“I thought: Now I am like Dante. I walk through hell, but I am not burning.”

“During that long terrible ride to Munich, I finally swallowed the bitter pill of my lover's rejection and poisoned myself with it. I murdered the personality I was born with and transformed myself from a butterfly back in into a caterpillar. That night I learned to seek the shadows, to prefer silence”

“Something always happened, you see. A Yiddish song on Hanukkah, a British rabbi's prayer on the radio, some kindness on a train or in the street that reminded me, no matter how far I retreated, no matter how deep into self-denial my fear drove me, that the Jews would always be my people and I would always belong to them.”

“You know, we have moments of passion when we are in pain. And then of course the moment ends, and with it the passion and the pain, and we forgive and forget. But I think that every time you hurt somebody that you care for, a crack appears in your relationship, a little weakening - and it stays there, dangerous, waiting for the next opportunity to open up and destroy everything.”

“The soul withdrew to a rational silence. The body remained there in the madness.”

“One class. No masters. No slaves. No black. No white. No Jew. No Christian. One race-- The human race.”

“It was when they determined that I had been born deadThat my life became easier to understand. For a long time,I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear,Frankly, why I never had any money. I wonderedWhy the cities I walked through drifted into cloudEven as I admired their architecture, as I pointed outThe cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songsI ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions,Some more like trailer parks, or pathways towardA future I tried to point to, but how could I point,With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched,With fingers that melted into words that no one read. I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio,Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat. I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry,The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars,But I never took part in the wars, because no one letsA dead man into their covert discussions.So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost,And America became my compass, and Europe became The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares,There’s nothing to say because nobody listens,There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seemLike sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive,As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the wayA lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me,In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand,The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of musicIn the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to sayIs sand. This is not, for example, a political poem,Because the dead have no politics. They might haveA hunger, but nothing you’ve ever knownCould begin to assuage it.”