Live As If You Like Yourself, And

Too Much Self-regard Has Never Struck Me As Dignified: Trying To Twist Over My Shoulder To View My Own Behind.

Now That I Am In My Forties, She [my Mother] Tells Me I'm Beautiful; Now That I Am In My Forties, She Sends Me Presents And We Have The Long, Personal And Even Remarkably Honest Phone Calls I Always Wanted So Intensely I Forbade Myself To Imagine Them. How Strange. Perhaps Shaw Was Correct And If We Lived To Be Several Hundred Years Old, We Would Finally Work It All Out. I Am Deeply Grateful. With My Poems, I Finally Won Even My Mother. The Longest Wooing Of My Life.

I Wrote To Make Sense Out Of All The Contradictions I Experienced And To Deal With The Pain And Loss I Was Undergoing.

All Women Are Misfits. We Do Not Fit Into This World Without Amputations.

Depressions, Local And Larger Strikes, Boom Times, Wars, Repressions, All Impact A Life As Do Epidemics Such As Aids And Pollution That May Take Years Off A Person's Life. We All, Whether We Like It Or Not And Whether We Acknowledge It Or Not, Are Impacted By The Racial Attitudes We Carry Within Us, And Experience In Some Form Every Time We Turn On The Television, The Radio, Go To A Movie, Read A Magazine Or A Newspaper, Or Walk Down The Street.