Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.

I am this fiery snail crawling home.

They were beautiful nothings

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.

I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude.

the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.