And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.

Shouldering your loneliness like a gun that you will not learn to aim, you stumble into this movie house then you climb, you climb into the frame.

Today [people] are ready to take emergency cures, whatever they are, if it's violence, if it's a fascination with serial killing or whatever - the discomfort is so intense. Maybe it's always been like that, certainly it is now.

Something I wrote quite a few years ago was, "The voices in my head, they don't care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through." It is a common mistake, to think you're going to go into some kind of spiritual practice and you're going to be relieved of the human burdens, from human crosses like thought, jealousy, despair - in fact, if anything, these feelings are amplified.

Everybody knows that you've been faithful, give or take a night or two.

I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me, but the room just filled up with mosquitoes.

This particular school of Zen has always considered itself the Marines of the spiritual world, so it has a kind of bias against conceptual thinking in favor of a very rigorous physical life.