Every Day One Has To Earn The

I Saw The Years Of My Life Spaced Along A Road In The Form Of Telephone Poles Threaded Together By Wires. I Counted One, Two, Three... Nineteen Telephone Poles, And Then The Wires Dangled Into Space, And Try As I Would, I Couldn't See A Single Pole Beyond The Nineteenth.

And I, Stepping From This Skin Of Old Bandages, Boredoms, Old Faces Step To You From The Black Car Of Lethe, Pure As A Baby.

I Felt The Mask Crumple, The Great Poisonous Store Of Corrosive Ashes Begin To Spew Out Of My Mouth.

This Seemed A Dreary And Wasted Life For A Girl With Fifteen Years Of Straight A's, But I Knew That's What Marriage Was Like, Because Cook And Clean And Wash Was Just What Buddy Willard's Mother Did From Morning Till Night, And She Was The Wife Of A University Professor And Had Been A Private School Teacher Herself.

I Lay And Cried, And Began To Feel Again, To Admit I Was Human, Vulnerable, Sensitive. I Began To Remember How It Had Been Before; How There Was That Germ Of Positive Creativeness. Character Is Fate; And Damn, I'd Better Work On My Character. I Had Been Withdrawing Into A Retreat Of Numbness: It Is So Much Safer To Not Feel, Not To Let The World Touch One.