Jane tried to convert me to religion. I tried to introduce her to Freud.

Ta'Ra

She is condemned to live in a small cloistered world because of her reluctance or inability to accept the responsibilities of adult friendship. 

- Bainbridge

…I was always tolerant—tolerant of her violence, her recklessness, of all her wild and uncontrolled love affairs. I understood all these passions in her as I could say I understand thunder, or a hurricane, or, in the case of her love affairs, as I understood a great cosmic maternal urge. Isadora was always the great mother in all her expressions of love—she could never truly be a mistress or a wife. She wanted ceaselessly to give of herself to all her loves as a mother gives to a child. And she gave herself indiscriminately because mothers, of which she was the supreme one, do not discriminate among their children.

. . . But I'm afraid she will never be a satisfactory person, because she is so dissatisfied with herself, and dissatisfied people can never be emotionally serious. They simply don't believe in anything—except their own limitations.

When people think they know who you are, they try to lay claims to you. Then you’re trapped.

I completely avoid music. My brain is still musical and it’s just too tempting to want to sing along or learn a new song. It’s also emotionally difficult to have to stop myself relating to music in the physical ways that I once did. If my voice did come back tomorrow, I think I’d find that my songwriting muscles have wasted away along with my vocal muscles to some degree.

Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing

The world is full of women
who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of 
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent 
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I’ve a choice
of how, and I’ll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it’s all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything’s for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads 
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge 
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can’t. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape’s been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there’s only a bleak exhaustion.

Speaking of which, it’s the smiling
tires me out the most. 
This, and the pretense
that I can’t hear them.
And I can’t, because I’m after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don’t let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I’ll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. 
That’s what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body. 
They’d like to see through me, 
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don’t hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn.