I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.

I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with.

I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

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

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?