Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps
I write in a fever.
I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this,
For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients. O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!
Bridled convulsiveness of raging mechanisms!
Raging in me and outside me,
Through all my dissected nerves,
Through all the papillae of everything I feel with!
My lips are parched, O great modern noises,
From hearing you at too close a range,
And my head burns with the desire to proclaim you
In an explosive song telling my every sensation,
An explosiveness contemporaneous with you, O machines!

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

the printing press
enlightenment
industrial revolution
flight
personal computer
moon landing
internet
artificial intelligence
don’t die

And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin' coal. Pourin' off of every page, like it was written in my soul from me to you...

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Translation: Wise men and fools alike, in varying style,
Rush into print, and still, midst books galore,
The world grows ever older and more vile.

There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators.. .Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement.

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind,
Possessing and caressing me.
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe
Sounds of laughter shades of love are
Ringing through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
Million suns, and calls me on and on
Across the universe

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students — how to write piercingly.

Roll on, thou ball, roll on
Through pathless realms of space,
Roll on!

Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow,
Since Time hath reft whate’er my soul enjoy’d,
And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloy’d.

As the words of my book, The Bloodless Revolution, accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink.

Words taken
by lips, tongue, teeth, throat,
down into body’s
caverns, to enter
blood, bone, breath,