I started to come down with a cold Thursday afternoon. I thought at first it might be allergies until I started to feel achy. I dragged myself into work on Friday, but by noon I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went home. I’m about 80% now. My nose is still a bit runny. I HATE being sick. It is so inconvenient. I hate being sick on weekends.

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[Poetry] aims…at the reformation of the poet, as prayer does. In the grand cases—as in our century, Yeats and Eliot—it enables the poet gradually, again and again, to become almost another man; but something of the sort happens, on a small scale, a freeing, with the creation of every real poem.

--John Berryman