God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain ... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.

And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.