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.

pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.

You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?