Voice C, from A Manual for Sons, from The Dead Father, p. 128-9.

... the thesaurus.

Why? wherefore? whence? how comes it? how is it? how happens it? how does it happen?

In some way, somehow, somehow or other; in some such way.

—New Roget's Thesaurus, 1989, section 155. Found poetry!