She wasn't a beautiful woman, though most people would find her hard features attractive. "I love all my men", she used to say, with a smile that was both childish and lustful. Sometimes people would call her cheap, but she'd never do anything for money; no, she was after a different kind of reward.

"Men are my antidepressant, their mere existence fills my nights with pleasure and my days with expectation", she'd tell her best friend, who was a lesbian and thus didn't exactly share her friend's priorities.

"It doesn't matter if they're handsome or ugly, intelligent or naive, ambitious workaholics or compulsive daydreamers; they all shine in their own way; they all unfold like magical parchment under the eye of a discerning reader".

"They're not always easy to deal with- sometimes they're inexcusably irritating-, yet I must admit that most of them treat me well. After all, they have to behave if they wish to keep seeing me- and why wouldn't they? My only vice is that I refuse to see my body as a piece of property, to be owned or conquered or even preserved, and my men come to respect this, after a while.

Her friend would nod absentmindedly once in a while- her chosen path towards emancipation and fulfillment took her through an entirely different realm; she had, however, become accustomed to such confessions, and even learned to almost sympathize...

To lead a borrowed life. Escape saved purely for weekends and holidays. Dream if they let you dream; if they don't, lose yourself in fantasies of silenced explosions.

Love, can love ever be true? Passion spiced up with powder, a heightening of the senses achieved by chemical means. Let me lie by your side, surrounded by the ghosts of forsaken expectations.

Don't worry, we'll make it to the other side, scathed and flame-licked, yet alive. We are the ones doomed to survive this war, and maybe the one after it, too; we are the ones destined to pollute their polished reality with infusions of intolerable cynicism bleeding from incurable wounds.

From Tropic of Capricorn:

"I reached out for something to attach myself to- and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for- myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live- if what others are doing is called living- but to express my self. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it.

What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live...From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie- everything I ever did or say which does not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greatest part of my life."

Space was never on our side, and now time isn't, either. How can the ones we adore be transformed into strangers with familiar faces? Is it a gradual process, or does it happen overnight? And can it be reversed?

Love ends, and the emptiness it leaves behind feels like the loss of a body part. Soon enough, you learn to live without it; you might even experience a certain sense of relief, especially if it was a sore and painful part, at the time. Yet the absence remains.

So you devote your time in futile exchanges and excruciatingly temporary attachments. You employ whatever means possible to cover the gap- things, places, people-, but nothing ever fills it up, and will you ever let go let go let go let go let go again?

Our place in the sun. It's shrinking. Maybe life does revolve around sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, so far as you interpret each component as a general and pretty symbolic category.

Under "sex", include all types of human relations; let the term "drugs" denote the substances we use on a daily basis, either to be cured from ailments or just to make ourselves capable of social interaction; "rock'n'roll" shall represent every form of self-expression, from artistic creation to drunken monologues and fashion statements. Forgive me if this makes no sense- the past few weeks have been way too stressful for poetic sentences or metaphysical conclusions.

Are you still listening- and why? Sometimes I think of you purely to relieve my eyes of chronic dryness, my heart of perpetual iciness, my mind of the nightmares sustained by an inability to find a purpose in the supposedly meaningful rituals of everyday life.

Under his mattress, he keeps crystallized memories of hope. They look like diamonds, though only the naive are fooled into buying them. He strictly accepts cash stamped by the future's dutiful clerks. When left in the sunlight, the crystals dissolve, leaving nothing but a sweet smell of incinerated possibilities.

Admiration leads the flock of the weak. Sit high on your throne, while I worship your footsteps' marks on wet sand; they begin to fade so I whisper, please, don't let me fall again. Yet you're trapped in silence, no sound shall ever reach your ears; remote as an iceberg, ever since I decided to entomb you inside my least realizable dream.

Humanity was scandalized: He'd committed the unforgivable sin of telling the truth on TV. Ask me to come find you and I will, like an insect hopelessly drawn to the light, no you won't, no you won't, no you won't... Perhaps I never learned to give up on lost cases, perhaps they never taught me how to resist Hope's ravaging lure.