All day I’ve built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.
Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
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.
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.
Fee-fi-fo-fum – Now I’m borrowed. Now I’m numb.
She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives.
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.