9/16/74
Thoughts make men strangers
and create great moments of urgency,
as well as nervousness, when a thought
moves you to wake up and light a cigarette
and lie back on pillow, content
in thinking, in playing the thought through,
that's the only way for it to die!
The death of a thought isn't wholesome
like coming home from school for a glass of milk
and cookies. There's no wholesomeness
in guilt, but it comes in dreams
in the form of pictures
of saints and rabbinical figures
lighting big cigars.
There's no thought like the one I'm having.
It bends me backwards in my chair so that