It's An Odd State To Be In,

You Have To Protect Yourself From Sadness. Sadness Is Very Close To Hate. Let Me Tell You This. This Is The Thing I Learned. If You Take In Someone Else's Poison – Thinking You Can Cure Them By Sharing It – You Will Instead Store It Within You. Those Men In The Desert Were Smarter Than You. They Assumed He Could Be Useful. So They Saved Him, But When He Was No Longer Useful They Left Him.

You Built Your Walls Too, She Tells Him. So I Have My Wall. She Says It Glittering In A Beauty He Cannot Stand. She With Her Beautiful Clothes With Her Pale Face That Laughs At Everyone Who Smiles At Her.

A Love Story Is Not About Those Who Lost Their Heart But About Those Who Find That Sullen Inhabitant Who, When It Is Stumbled Upon, Means The Body Can Fool No One, Can Fool Nothing—not The Wisdom Of Sleep Or The Habit Of Social Graces. It Is A Consuming Of Oneself And The Past.

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power. Nothing Much Of Lasting Value Ever Happens At The Head Table, Held Together By A Familiar Rhetoric. Those Who Already Have Power Continue To Glide Along The Familiar Rut They Have Made For Themselves.

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)