From time to time
I make it rhyme
but don’t hold that kind
of thing
against
me—
Oh well, what the hell,
so it won’t sell.
What I want to tell—
is what’s on my mind:
‘taint Dishes,
‘taint Wishes,
it’s thoughts
flinging by
before I die—
and to think
in ink.

*****

Marilyn Monroe read voraciously and wrote somewhat epigrammatically. She was friends with Dorothy Parker and Carson McCullers, and many other literary figures through her work as well as her marriage to Arthur Miller. Apart from movie scripts, she read widely: Thurber and Bemelmans, Dostoevsky and Camus, Yeats and Frost, Lewis Carroll and Harold Robbins and Rudolf Steiner and Sigmund Freud… In 1999 hundreds of her books were auctioned by Christie’s in New York. The whole list, together with more of her poems and epigrams and photos and mentions of literary friends can be found here in The HyperTexts.

Photo: Marilyn Monroe reading in the woods, from The HyperTexts.