I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.

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

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

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.

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.