The Pleasures of the Damned

in this room the hours of love still make shadows.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don't swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept what is but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. be self-taught. and reinvent your life because you must; it is your life and its history and the present belong only to you.

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

we had goldfish and they circled around and around in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes covering the picture window and my mother, always smiling, wanting us all to be happy, told me, “be happy, Henry!” and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you can but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while raging inside his 6-foot-2 frame because he couldn’t understand what was attacking him from within. my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile! why don’t you ever smile?” and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw. one day the goldfish died, all five of them, they floated on the water, on their sides, their eyes still open, and when my father got home he threw them to the cat there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother smiled. A smile to remember

magic persists without us no matter what we may do to try to spoil it

And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.

we waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nights our silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti

we are a scene chalked out with the sick white brush of age

About church: the trouble with a mask is it never changes.

they say that nothing is wasted: either that or it all is.

I did not like war, even when it was the popular thing to do.

art as the spirit wanes the form appears.

no leaders, please invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept what is but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. be self-taught. and reinvent your life because you must; it is your life and its history and the present belong only to you.

that boy was ready for his life to come, he would undoubtedly be highly successful, the lying little prick.

I felt better when everything was in disorder. It will take me some months to get back to normal: I can't even find a roach to commune with. I have lost my rhythm. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I have been robbed of my filth.

my poems are only bits of scratching on the floor of a cage.

a poem is a city burning

of late I've had this thought that this country has gone backwards 4 or 5 decades and that all the social advancement the good feeling of person toward person has been washed away and replaced by the same old bigotries we have more than ever the selfish wants of power the disregard for the weak the old the impoverished the helpless. we are replacing want with war salvation with slavery. we have wasted the gains we have become rapidly less. we have our Bomb it is our fear or damnation and our shame. now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry. - putrefaction

people who believe in politics are like people who believe in god: they are sucking wind through bent straws. there

it’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse. death he’s ready for, or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood … no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse …

I get the blues for him, for me, for all of us: for want of something to do we keep slaying our small dragons as the big one waits.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.

it's when you're on the row that you notice that everything is owned and that there are locks on everything this is the way a democracy works: you get what you can, try to keep that and add to it if possible

we are all little forgotten pieces of shit only we walk and talk laugh make jokes and the shit shits - the shit shits