I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going