EXCERPT FROM Burn by Barbara Hamby, POEM: Ode to All My Late-Night Great Ideas, Pgs. 7-8 Ode to All My Late-Night Great Ideas The Germans have a word for you--Schnappsidee--an idea fueled by Margaritas or shots of tequila or bottles of red wine or white, you know the ideas that maybe involve a road trip to Miami or California and you wake up in a parking lot in Mississippi or Delray Beach with a dead French fry stuck to the side of your face or you decide to drive over to your ex''s house at 3 am and give him what your mother used to call "a piece of your mind," and if you''re lucky you won''t remember that psychedelic trip into the night or you''ll be able to retrieve the piece of your mind from the sidewalk where he either threw it or you fumbled, and it almost slid into the gutter, or what about the time you volunteered to serve Thanksgiving to the homeless and all the women with their sliding makeup and soft chins whispered, "We could trade places with you tomorrow," or was that the Buddha, trailing along on the comet tail of all the acid trips you took when you were sixteen, especially the night you discovered Motown, because you''re slinging hash in the 24-hour diner of your soul, and what is it that keeps you going through that dark night but four men singing harmony, and so what if you end up on the side of the road in Arkansas reading a beat-up copy of A Season in Hell or Fleurs du Mal, you still have "It Was Just My Imagination" flowing through your cerebral cortex along with Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, and that road trip across country in the 1966 Cadillac convertible with the boyfriend who hated to travel. Was he the one you gave a piece of your mind to? No, that was another one who had so many rules about food that when you were behind his new girlfriend at the local co-op and saw the belt full of tofu, lentils, soy sauce, turmeric, fenugreek tea--all the brown meals you ate with him passed before your eyes, and you felt such a sense of relief that his Nazi regime was over, Berlin bombed and you walking through the rubble, glad that you still had your arms and legs, but back to that Cadillac convertible on the road from California to the East Coast, hitting Taos and trying to conjure up D. H. Lawrence and thinking about the description of Gundrun''s and Ursula''s stockings at the beginning of Women in Love, but really we were driving to a one-month meditation retreat, which is kind of the opposite of a car trip, sitting for an hour at a time and then walking and sitting and walking while your mind roams like a wild monkey on amphetamines, but after a week in Himalayan storms, being attacked by pterodactyls swooping out of the wild skies, you finally coast down to the plains or savannahs with their endless vistas of nothing and its brother and sister, which is an oasis of cool water, and you find that your mind''s zoo has lost its savage beasts, the lions now little pussy cats and the wild boars, piglets, and yeah, it''s kind of boring, but it''s also like a radio with Bach playing, so you can always tune into the Kinks if you need to, and I don''t really want to tame my mind, but I do want to get the good out of it, leaving room for a riot or two, though it takes so long to get over the riots--windows broken, walls collapsed, doors splintered--that you think, Is it worth it? and I guess I''d have to answer, yes, the bombs exploding like fireworks, the shelves looted, and the little girls crying on the street corner--Oh, that''s me sitting with my torn dress and skinned knees, so please, Mr. Postman, keep all my great ideas in cosmic envelopes and bring them to me whenever I need to be shoved out the door with no idea where I''m going or how or where the hell I''ll end up.