You can be hurt because you want too much; because in your face it says: love me, nurture me; because in your teeth it says:

After the teach-in we smeared the walls with our solidarity, looked left, & saw Marx among the angels,

You whom I hoped to reach by writ… you beyond the multicolored tangle of telephone wires, you with your white paper soul trampled in transit,

Little egg, little nub, full complement of fingers, toes, little rose blooming

Black ship of night sailing through the world & the moon an orange slice tangy to the teeth of lovers who lie

A delicate border. A nonexistent… The train obligingly dissolves in… The G.I. next to me is talking wa… I don’t ‘know the Asian mind,’ he… Moving through old arguments.

Your slit so like mine: the woman of it, the warm womanwide of thigh, & the comfort of it– knowing your nipples like mine,

We used to meet on this corner in the same wind. It fought us up the hill to your house,

If you ask him he will talk for ho… how at fourteen he hammered signs,… raw with cold, and later painted b… in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played… for two weeks in jail, and lived o…

After the first astounding rush, after the weeks at the lake, the crystal, the clouds, the water… the snow breaking under our boots… & the long mornings in bed. .…

What makes a poet? Many have tried to guess. Is it a voice like a conduit, a plainspokenness to grief,

On line at the supermarket waiting for the tally, the blue numerals tattooed on the white skins

I sit at my desk alone as I did on many Sunday afternoons when you came back to me, your arms aching for me,

When we become truly ourselves, we… —Suzuki Sick of the self, the self—seducing self— with its games, its fears,

People wish to be settled. Onl… —Thoreau My life has been the instrument for a mouth