“Poems are bullshit unless they areteeth or trees or lemons piledon a step. Or black ladies dyingof men leaving nickel heartsbeating them down. Fuck poemsand they are useful, wd they shootcome at you, love what you are,breathe like wrestlers, or shudderstrangely after pissing. We want livewords of the hip world live flesh &coursing blood. Hearts BrainsSouls splintering fire. We want poemslike fists beating niggers out of Jocksor dagger poems in the slimy belliesof the owner-jews. Black poems tosmear on girdlemamma mulatto bitcheswhose brains are red jelly stuckbetween ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes. StinkingWhores! we want “poems that kill.”

“If we leave that general descriptive talk where everything which looks like a poem can be called a poem and turn instead to normative talk, we will of course not recognize as a poem everything that looks like a poem. A real poem has to be a successful poem, a successful speech act. In approximately the same way that only a mathematical proof which really proves something can be called a mathematical proof. It is not enough that it looks like a proof. The proof has to prove. For the poem it is not enough to look like a poem. It has to achieve something.”

“We want to forget until we start to forget. from the poem Regret”

“It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.”

“It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live.”

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness.”