Most men are so starved for tenderness that they will call any feminine presence a blessing, even while it is quietly eating holes through their spirit. they would rather be slowly pecked to death from across the dinner table than face one clean night alone under God and the wind. but a man who still has some sacred violence left in his soul knows the difference between hunger and corrosion. I would rather sleep on the edge of a roof with cold in my teeth and the whole black sky leaning on my ribs than lie beside a woman whose voice keeps needling into my inner world until even my silence no longer belongs to me