"A Prayer for The Wild at Heart Kept in Cages"

The most important things are the hardest things to say.
It's hard and painful for you to talk about these things
people just look at you strangely
The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes in the cool dead earth
You're all I've got in the world, and you're not glad to see me!
They haven't understood what you've said at all
They haven't understood what you’ve seen.
It happened in 1960, a long time ago
although sometimes it doesn't seem very long to me.
Especially on the nights when I wake up from dreams.
I'm positive that I am. Show me a person who hasn't known any sorrow and I'll show you a superficial
in those days it was possible to walk into the forest and lose your direction
We had a treehouse in a big tree which hung over some empty ground
It was a kind of club, although it had no name.
When the news came on we usually stopped listening, but the Ray Brower story was different: he was our age
One lick less. One lick less and we could have been quiet
a quiet, defeated-looking sixteen- year-old whose hair needed cutting badly and who had black eyes with a frightened expression to them needed me
I'd failed him in some mysterious way and wasn't able to give the help he needed but couldn't speak of!
He was in the quicksands and clutching at me--but I wasn't holding him out, I was slipping in with him!
I dream about that sometimes
I know how it must have seemed to you and I'm awful sorry it had to happen, but it wasn't anything as serious as you seem to take it
One week had taken all three of them from me.
And I decided I could tell people
And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this--kitchen-- candle...
I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it

Love has teeth; they bite and the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those wounds. It's the other way around, that's the joke.