But somehow,I’ve stopped praising you. How the valleywhen you first see it—the small roads backto your youth—is so painfully pretty at first,then, after a month of black coffee, it’s justanother place your bullish brain exists, botheredby itself and how hurtful human life can be.Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some daysfull of crow and shine, and then someonehas put engine coolant in the medicineon another continent and not even cryinghelps cure the idea of purposeful poison.

Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief.If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival break down, make the factory fail,to know that this war was winless,to know that she would singlehandedlydestroy us all.

Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional. Moving away from "useful" doesn't mean it isn't necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.