I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.