The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that.

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.