The People Look Like Flowers at Last

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.

she was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty

dogs and angels are not very far apart

in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.

I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. as I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then.

I said goodbye again sucking up all that was left of her into the little that was left of me. I said, 'don't look for me again. fuck it. we are all lost. goodbye, goodbye.

it was like any other relationship, there was jealousy on both sides, there were split-ups and reconciliations. there were also fragmented moments of great peace and beauty. I often tried to get away from her and she tied to get away from me but it was difficult: Cupid, in his strange way, was really there.

to fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.

whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn't help the mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown

purple does something strange to me

What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

we had such tremendous fun and much agony together for some years

morning night and noon the traffic moves through and the murder and treachery of friends and lovers and all the people move through you. pain is the joy of knowing the unkindest truth that arrives without warning. life is being alone death is being alone. even the fools weep morning night and noon.

life itself is not the miracle. that pain should be so constant, that's the miracle -

as she drove me through the hills everything screamed inside of me, and I kept saying as we drove along (to myself, of course) fucker, it will pass, everything passes, it's all a joke a joke on you

we only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.

The wisdom to quit is all we have left.

startling! such determination in the dull and uninspired and the copyists. they never lose the fierce gratitude for their uneventfulness, nor do they forget to laugh at the wit of slugs; as a study in diluted senses they'd make any pharaoh cough up his beans; in music they prefer the monotony of dripping faucets; in love and sex they prefer each other and therefore compound the problem; the energy with which they propel their uselessness (without any self-doubt) toward worthless goals is as magnificent as cow shit. they produce novels, children, death, freeways, cities, wars, wealth, poverty, politicians and total areas of grandiose waste; it's as if the whole world is wrapped in dirty bandages. it's best to take walks late at night. it's best to do your business only on Mondays and Tuesdays. it's best to sit in a small room with the shades down and wait. the strongest men are the fewest and the strongest women die alone too.

the psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on

it's colder than hell (yes) but the blankets are thin, and the pulled-down shades are as full of holes as love is.

we were in her big oak bed facing south so much of the rest of the time that I memorized each wrinkle in the drapes and especially all the cracks in the ceiling. I used to play games with her with that ceiling. "see those cracks up there?" "where?" "look where I'm pointing..." "o.k." "now, see those cracks, see the pattern? it forms and image. do you see what it is?" "umm, umm ..." "go on, what is it?" "I know! It's a man on top of a woman!" "wrong. it's a flamingo standing by a stream." . . . we finally got free of one another. it's sad but it's standard operating procedure (I am constantly confused by the lack of durability in human affairs). I suppose the parting was unhappy maybe even ugly. it's been 3 or 4 years now and I wonder if she ever thinks of me, of what I am doing?

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

I could understand the moon leaning across a bar on skid row and asking for a drink, but I couldn't understand anything about myself, I was murdered, I was shit, I was a tentful of dogs, I was poppies mowed down by machine-gun fire I was a hotshot wasp in a web I was less and less and still reaching for something, and I thought of her corny remark a night or so ago: You have wounded eyes.