i feel most a live in a process of refusal. no I will not get any better today. my aliveness is mine anyway.
The truth, forever, for everybody, is that one is a stranger to oneself, and that one must deal with this stranger day in and day out—that one, in fact, is forced to create, as distinct from invent, oneself.
“Slowly I dance out of the burning house of my head.”
— Mark Strand, from The Compete Poems; “The Way It Is,” wr. c. June 1975
