For I swear that it stung me last morning or midnight
and pushed my mind into a cut-paper black oak
with spiders and witches and cinnamon kisses
and all the clichés of the wild-girl meadow and ancient
cavorting by moonlight…

Can there be a debt for poems?
And I am so terribly sorry and scared:
I suppose it is right I should sputter at night,
kicking transmissions and shuttered ideas-
but pardon, I felt so (both bright and) defenseless
As my mind was adrift in the tinfoil world

And why is it I cannot say (cannot listen promise stay)…
For I regret that I have left, and my waste is horrid grieved-
All I wish to be- what have I DONE
Why is nothing I do enough…

I know there is a debt for feeling
and boundless prison time for ceasing.
Bound, bound my thoughts and wonders, in my own forgotten room,
Far in the land where no girl stands
for the ache of the rotting inside her mind
And the words and the tiles have black-speckled smiles
Tiny and shiny and evil inside

But as I lay trying to think of them dying
(tall and black and still, two carnations on the sill)
The folds have unfettered and rumbled the beat
of red-festooned chariots, gaudy and garish and come to drag forth
The woman who wastes her soft brilliant attention and bites back the
Reeling so brined and tight corked—and I will die joyously
unto that anthem: if only my poems were unbroken again