For My Sins

For my sins since I have come to this town I have been a fool and continue to be so, eschewing all masks and roles but for that, offering genuinely, and without scruples, the most intense compulsions toward wholeness, even truth. Rage, envy, regret have been my burden.
From soulless nightclubs, allnight bakeries, reflected electric light I have been able to draw a kind of sustenance, noting that the poet must be indestructible, even if he has to creep like an insect across a dirty floor, the city, any city, is his Revelation, his Koran and Torah,  his Old and New Testaments seen in inscrutable flashes, on the fresh-lipped faces of friends, behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses, behind windows, too, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out.

Little shards of redemption, always ungraspable. Always fleeting, transitory, illusory. Always ephemeral, the gifts of music and wine, vacant-eyed girls under sodium light, dropping forth from their mouths scripted sounds of assent or delight, weariness or boredom.

From An Old Letter

There is nothing much more to be expressed. I have the most awful feelings almost all the time now. These are what I must struggle to express, but it's hard work. Only because she has something in her, some intangible thing, that is deeply attractive... a vast, unfathomable well, the source of another Nile.
There is a flame that still responds. There is after all a heart that beats. There are brown clothes, scents, rooms, that from this distance still come back to me. Her mouth, her smile, her hair, her eyes, all gone, done for today, wrapped up. And yet I know as sure as death that they'll recur, haunt my dreams of other days. There seems to be something in me that will not rest, nor be resisted. And all this fear is to another soul wedded, all this shame is to another life bonded, all at once, all in misery, all in love.
I love because there is no such thing as love. And I can't stop.

Poetry as Struggle

Force out creativity in blocks of earthy stone, onto the paper.
Unload your brain, all of it, in a tantrum Jackson Pollock mess with no boundaries except writer's cramp and sighings of existential fatigue.
A sick complaint of desks and empty bedrooms.
I decided to take the Muse and strangle her, till she vomited all of her beauties on the page.
All her nonsense and ugliness too, that just as relevant.
Trapped forever under stark, austere glass.
Poetry! Fuck it, almost kill or abuse it so that the muse herself either dies from shame or is driven mad with laughing.
Try and grasp reality, force it into sense and beauty, force it like a struggling animal into the cage of words and, before it can escape, pin it like a specimen onto the page.
Sheer poetry killed and hung up for spectators, all the exquisite poetry you ever dined on vomited back up, like Saturn vomited up his own children.
That bird of poetry becomes like a stuffed museum piece, poised forever in pretend flight inside the book covers, until the reader comes along, ignites it into life again with the power of his imagination, and it soars... and then falls, crashing, into oblivion.
Art or writing was to me then, some kind of awful struggle, a fight with myself to express some kind of beauty or meaning, to wring truth from madness, to take a zero and make it into a one.
Doing this I had to convulse, fatigue myself, loosen my wrists and grit my teeth, screw up my eyes to see more clearly.
Till some blasted, sudden, half-understood vision would force itself upon my mind, blooming vaguely into an explosion of words.
I had to become a godly creature striking jagged lightning into my own world of words, till it became ignited into quivering beauty.
It was ultimate focus intractably screwed down onto objects, all of the truth squeezed out of it in an instant, discarded like a flipping fish onto the page.