It was pretty rocky last month but I didn’t want to depress you with my depressions. I lack contentment. No. I lack a mother.
I do have that bad habit, so female, of taking people at their word.
I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.
Alone in our place I was a guest.
As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.
Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.
Sometimes I feel like another creature, hardly a woman. I can’t be a modern woman. I’m a Victorian teenager–at heart.
And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.
I don’t know if I can go on spilling myself out to people – those strange strangers.
Personally I’d give ten thousand bucks to be a psychiatrist and not a writer.
I am so tired of that old suffering.
My heart cracked like a doll-dish...
And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.
Your hands found me like an architect.
She owns her own hunger.
Sleep without pills? impossible. take pills! death? have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.
I am not seeing anyone or writing anyone – I’m on my 8th draft of this play and how many more – God knows.
I’m like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I’m not a part. I’m not a member. I’m frozen.
I am going to lose myself – or else, the chance is that poetry will save me.
The great theme we all share is that of becoming ourselves, of overcoming our father and mother, of assuming our identities somehow.