I’m an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn’t break the way it warned. Even crazy, I’m as nice as a chocolate bar.
I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning...
Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.
Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have...
My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Today life opened inside me like an egg...
One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is “Whatever you do, don’t be boring.”
Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
It would be pleasant to be drunk.
Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.
Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.