“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“I saw myself before an infuriated mob, facing the firing squad, weeping out of pity for the evil they could not understand, and forgiving!-Like Jeanne d'Arc!-'Priests, professors, masters, you are making a mistake in turning me over to the law. I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race that sang under torture; laws I have never understood; I have no moral sense, I am a brute: you are making a mistake.'Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drunk of the untaxed liquor of Satan's still.-Fever and cancer inspire this people. Cripples and old men are so respectable they are fit to be boiled.-The smartest thing would be to leave this continent where madness stalks to provide hostages for these wretches. I enter the true kingdom of the children of Ham.”

“It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.”

“On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman. "Sensation”

“Evening prayerI spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,My neck and gut both bent, while in the airA weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.Like steaming dung within an old dovecoteA thousand Dreams within me softly burn:From time to time my heart is like some oakWhose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.And then, when I have swallowed down my DreamsIn thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turnTo satisfy a need I can't ignore,And like the Lord of Hyssop and of MyrrhI piss into the skies, a soaring streamThat consecrates a patch of flowering fern.”

“I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!”