madness seems to have been matter of embarrassing custom -
yelling is bad, expressing anger is bad -
yet in the old romances of my life, whether family or ardor,
no one ever tells you that it is okay to be mad, angry, bitter,
or beyond patience to the point of punching a shelf,
shattering your hand to sobering and soothing affect.
I speak of this with my good friend Christopher,
how his last gal made him feel bad for getting mad,
and I tell him of the best advice a famous film director
once gave me while strolling around New York City;
he said that it is okay to get mad, but no one will admit it.
We all get angry, sad, psychotic, lashing out
at pillows, lovers, better looking baristas, but
it is how we handle it; sure, yelling is not good,
but at least we don't maim or mask it,
which may be worse, because you bottle it up
and then explode like a powder keg in a post office.
To all the young, dumb, frustrated artists,
and just all people in general,
it is okay to be angry:
yell, cry, huff and puff and blow the day away with booze or drugs,
but just let the loudness resolve violence.
I once got so angry at a Hewlett-Packard printer,
because it wasn't printing my poems for that evening's performance
(it had paper and ink, but just wasn't cooperating),
so I transcribed the poems, and marched the machine
down to the edge of the East River and chucked it in.
I felt great afterward an put on a great show.