Song of Myself

I
I dress myself,
and what I adorn you shall adorn,
for the underwear I wear is the same as yours.

I loafe in the lilac-scented laundry... observing a strand of my hair.

VI
A child asked, What is your hair? pulling it from my head,
leaving it in stale clumpfuls around my feet.

Perhaps he thinks it morbid, or perhaps he thinks it dead,
but yet something tells me it is abounding and alive.

And still it seems to me now the shavings of my back yard.

XVII
I abandon original thoughts,
I adhere to the common thought and the good idea,
If my thoughts are not everything they surely are nothing.

This is a poem plucked from the wing of the globe.
This is the poem that has been written before.

XXV
The sun has a gun and will murder me,
but it does not know that I too have a sun,
rising and diving daily within me.

I hear the orbs and seizures of the universe.
I hear you whispering, O planetarium.

LII
I am large enough to fit in my bathtub,
hold nothing back from the present,
and send myself drifting in lacy jags.

I have left a message for you on the sidewalk,
Look for it between the cracks and in the gum.

Soon I will discover you, only later will I remember.
Lighting my fire just moments away,
I wait until the day you find me.

XIX
This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.