My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on. I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.

ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars

I kind of limp along like so many of us do in these realms. Occasionally I've felt the grace of another presence in my life. But I can't develop any kind of spiritual structure on that.

And I'll dance with you in Vienna, I'll be wearing a river's disguise. The hyacinth wild on my shoulder my mouth on the dew of your thighs. And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss. And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross.

Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore

We are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it's a terrible shock.

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.