so I spent a lot of time in the library

[revolutionR]

so not long after I began writing poetry in 70'
I began to hang out in the university library
I would go up to the university on the hill
with all the tall pine trees, and hang out
all day long, and cruising the isles of books
I would hang out with the poets for awhile
then I would find myself in the philosophy section
and then mythology or history, then psychology
I am not sure what I was looking for
I was attempting to submerge myself in language
a kind of crash course in reading about as many
different versions of things as I could in as short
a time as possible, I would just jump around
with a stack of books, sometimes I
would read big books of old magazines
and then I would allow myself to read literature
to try to get a feeling on who were the writers
that I really was attracted to, for instance
I was drawn to Jorge Luis Borges, when I read
his short story Library of Babylon, it began to
fall into place what I thought I was doing
in the university library, I also liked reading
about native American Indians, I read all about
Crazy Horse one day, then I was reading about
King Arthur and Merlin the magician
or I was fascinated by Napoleon or Rasputin
I did not read the Bible but I read about ancient
civilizations, I wanted to know who the gods
and goddesses were, I read fairy tales and folk tales
I spent a whole day reading Jung and Freud
I read a lot of things I had no idea what it was
like writings about the end of the world, Eschatology
and then a lot of my readings began to kind of blend
together in my mind, and bleed into one another
and some lines in books would begin flashing
through my head, and and then I would read
some Tao De Ching, or Sufi writing, or Buddhist
then jump back to very mundane stuff
like old newspapers, finally back to my favorite poets
after hours of this, I would walk down the hill
as the sun was setting, and go back to my pad
and sit down and try to write my own poetry
and one night I thought I saw Merlin in the shadows
around this time I began to hear words in my head
that were not of a language I understood, I began
thinking of these words as words of light and dark
or magic words,I also began having unusual experiences
like telepathic, but almost as if things I had been reading
about were following me around in my thoughts
about poetry, all these different realities and dimensions
moving through one another like ghosts haunting history
after awhile one night I sat down and wrote what I still
call my first poem, which was really the first poem
that got published in a local paper

[saw]

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