White Heat

02.08.01
11.23.03

“I’ve been thinking a lot about delight.” Last night I dreamt I wore a wedding ring. “Does anyone know the roots of the word delight?” I forgot to see if I was engaged. “I have vowed I will not write death poems anymore.” “When we’re writing, the energy anyways has a tendency to go down, to go dark.” I will sell white takeout boxes filled with human hair. When I was six I saw a chick hatch in a museum’s incubator. “These suggest a future time and not a present time, but the only way you can let yourself go is in the present.” “More thought than I can take.” “As you get older you get more filters about what you allow – don’t allow yourself.” “I don’t know why a lot of contemporary poems are being written.” “What are we risking personally?” “And maybe Creeley was right, maybe it is for love…but I think it should be nothing less than that.” I want to write a poem about a milkshake and throatfuls of chocolate ice sludge in a white paper cup with fingerprint spots in the condensation and a plastic yellow straw, flattened on top between my teeth—what is more satisfying than the last gurgly swallow. My boyfriend’s semen smells like broken glass. “First book I wrote at night, with cigarettes, second one in the morning without, and the third was all over the place.” “I write because it doesn’t have to be published.” When I run out of poems I will invent a new form. I will gravel-smash the world to clear a space for a new one—hot nights I throw lit matches from the roof.