I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23.

He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it

There's a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness.

Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.