
“Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.”
Diary of an Unknown (1988)
Q & A
“Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.”
Diary of an Unknown (1988)
“There's nothin like a trail of ßlooÐ to finÐ your way ßack home”
Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”
Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
Source: Sarmad, Martyr to Love Divine, p. 240 (2005)
"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)
Poems
As We May Think (1945)
Context: The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.
"Backdrop addresses cowboy" (1974)
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)
Context: Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.