I dunno about you, but I love Sam Shepard.  Many years ago, I Loved loved Sam Shepard.  Oddly enough, I discovered his poetry before his prose; his prose before his plays.  I kind of backed into True West, as it were.  And fell in love all over again.

I'm on my way out there to find the book I think this poem's in, but thought I'd throw the question out there:

 Has anyone heard of a poem titled Paris, Texas?  I think?  I don't mean the play; we've all heard of the play, seen the movie, perhaps.  No, this was a poem, possibly in Motel Chronicles, so far as I can deduce, that I read and carried with me nearly 30 years ago, from Kansas to New Orleans to San Francisco... and then lost it.  It has a line that was my line, and now I can't quite grasp it, you know?  And, lo and behold, when Everything's available via Google, etc., it's not there!

 It 'goes', variously as follows:

      Is this Paris, Texas

     Or Paris, France?

     Am I alive

     Or am I dead?

... then on, ending something like this, and This is the This that I carried with me:

      I cannot fall on my knees

     I will not beg

     I have not the strength to fight

You see, it's the dichotomy that gets me.  Every time.  He cannot, will not; and yet has not the strength to fight.

     *  *  *

In the days after 9/11, living near NYC, devouring everything I could read; glued to CNN and the like, a writer, I think it was Richard Ford, put it all together for me.  He wrote of the jumpers from the Towers, those that chose or had to choose to fly, sometimes hand-in-hand.  He referred to their "resigned desperation", two words that are not supposed to go together.  Yet they did.  And do.  I mean, I realize the root word, despair.  But desperation, to me, meant frantic and actively fighting.  Whereas resigned....

 Dichotomy.  A succoring playmate, up, with a twist.