You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you.
I’ve been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I’m an optimist.
Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.
His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.
He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn’t handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.
No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
How many people ask you to come share their life?
A fish has no concept of water.
I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.
I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.
Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.
She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I’m so lonely, so desperate. I’ll give you whatever you want.
Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.
I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.
It wasn’t awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn’t want pain, she wouldn’t want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn’t unthinkable.
She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.
Love could never bloom in a concrete block room.
She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.