From an article on Cobain:
Passing that fiery tree—if only she could
Be making love,
Be making poetry,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe
Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow blazes—
She believes if she could only overtake
The riding rhythm of things,
Of her own electrons,
Then she would be at rest
If she could forget school,
Climb the tree,
Be the tree,
Burn like that.
She doesn’t know yet, how could she
That this same need
Is going to erupt every September
And that in 40 years the idea will strike her
From no apparent source,
In a Laundromat
Between a washer and a dryer,
Like one of those electric light bulbs
Lighting up near a character’s head in a comic strip—
There in that naked and soiled place
With its detergent machines,
Its speckled fluorescent lights,
Its lint piles broomed into corners as she fumbles for quarters
And dimes, she will start to chuckle and double over
Into the plastic baskets’
Mountain of wet
Bedsheets and bulky overalls—
Old lady! She’ll grin,
beguiled at herself,
Old lady! The desire to burn is already a burning! How about that!
And the second poem, Boil:
Boil over—it’s what the nerves do,
Watch them seethe when stimulated,
Murmurs the man at the stove
To the one at the fridge—
Watch that electric impulse that finally makes them
Fume and fizz at either
Frayed end. If you could grasp a bundle
Of nerves in your fist like a jumper cable, and sense that
Python’s writhe, or a garden hose when the pressure’s
High and it wilfully weaves about
Trying its best to get away from you—
You’d see how nothing is passive,
We’re all—I mean from our elephant sun, ejaculant
Great-grandfather, cascading down
To weightless
Unstoppable neutrinos
Leaving their silvery trace
In vacuum chambers, in
Effervescent lines, twisted
Madly in our madhouse jackets,
Rules, laws, which we are seething to break
Though to rupture them might be of course to die,
Or, possibly,
To change:
Boil, it’s what water
And everything else teaches.
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