Around the Fire

What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is

proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest

in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in

anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some

where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look

in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are

the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s

different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me,

I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel

a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean

all the grown-ups in the world, they’re just playing house, all

poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is

what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look

the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m

not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because

I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself

somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place

you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strange-

ness of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and

I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have

a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular

segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer,

me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to

look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding

Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right

in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it.

And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean

God is the progenitor of religious impetuousity in the human beast.

And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear,

but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run

right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought

there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that

and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction

between men and women is five million shits.

Source: Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1994)