Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

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

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be.

I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.