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.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.