Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You’ll move off.
My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict...
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
What’s the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren’t much company.
Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle...
I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman’s yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover...
The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.
My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.
When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.
Please God, we’re all right here. Please leave us alone. Don’t send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you...
Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.