The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

What I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spread the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.