Emmeline

“...I am not at all sorry to part with the rest of it. I am no longer to be held accountable for myself. I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of self determination, freedom canceled. Hooray for regular hours! And, for the supervision of the spirit! Long live regimentation.”
― Saul Bellow, Dangling Man

“I am listening in that fine space between desire and always the grave stillness before choice.”
― Audre Lorde, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987-1992

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One need not smoke
to inhale. The air
in bars holds its
load of tars in stale suspension.
Also jails. Jails
are a prison for
the person who
abhors smoke.
But happily
gorgeous thought
also hangs around
like that: you can
walk through a mist
of Brodsky and contact-
exist.”
― Kay Ryan, Erratic Facts