I can’t seem to stay out of my own way.

We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.

All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.

An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.

I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t. We haven’t.

Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution.

I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails...

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.