from Outtakes

off on this
morning's El my
last glimpse of
you today/maybe
I'll live through
this afternoon
chasing personal
demons of the kind
that wire you
up/maybe I won't
but I am wired here
and lonely/glimpsing
you/through this
borrowed machine
your hair/spread out
blonde corona/walking
away to the world
which doesn't deserve
to share you

From a series of short poems written in Lincoln Park in the fall of 1973 and mailed to Alison Gaughan. She showed them to Knoepfle and he used them to start his chapbook series, based on money from a donated fund he was able to get out of the university. The poem is one of many poems I wrote to Pat Smith. Although she was thirteen years older than me, with two children and a professor husband (not to mention a professor lover, John Knoll, who was married to her best friend), we seemed to get along quite well. The first several years of our relationship were mainly based on sex. Joel's mother, Becky McGovern, was not very sexual. Or maybe I was very sexual. In any case, Pat had lived with Larry for fourteen years and they hadn't had much sex, and she was not happy about it. So she would be available essentially any time I wanted, and this maintained through most of our relationship. She also was somewhat more adventurous than Becky McGovern, who had pretty strict rules as to what was okay with her.

When I eventually split up with Pat I still slept with her for about another year while living with Bradway. Bradway was not a giving person, shall we say, and getting sex from her was always a certain amount of work. Unless she wanted something from you; then she would do whatever it took to get her way. At least that is how she was with me. Hopefully that has nothing to do with how she is now.

I did love Pat. It was only after I came to understand the contempt she held my work in that I had to separate from her. She loved her vision of me, not the me that actually existed. Maybe that is always the case. Kimberly seems to know the real me, and forgives me that person, and so I trust her more than anyone else.

Removed Posts

To anyone who has come here via a search engine looking for information about Anastasia Sands: these posts concern a character in a novel written in the 1970s and are in no way involved with the current actress/porn star. To those come looking for information on Janet Hanrahan, she also was the basis for a character in a novel written in the 1970s and has nothing to do with any persons of that name today. Those posts were removed to avoid any confusion. Thanks for your understanding. Good luck with your search. The following piece comes from early notes for the novel, Strange Sins. The title comes from Raymond Chandler: "Her eyes were like strange sins."

Early Notes On Anastasia Sands

Out the back door
carrying her radio, visions of a sober life
up front today. No pills, she promises herself.
She seeks a simpler joy
in her sharp bones, pointed flesh.
She says, "I will make do
with sex today." She knows about adventure
& figuring the odds. She makes it clear
to all her wouldbe boyfriends
I don't want you stoned, again
I want you to care. I have feelings
I don't use you. But she is unsettled.
She is nauseous.
She feels the thrusts of memory, double-tracked,
incompetent to manage the multiple exposures,
she asks for an insurance of some kind.
Her brother snickers, pretends he sees
the future. He tells her
"it just gets worse." What makes
you think you can explain it?
You always were a bitch to me,
but I still love you though.


This piece is one of the earliest attempts to speak about a character, the main character, from the novel, Strange Sins. She is a teenage girl who is being tripped up by her memories of another existence. Ultimately it comes out that she is the reincarnation of another teenage girl who was sexually abused by her father and murdered and buried in a proximate location. Anastasia Sands was the name of a checker at Krogers on 2nd and South Grand, where I shopped at the time. I stole the name and set the book in and around the community of Saugatuck, Michigan, on the Lake. It is an area I was familiar with having traveled to Chris Beckman's family's house on the Lake a couple of times. One of them was my honeymoon with Becky McGovern. We drove up with Chris and Monica Schaeffer in February of 1970, long before this book appeared. There was a real revenge theme, ultimately, in this book and I met someone this had sort of happened to after I had done most of the work on the piece. Kind of spooky, really, but my Sister Diane, who speaks with ghosts on occasions, told me that a relative of our's from the previous century -1800s- had told her in a dream that I had the Sight, just as she does. I wish it were a little more useful, however.