I Am The Only One Who Can

Beauty Is A Hard Thing. Beauty Is A Mean Story. Beauty Is Slender Girls Who Die Young, Fine-featured Delicate Creatures About Whom Men Write Poems. Beauty, My First Girlfriend Said To Me, Is That Inner Quality Often Associated With Great Amounts Of Leisure Time. And I Loved Her For That.

Two Or Three Things I Know, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure, And One Of Them Is That To Go On Living I Have To Tell Stories, That Stories Are The One Sure Way I Know To Touch The Heart And Change The World

Behind My Carefully Buttoned Collar Is My Nakedness, The Struggle To Find Clean Clothes, Food, Meaning, And Money. Behind Sex Is Rage, Behind Anger Is Love, Behind This Moment Is Silence, Years Of Silence.

I Told Her, Don't Touch Me That Way. Don't Come At Me With That Sour-cream Smile. Come At Me As If I Were Worth Your Life - The Life We Make Together. Take Me Like A Turtle Whose Shell Must Be Cracked, Whose Heart Is Ice, Who Needs Your Heat. Love Me Like A Warrior, Sweat Up To Your Earlobes And All Your Hope Between Your Teeth. Love Me So I Know I Am At Least As Important As Anything You Have Ever Wanted.

...i Have Come To Make Distinctions Between What I Call The Academy And Literature, The Moral Equivalents Of Church And God. The Academy May Lie, But Literature Tries To Tell The Truth.