Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins..

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- no….

Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out..

My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat..

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 fro….

As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool..

Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn..

There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab..

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box..

I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house..

Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone..

I burn the way money burns..

I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God..

The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket..

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe..

Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over ….

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face..

My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth..

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s q….

Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse..

I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws..