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70 let me out Let me out! Let me out! I wasn’t made to pour old onion soup down the toilet, I wasn’t made to suffer from this dreadful cold And the boy from the grocery store who is wearing this big cowboy hat and the fringed shirt and pedaling the bicycle with the big basket for food is saying, look! my soul is beautiful, too Oh William Wordsworth and the other 19th century poets from whose dear Romanticism I first drew hints You have hinted me very well beyond myself And now when I write poetry I don’t know what I am saying any more, only what I’m doing I even noticed that my loves weren’t what they should be, thanks a lot, thanks a lot Although surely all ladies with nice waists tiny tits and exquisite globèd asses shall continue to be superb Let me out! I want to fly without having to stop at the airline terminals I want to say farewell forever even to the departure points of LaGuardia and Kennedy airports in New York No, no explicators; that doesn’t mean I’d prefer to use Newark airport, after all dangerous Leroi Jones lives in Newark Leroi, Leroi, do you want me to come to your neighborhood in Newark; if you don’t, I won’t Leroi, do you remember the time you crashed that abominable cocktail party with your old friend, tall, enormous and powerful Charles Olson? You both just entered, made three telephone calls (one long distance), and disappeared in one corner with the plate of hors d’oeuvres (Leroi, that must have been long ago, before the invention of soul food) What is Leroi Jones doing in this poem anyway, is he making me immortal or am I making him immortal; certainly we are large this evening. Tonight, after supper and an appropriate smoke, my cat started whispering to me, tales of the stockyards, and the sufferings she knows; for example the sufferings of beef on the hoof even as it is removed from the hoof for my supper, by blows on the brain 71 Oh big blows collapse us all now, it is our own heads we hit, our own arms It is obvious all this, although it is obvious only temporarily during certain high moments certainly And I agree with the recent revolutionary who said to me after our talk after our poetry reading: “It is in your poems alone that you speak prose for us” But also with the host of the abominable cocktail party, whose fate it has been to be bitter forever When will we see him when will we really see we are the same and who was it anyway that the revolutionary meant when he referred to himself as me, and me, as “you”? Who is speaking here anyway, can it possibly be me?—What is here and where is “I”? And how will it be possible to fly with all this great weight of sadness and deliberation Yes even United Airlines says we are five pounds overweight but as far as I’m concerned I’m 155 pounds overweight I wonder how it would be to fly now I wonder what it would be like if love were really endlessly desirable possible and present Let me out. Let me out! Let me out! ...

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