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I don't suppose there is anything worse for the poet-prospector, the insatiable addict of the Mother Lode, than contemplation of a wealthless future whilst the wealth-giving oil gutters its last from a deep-drilled well.

This stuff of glory is hellishly deceitful, to a fallibly deceitful mind; perhaps if one were a saint one would live suffused, but I doubt any saint has felt the need to write poetry, for the same reason: poetry is the simulated sainthood of the sinful - that is to say, poetry is the fiction of divinity, not the actual, and poets themselves have far more in common with demons, being often in daily conversance with the same.

I've been reading about saturation diving recently: divers enter a pressure vessel, are compressed to a high atmospheric pressure and breathe a precisely controlled mixture of gases, so that they can carry out work at several hundreds of metres of depth; afterwards, they are required to spend long periods, even days, being gradually decompressed so as to avoid the boiling of gases in their blood which had previously been kept liquid by the high atmospheric pressure inside their chamber.

I've no analogies to draw; nothing in my present life moves me very much, and nothing in reading about such marvels of technophysiology moves me to write much either.

I sometimes have the idea of drawing up a design for my perfect house (combining observatory, library, catacomb, rather personalised dungeon, etc) and given up, because I am not architecturally trained. I'd love to design an aeroplane, but I lack the engineering and aerodynamical skills; there's not much else I'd like to do.

I like to get drunk, because at least then I can ramble on about things until I get bored/fall asleep/trash my room so dad has to come and sort it out.

My life is useless. This is apparent to me now in the utmost clarity - I've had the suspicion since about the age of 15 or so, but it's been glaring me in the face for so long, and every single thing I've tried, every suggestion I've followed has failed so absolutely, that it's about time I faced it once and for all: I am a failure.

If there is one conclusion I've come to, it's that there are two things that could have saved me from this rock bottom (I'm only saved from homelessness by my father's financial help):

1) Utter, ruthless arrogance

or 2) Courage.

Since I have neither, I'm likely to go on for a few decades more, putting a brave face on things as they slowly fall apart, until my liver gives out on me.

I am a poet with nothing to write, an artist with nothing to paint, a musician with nothing to play. Dumb, invisible, and silent - a shadow of what could have been. A waste of rare vitality, a crime.