Watch out for intellect,because it knows so much it knows nothingand leaves you hanging upside down,mouthing knowledge as your heartfalls out of your mouth.
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
As it has been said:Love and a coughcannot be concealed.Even a small cough.Even a small love.
I am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoesin the stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
I’d won the worldbut like aforsaken explorer,I’d lostmy map.
We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.
Depression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.
God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.
Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.
It is snowing and death bugs meas stubborn as insomnia.
I like you; your eyes are full of language.”[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
Quite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headI’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
He turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
It doesn’t matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.