When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row." "There are some real weirdos down there." "They're everywhere.

I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they all made the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn't help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.