The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.
I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.
But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
It’s all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
What’s missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable – so moist and breathlike.
Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.