You are the captive of your darkest heart. Free will is not only not free, it’s illusory. Given the same situations, you’ll play your part over and over again — and what’s more, we all have an obsessive knack for finding ourselves those same situations to play in over and over again.

None of this is original thinking. Which is the point: there is no original thinking. Even Einstein was only dreaming God’s random thoughts.

A poet in this area once wrote a book with the title, “I Wish My Room Had A Floor.” I think he got it wrong. I think most of us wish our rooms had a door.

The window is always an option, of course, unless you’ve made it off limits. The limits of original thought would suggest that even when you have, nothing is ever truly off limits.

The way out is through the ceiling — way up there, solid and suspect and unfair; or through the walls, which have the added downside of being close by. They induce despair because unlike the ceiling, you can touch them and realize the futility of escape. At least the ceiling is beyond reach and potentially penetrable.

When do you think it’s ok to admit you’ve made an irretrievable mess of your life?

At what point do you declare the game piece broken, toss it aside, and look around for a substitute — a penny, a piece of wood, a piece lifted from another game?

Must we assume that every trial ennobles everyone, or are some people born to shuffle?

Is the capacity for hope always supposed to triumph? Or are some of us supposed to be object lessons?

Insomnia.

I have literally been awake all night. I try to sleep and I can’t.

Been working on the Chinatown poem all night, staring at it, thinking about it.

If it’s true that every poem written, every poem performed, should be treated as though it was your last work, should be treated as though it was the last thing you could point at and say, “that was me” — well, I should have died years ago; because I write the same poem over and over, and have for the last five years, and I can’t seem to stop.

I’ve written some marginally better stuff lately, but I can tell when a phase is ending, and it is; and I no longer believe in my own capacity for self-renewal.

Too many male poets lose their edge in middle age, and become masochistic whiners or esoteric fops, chasing arcane visions. I swore long ago to become neither.

But I need to recuperate and rebuild to get past it. And I’m so tired and I can’t sleep, and I don’t know what to do next.

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