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

Last year a friend went dark in a nervous city alone, the sea flashing against his glasses, the sea sorted out at last in his inner ear so he could leave this world as he'd entered it through the undependable irrational influence of water. -Kevin Jeffery Clark It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.