. . . First off I want to tell a few really important things about me. I know that continuity is necessary, and I do my best up to a point, but I believe in distortion—I believe that if you get to a place where something is taking shape and want badly to comprehend the thing that you have created, supposedly for yourself (since everything is personal anyway), then any old thing to fill the gap will do—and that is the point where you come in . . . in looking back, what's important is not the technique or lack of it, but those few minutes when you overcome the frustration, bridge the gap, and hold something incredibly beautiful to you; the point where you don't see yourself anymore but you are there, and OBOY, that's the way you really are . . . Here is the way I really am: I HAVE GOT PLENTY OF NOTHING, if you will excuse my banality. My heart belonged to Ray since the day I met him in Washington, that is the basis of my life, and all life before that can only be explained this way: that my heart knew that Ray was on his way to me. My heart has a mind of its own—and, speaking of minds, this is where I want to explain me: I have a dirty mind.

My mind is on my needs. I walk down the street and feel the thigh within my raincoat warmed by the sun. I like to think of other people helping me. It occurs to me that everything will be O.K., because there will always be someone to help me get the things that I want. I like the people who help me, as a rule, because their existence adds to the thought that everything is going to be O.K.

When I have no money I am able to desire vividly the things that money can buy. I look at them and am pleased at their availability; even looking at money pleases me. With a dime I walk into a restaurant and take a long time over a cup of coffee and am pleased to see people buying things that I don't have the money to buy, and a green bill passing hands is especially beautiful to me. A person sitting next to me complains of the food and the proprietor calmly throws it in the garbage and when the man leaves he pays for it, though he is not asked to, and leaves a tip for which the proprietor thanks him. I find them both admirable.

Walking by a wholesale jewelry store I am called into a dream by the fairy tale beauty of diamond bracelets, and moreover, I think of the people I could have buy me those things; nothing more that that, the moment passes but leaves its impression of a completed sensual experience. I decide that I will go without money more often to enjoy this feeling: the anticipation of confidence, the lilting dream which grows upon itself is a reality I had not expected to encounter.

I am pleased at my lack of clothing. My nakedness is anticipated much more in dreams than my eyes can ever plan for it in covering, and the means to the dream is a whole other dimension I hesitate to describe. The ideal covering for my body is sunlight, and in sunlight I will be admired, (foremost by myself)—the afternoon sun I while away thus with my dirty mind.

Oh yes, but I can lay it down gently too, at any stage, for I have changed, remember? The first time that Ray was taken away from me by New Jersey I was fresh out of college, married to Ray only six months, a rebel yes, but still investigating just the outermost bounds of myself. I didn't know much of what anything was about; had only the confidence to accept Ray's love and marry him. That part was unmistakable, I was plenty old enough for that, but to deal with prisons and disappearances? You see I must always do everything on my own. Though I am sometimes inspired, I am seldom advised, except, newly, then, by Ray. I thought that marriage was an end to all my problems, but it was more than that; it was a new life, and that I had to work my way through six months of it as isolated as I had been previously all my life, with little encouragement and little direction of my own, was a tragedy. The hope of a dream had long since died in my cynicism, and despair had taken over, enabling me to live in abandon without even knowing what abandon was. But the dream had grown freshly when I met Ray, and when they took him from me the first time, I abandoned my hope and gave up the faithfulness and the dream I had so implicitly believed in. But I was more unhappy than I had ever been, and that is a consolation, that is hope and some kind of recognition, though I knew it alone and had no idea that Ray felt the same way—the same as when I was constantly away from my mother in childhood. I thought that she didn't care, didn't even think about me when we were apart; I thought that I was the only lonely soul in the world, and accepted it, lived with it, all my life, and when a chance came for companionship and good healthy exercise, I jumped on it. So, blame me! I can't blame myself anymore, for the repentance is done in the act, and working through it.

The very night that they took Ray away from me, I capped the disillusion myself and pretended to find love everywhere, not only in the person of my real love. This is life, this is one of the drawbacks of living in a world so full of people and human beings—to find out that I'm not alone, in order to find out how truly alone I am, and then to be surprised to find out that I'm not alone after all—and take it all into my hands finally and weed out the garden, put down my mother and my father and my sister and everyone who would make me part of the family except my very individual axis which miraculously is part dream and part real.

It all comes back to me: I was sure after marriage that Ray had made a bad bargain in me. I was afraid that if I wasn't worthy of him that maybe he wasn't good enough for me, by some quirk. Not knowing the worth of either of us sent me out to test the whole business. I tried seduction to see if I could pick up that one and lay him down again and try and investigate mindfully if the ones I was able to catch were worth catching. I cannot give a final opinion; as a rule, I got fucked over, that's what the world does to trusting people. Yet, it was all between Ray and me, so no harm was done finally. As soon as I knew that Ray was coming back, that there was no end to things, though New Jersey fucked over him worse and took him away and gave him back—the same as those unthinking males I fucked while he was gone—we were only washed around by the waves, and when time got turned on again, we both cooly moved to each other's sides to start it all over again.

Yes, funny, you who know me, Bonnie of the streets, of the hard touch, of the frantic spiritual judgment come to coerce you, you remember, jazz soul and bebop and well along the straight road to salvation. Funny that I should come so late so weak and confused to explain the basis of it all, to fall back on the poetic pattern, spoken rivets on a plank. Lord, let me keep on with the patter. Come now to save me, phoney this, the means—but the end? that's what I wonder mostly.

I have lied. I am ashamed of my fear, afraid to disclose my lack of scruples. Oh, I am inscrutable too, even to myself, and don't think, oh reader and thrill seeker, that that ain't the real payback—the man inside hibernated for a long winter, how to dig him out and now look it in the face. Don't I have a right to fear my own frightened sensibilities first, before yours? It's only natural, I take the responsibility; learn that, society, and we will get along O. K. Should I invoke the muse? No, that would be an excuse. Or should I cite history about the temple prostitutes? No, that would be a downright lie. Tell you straight? I'm getting to it—you wait, for a change, you drags, you barriers who want to shelter me from the purity of my own action by layers and walls of shitty, philosophical drag. Call me an addict . . . huh, if so, you yourself are the drug, a drug and a drag, all of us wallowing in it now, but I intend to clear the atmosphere at if least for my own breathing. That's how much I care for your morals—clear enough? Get off my back—I will moan and groan in misery no more.

My soul is black to its depth and the heart shines through like a beacon, or that powerful Egyptian self-induced light which moves all material things effortlessly. The pacified ghost roams at leisure within the pyramid, takes on the countenance of its own sphinx, expresses itself inwardly and that pretty much excludes you.