This sums it up.

“If velvet could speak, it would sound like Rickman.”

- Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Cigarette:

Another one of those scratched-out poems, that I wrote a year after the last one. Kind of forlorn and bitter.

Virgin white with burning tip
Glows with passion at my lips
In go my hopes
And out my dreams in a
puff of smoke.
Watch flecks of time drift
away
And faces form and fade
Then crush, and crush
beyond recognition
And leave it
forgotten in its black ash
graveyard.

(Written at 4.53 pm 1st June 1988)

Return of the red-nosed.

At long last .. Gladys has returned from an extremely lengthy tea party with the Queen (she could have pinched an ashtray from Buckingham Palace for me but no, all she did was stick that red nose on and take up where she left off).

The voice is not better, actually - still gives me trouble from time to time and I do need to go on one of those silent treatments again, but I have too much to say! So for now, I'm just carrying on. But I will do my best to keep Gladys from jabbering as much as she usually does. We shall see. She tends to get carried away and forgot all about my poor vocal chords.

But she is all set to start working again and I can't bear to deprive her (and the world) of her delightful presence. So this weekend sees the start of a new assignment. I shall be driving Gladys and Miss Rose down to the paediatric ward of a cancer hospital this Saturday. They are both very excited and a bit nervous too. Clowning in the paediatric ward of a general hospital is one thing, where the faces are different every time you visit. At a cancer hospital, we'll be seeing patients who are in for longer stretches of time. We'll get to know them, and probably love them. And not all of them will make it.

I wonder if clowns cry.