"An Agony. As Now" (1964), derived from his early radicalism, dissociates selves in a tormented first-person speaker. Driven mad with toxic emotion, the unacknowledged self lives in the sensory experiences of a hated outer self. His distaste takes shape in the songs his double sings and the women he loves. Like the man in the iron mask, the internal self looks out through metal at an interaction with the world that he neither understands nor condones.
Beginning in line 12, pain takes on a greater distraction as the schizoid state becomes less tolerable. Repetitions of "or pain" recycle the poet-speaker's misery as he attempts to name the source and type of hurt. The suffering outdistances his notion of God as it reaches for a "yes" in line 27, the beginning of resolution. With controlled self-direction, the speaker forces himself to see and acknowledge beauty. In the final five lines, the trapped inner speaker batters the outer shell that refuses to feel normal love. The outer man, incapable of compromise, gazes at the sun and scorches the pulp-tender inner being.
A long verse ode, "A Poem for Willie Best" (1964), retrieves the humanity of modern-day Jim Crow, a black actor who functioned in film as "Sleep'n'eat." The poem opens on Best's head, a symbol of his disembodied talent, which performs while ignoring a suffering heart. Carefully aligned alliteration (all/hell, beggar bleeds) and assonance (time/alive) precede a rich image of doom in slippery-sided hell "whose bottoms are famous."
