Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.

I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.