I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Need is not quite belief.
I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections...
For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!
This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue’s wrangle, the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.
My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they’re money.
I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
I’m the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.
In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere...
It is in the small things we see it. The child’s first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.