I hate the quiet, green suburban hills
of Scythia, and all the new-built houses,
all alike, around which children play

Bolinas, I was near there once, 
but that was years ago

               I was given the Earth

I walk around with no ideals or goals. I pass ripe blackberry bushes.

There’s a man in me who would prove. He is right but little else. My knowledge of people was built up somewhere else. It was a heavy-handed preparation and it dies hard.

I blew money. I lost things. I got over the loud thing for awhile. Loud or quiet is about the same. It means you don’t have anything to come on to people with. And you have to give up first.

Where Have We Come From?
What Are We?
Where Are We Going?
                a painting by Paul Gauguin, 1897

Splotchy underbrush of suggested trees, eely
vines, fresh water holes springs around us.

On cleared earth, kittens play in bowls or are

At Christmastime in sixth grade I gave out
three dozen Berol Black Warrior pencils,
gifts for my classmates. (All the boys

For noble persons, madness seems to have been
A matter of custom--in the old romances.
Alas! I shall be mad, they say, and at once

It should be entered from the old quarter
At its center, the easiest part to get lost in.
—It happened to many of us here, as children:

His shadow in the frescos
Is the first admitted
Into a picture. Before this,

Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living.

The morning flew by.
Not that it matters, it’s nothing
like flying, or finding a dime behind a cushion,