Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren't with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
In the sun and in the rain, in the day and in the night, pain is a flower, pain is flowers, blooming all the time.
People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.
The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.
When I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original and beautiful I realized that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt). She has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through, like I said she, has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world. She has won. Frances, this poem is for you.
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone, my editor phones me.
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