The most exotic flower

“I ask myself at what point could I come out and call myself out/ call myself a poet/ when I could say something about death/ when I could/ like Orpheus/ walk backwards and forget”

When I was younger, I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out of there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money bobs that turned into my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger... ...it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it's simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward. That's where this sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another.

Each new month arrives and I’m hit with a wave of sickening nausea

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that’s much harder?”

“From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”

“To have received the key to understanding shame does not give one the power to erase it.”

“Mama was a mermaid And a Carnaby Street gal She could have been a model But she spent her life mopping up spilt milk Covered in sea salt, would he, could he Be home when the stars came out to party Covered in sea salt, yeah I know it was my fault That he always ran away because he didn’t want me Oh, daddy was a sailor And he gave me a black heart Oh, daddy was a sailor The only man that could tear me apart”