​For everything that has been 
Thank You.
For everything that will be...
Yes. 
— Dag Hammarskjöld

​I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. 
— Susan Sontag 

The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me. 
— Ayn Rand

​

​All I know is a door into the dark 
— Seamus Heaney 

What are we if not what the light says we are? 
​— Ocean Vuong 

There’s this cathedral in my head 
…
In anger, as in desire, it was
everything, that cathedral. As if my body
itself cathedral. 
 
I conduct my body
with a cathedral’s steadiness, I
try to. 
 
I cathedral. In desire. In anger.
 
Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.
 Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.

— Carl Phillips

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.
It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.
My language trembles with desire.
— Roland Barthes

​

​I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
 - Rainer Maria Rilke

Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached.
​ I have always been detached (in part). Always.
― Susan Sontag

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

...

I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands

...

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
 - Margaret Atwood