It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

I am myself. That is not enough.

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists