Jim Carroll
I fucked up. I sit here with my liver and kidneys vibrating inside from uncertainty in every direction. Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you--call it heart, call it mind, call it soul--accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short of a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.
Jim Carroll, "The Price You Pay"
from Forced Entries © 1987 Penguin Books
Download:
"Catholic Boy" mp3
by The Jim Carroll Band, 1980.
available on Catholic Boy
"People Who Died" mp3
by The Jim Carroll Band, 1980.
available on Catholic Boy
"A Peculiar-Looking Girl" mp3
by Jim Carroll, 1984.
from Better An Old Demon Than A New God
out of print: via UbuWeb
top photo: © Ted Barron
Jim Carroll, New York City, 1983.
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