“I have gone into the waste lonely places”

“DolorI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,Desolation in immaculate public places,Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.”

“What's madness but nobility of soulAt 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.”

“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.”

“In this place of light: he dares to liveWho stops being a bird, yet beats his wingsAgainst the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.”