And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy & peaceful.

Like a cat I have nine times to die.

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.