If You Dissect A Bird

I Thought If Only I Had A Keen, Shapely Bone Structure To My Face Or Could Discuss Politics Shrewdly Or Was A Famous Writer Constantin Might Find Me Interesting Enough To Sleep With. And Then I Wondered If As Soon As He Came To Like Me He Would Sink Into Ordinariness, And If As Soon As He Came To Love Me I Would Find Fault, The Way I Did With Buddy Willard And The Boys Before Him.

I Felt Very Low. I Had Been Unmasked Only That Morning By Jay Cee Herself, And I Felt Now That All The Uncomfortable Suspicions I Had About Myself Were Coming True. After Nineteen Years Of Running After Good Marks And Prizes And Grants Of One Sort And Another, I Was Letting Up, Slowing Down, Dropping Clean Out Of Race.

I Am Learning Peacefulness, Lying By Myself Quietly, As The Light Lies On These White Walls, This Bed, These Hands. I Am Nobody; I Have Nothing To Do With Explosions.

I Felt Overstuffed And Dull And Disappointed, The Way I Always Do The Day After Christmas.

I Think That In Poetry Personal Experience Is Very Important, But Certainly It Shouldn't Be A Kind Of Shut-box And Mirror Looking, Narcissistic Experience. I Believe It Should Be Relevant, And Relevant To The Larger Things, The Bigger Things Such As Hiroshima And Dachau And So On.