Reality has gone HAY-fucking-WIRE, man!
Black is white, white is black, dude!
Faire is foule and foule is faire, hombre!
Hover through the fog and the filthy air, podna!
The falcon cannot hear the falconer in the widening gyre, my nihg-uhrrr!
Dogs and cats, Chief! Dogs and cats…!!! Living together, Slugger!
[From her introduction to the 2011 Edition of Arthur Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell," via New directions paperback]
Vows erupt! He shudders as he writes, generating a superb and nasty shedding of skins….
Let us walk into the Second Sight, for these brief seconds, unadorned:
unweaponed and unafraid–
ready;
chillingly able to withstand the coming,
unbridled,
material narcissism
of that sober daylight.
Practicing tenor (or at the very least, I imagine, accumulating skill at that task at which you seem to be the most connected to the Gods) puts you in the Realm of the Gods, however distantly– at least close enough for you to see them, to know they are there and to appreciate their mountain; anything else, any other activity during your day, seems like a subtle nonverbal declaration of “I accept I’m dirt with no relation to you.”
Practicing says, “I’m on my way up, motherfuckers.”
I’m gonna need some closure, dead man.
So I’ll very carefully excise (not exhume) your ashes, and
stealthfully
around midnight
put you in a septic bin,
and spit on it.
All
done.
When I have on a well-used leather glove
and my hair is disgusting because I’ve been in the 96 degree weather working in the yard,
brushing back my hair with that hand
makes me
feel
very
tough.
–Non-fiction Novel
…fantasies where I tramped the sloping sidewalks of North Beach or Greenwich Village a poet madman king in dada-colored castoff rags, no concept of writing as anything but a sacred squawking Aztec exorcism, no satisfactory concept of existence not bequeathed by mad bums, junkies, perverts, gray old “existential” misanthropes….
–”A Quick Trip Through my Adolescence”
Growing up with ease and comfort, but fast, about as fast as you could imagine, short of some primitive tribe’s brutal confirmation, using LSD as a rite of passage like you’re supposed to be able to use the army, things sometimes get a bit complicated.
–”A Quick Trip Through my Adolescence”
It made me feel low that I couldn’t praise him without reservation. But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.
Women
I foresaw future problems; as a recluse I couldn’t bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.
–Women
