Poetry Will Absorb And Transmute,

He Whose First Emotion, On The View Of An Excellent Work, Is To Undervalue Or Depreciate It, Will Never Have One Of His Own To Show.

My Heart Has Become As Hard As A City Street, The Horses Trample Upon It, It Sings Like Iron, All Day Long And All Night Long They Beat, They Ring Like The Hooves Of Time.

Oh, I've Discarded A Great Many [poems]. And Occasionally I've Discarded And Then Resurrected. I Would Find A Crumpled Yellow Ball Of Paper In The Wastebasket, In The Morning, And Open It To See What The Hell I'd Been Up To; And Occasionally It Was Something That Needed Only A Very Slight Change To Be Brought Off, Which I'd Missed The Day Before.

I've Tried It Long Ago, With Hashish And Peyote. Fascinating, Yes, But No Good, No. This, As We Find In Alcohol, Is An Escape From Awareness, A Cheat, A Momentary Substitution, And In The End A Destruction Of It.

The Wind Shrieks, The Wind Grieves; It Dashes The Leaves On Walls, It Whirls Then Again; And The Enormous Sleeper Vaguely And Stupidly Dreams And Desires To Stir, To Resist A Ghost Of Pain.