Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.