What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Over coffee and orange juice the embryonic suicide brightens visibly.

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.

I'm happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.