What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.

The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.