And what of the dead? They lie without shoesin the stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.