A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability.
"Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies.
I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. “It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.
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