“I have daughters and I have sons.When one of them lays a handOn my shoulder, shining fishTurn suddenly in the deep sea.”

“My life failed on the very day I was born.”

“IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE INI have been thinking about the man who gives in.Have you heard about him? In this storyA twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small windAnd the pine bends all the way over to the ground.I was persuaded,” the pine says. “It was convincing.”A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agreesTo drown all her children. “What could I do?”The cat said. “The mouse needed that.”It’s strange. I’ve heard that some people conspireIn their own ruin. A fool says, “You don’tDeserve to live.” The man says, “I’ll string this ropeOver that branch, maybe you can find a box.”The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,I need twenty thousand corpses.” “Tell you what,”The General says, “we have an extra battalionOver there on the hill. We don’t need all these men.”

“Early Morning in Your RoomIt's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-likeCoffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.The gray light as you pour gleaming water--It seems you've traveled years to get here.Finally you deserve a house. If not deserveIt, have it; no one can get you out. MiseryHad its way, poverty, no money at least.Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter to his Father, are all here. You can danceWith only one leg, and see the snowflake fallingWith only one eye. Even the blind manCan see. That's what they say. If you hadA sad childhood, so what? When Robert BurtonSaid he was melancholy, he meant he was home.”

“Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.”

“We will have to call especially loud to reach Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.”

“The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.”