Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Your room is not your prison. You are.