To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

The future is always beginning now.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.