Allen Ginsberg makes me cry at my desk sometimes.

In San Francisco Ginsberg saw a $1 an hour psychiatrist, Philip Hicks, who asked him what he would like to do. "Doctor," as Ginsberg recalls his answer...

"I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever. Never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now, and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone - maybe even a man - and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. Then he said "Well, why don't you?" I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from doing it?

A brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1996)


Oh god. My thoughts exactly.

those who don't never will. but those who do?

Rise and shine to you.
For you
The moon and the stars and
The sky. There is always
Quick heat in mouths touching, built
with brick around
frost, and hung
with a thousand particles of
light around brick.
Stolen, not taken. My world
is the same as any other (because
what is a world?) if a look is taken
at the brick and
the frost, the lights
in the dark.
But between? There, in the
tiny, apparent barren space that
no one bothers
or, maybe, looks close enough
to see?
There is a rise
and shine
to you
For you
Always sticking.
It is steady, it is even. and
I?
I have seen what a world is after all.

As promised.

I wrote nothing to actually write here today (and for that I do of course apologize), but being the woman of my word that I am, here's one from the archives that was published earlier this month. Enjoy, darlings.

Make Out

phones with broken buttons

call back with broken words

typo send backs

on his back in my bed

for four days on end our heads

are not quite right but nothing ever

is when you're in the thick of it, wanting to live inside of a perfect

silver book of things that cannot be named until

you've at once known them, felt them and lost them

if only for a moment

in time.

Suburb.

night after a night of falling on
front lawns
in the expanse of this place's yellow lined pavements
and our lips that can't stop touching and pulling
at the throats of all of our friends in our blissful
reveries on the
front lawns
of where you grew up and you showed me
coloured concretes and red-bricked buildings
and birds of your father's
and kitchen sinks, dishwasher fillings,
interrogations lovingly spent over cups of
coffee and I took another sip, saw
into a flash of light, same
colour eyes and I think you could
really love me
after all.

Hurricane Heart Attack.

I don't know where it was.

I thought I would die
(but always feel that way on rollercoasters.)

I'm going to go
down
with you.
Sitting down.

Ooh la la,
annhilation.

The more
I leave,
the less
I lose.

You never get wise, you only get older.

There's that evil beauty again

in the booths of booze and

slights of hand,

smock dresses and smokers stresses,

party favours through the favours of friends.

Glittering like a speck of sand

hit by the opalescent night.

The night is ours with our

skinny legs taking us nowhere

oh so fast

when we're everywhere

with everything for which

we didn't have to ask.

So get back

to watching videos of

destruction

and corruption

and the Power

of Positive Thinking.

Because our pictures are

in the newspaper box

and on the newspaper box

now too.

It's no crime?

Lists.

I’ve been revolving my day around lists.
Lists, lists, lists, ubiquitous
and organized
and productive
and goal-oriented
lists.

Remember to eat, they tell me.
Respond to e-mails.
Wake up early enough to have time to shower.
Figure out what to wear tomorrow.
Call your brother.
Wear winter boots.

And then.
Somewhere in there between the things I’m reminding myself of.
Affirming to myself that I need to do, of which I do not need to be reminded or affirmed.
Are the real ones.
In a lyric.
In a phrase.
In a telephone conversation.
On new paper in a new book.

Raspberries and coffee taste delicious together.

Become everything you said you never would be.

Enemy fire. Filling me blanks.

Again and again and again
through my useless, symmetrical head
these useless sentiments ring.
It’s been six days
and already
the lists and reminders
have marred and forever burdened one hundred and two
once clean, lined pages.

I have frostbite on my toes from the cold.
And frostbite in my hands from you.

Twentieth.

Warming feet in the tub
stained with hair dye from a new guy
who I live with.
Grey nightgowns, grey ashes into water
PSFT. Psft. pfst.
It’s a good noise we make.

I don’t even like you that much.
Nightclubbing. And listening to
English Girls Approximately
and The Drug’s Not Working
in a full bed at 4 a.m.

Smoking more cigarettes
with people I’ve met
mere hours and days before.

And I don’t even miss you.
Not one single bit.
But oh,
look at you
now.

Best I’ve ever seen.