They’ll think when I pass through that door To-morrow in the dawn, I’ll then be going to my death. _It’s I’ve already gone._
They’ll watch me walk serenely out, Still-nerved and somber-eyed, ‘So strong,’ they’ll say, ‘to meet her death.’ _To-day it is I died._
There’ll be my pulses quick with life, My white sweet throat, my breath: But flesh and bone are all will hang. _This noon I met my death._
For days I charmedly dwelt on death-- I raved at death--I swore-- Till vexédly death waived the date: _And came this Day-Before._
From being lured with artful thoughts My life abortive grew. From being broached in livid mood _My death aborted too._
To-morrow they’ll remark my calm-- No fuss, no fright, no swoon. They’ll kill a wench to-morrow dawn _Was dead to-day at noon._
that it is true to life in that I in my lightning Mary-Mac-Lane-ness _would_ manage to cheat a gallows.
that it is untrue to life in that instead of writing of it in the true twilit poetry of my own sufficient prose I wrote it in the shallow trick-phrasing of rhyme, a little serenade to the gibbet.
that it catches and holds my Shadow-self who lives not _in_side me but _be_side me: the resembling dissembling shadow I cast when I stand between the daylights of the actual world and the quivering films of the region of dreams.--
My owned mysteries thrive apace. They are poetry and beauty and loveliness yet they bruise and batter me and split me to atoms. Withal are terrifyingly superfluous: they violently kill the wench to-morrow dawn who died restfully to-day at noon.
It is but one phase--one which slightly touches each other phase I own. And in it I am poetic and imaginative and worldly and amorous and gentle and true and strong and weak and ardent and shy and sensitive and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false.
The Lesbian sex-strain as an effect is reckoned a prenatal influence--and, as I conceive, it comes also of conglomerate incarnations and their reactions and flare-backs. Of some thus bestowed it makes strange hard highly emotional indefinably vicious women, turbulent and brilliant of mind, mystically overborne, overwrought of heart. They are marvels of perverse barbaric energy. They make with men varied flinty friendships, but to each other they are friends, lovers, victims, preyers, masters, slaves: the flawed fruits of one oblique sex-inherence.