I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can't.

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

There is light somewhere.

I don't think I have written a poem when I was completely sober. But I have written a few good ones or a few bad ones under the hammer of a black hangover when I didn't know whether another drink or a blade would be the best thing.

the tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.