I liked this because of the elimination of the essential in the composition. I cut it down and down, and down. This squeezed up to make it vivid. - William Carlos Williams

In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion-
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning-

the set pieces of your faces stir me — leading citizens — but not in the same way.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.