Is anyone anywhere happy?

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

Mother of otherness, Eat me.

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.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.