Because I Feel Again copyright 1972 by Tracy Marks (after plunging headlong into the personal growth movement) When I was fourteen, stuffed with fantasies of romance, and making poetry my food because boys wouldn't ask me to the movies if I were fat - when I was fourteen, I could feel. The sun was a ball of butterscotch then, warming my tongue; the sky really fell then, breaking into pieces and pieces of cardboard jigsaw puzzle, pieces that cut like paper I tore suddenly from a notebook not to find an hour later the slit in my forefinger but to feel it then. Even pain was good then. It was all right to glory in it, to show it off - I didn't "have" to be a woman then. I didn't "have" to be anything at all And yet I was everything, everything - leaping from bed in the morning and fighting sleep at night, letting blood flow into every artery and then out out into words to my best friend over the phone at midnight, out onto paper at 3am when I could no longer contain the joy. I felt everything then, felt until the wounds were so deep I had to build myself a coffin out of cardboard and bury myself in the garden without even a sky above to threaten my security. I'm twenty two now or will be, a woman now or won't be, I won't be, I want to scream till the sky falls again, I WON'T BE! FUCK YOU, WORLD, I WON'T BE! - World, I've got to own you back, spew out the shit you toss off as nourishment, write my own recipes, add my own spices, cut my own herbs from my own garden, dig up that corpse and fling it up so hard that the sky falls down on me and cuts  jagged slits into every finger of my hand, into every inch of my flesh, and cry cry cry with joy because I feel because I feel because I feel again.

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