Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Last year a friend went dark in a nervous city alone, the sea flashing against his glasses, the sea sorted out at last in his inner ear so he could leave this world as he'd entered it through the undependable irrational influence of water. -Kevin Jeffery Clark It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.