Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

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

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream