"To a Mosquito"

I mashed you against the glass.
Now you hang there, effortlessly,
like a spacewalker or Lucifer falling
and the cars fly behind you
in this raw blue dawn.
Of all the mosquitos here
you must be the largest and most fearsome.
Your delicate rigging is almost intact;
your scales poised, your antennae tuned to skin-seeking.

I don't know why I killed you:
it was more instinct than reason.
Mosquitos feasted on me nightlong,
but you were only trying to get out.
Somehow I have a feeling if I were to take
that tiny bulb of an abdomen and squeeze it
no blood of mine would issue forth.
We were waiting for the early bus together
and you must have been hungry as I.

[from PHOENICIANS (1981)]

Midway between a virgin birth and an abortion.

Without discourse, i can't tell if i'm telling the truth or not. (Sic semper tyrannis)

I think art should be like: sparks from welding (maybe the real action too bright to look at directly), thrown out, superabundantly, with no thought for their home. But what i feel about my own works is more like: messages from another star, that i don't even understand (is that why they're precious to me?) --and my modesty, that i'm never satisfied, is only because they're so nearly perfect...

Without the touch of another, you walk on air.

At times when i have been sick, stoned, or shaken, i thought i came close to understanding the trustlessness of a life like A----'s. But that doesn't give me any more communion with it. I learn a terrible loneliness--and forget, because even myself is not one, when i return to myself. Compared with that, my regular solitude is rich and teeming with shades. Did i curse haunting? when i was sick perhaps. But between life and morbidity there is a chasm, which all talk of death and dying by the lively but mocks. And i think it is the constant listening for this mockery, that makes a person violent. Otherwise they could be content with selfpity.