Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a date on a tombstone.

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.