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RAW MATERIALS I work in a psychiatric clinic, an "outpatient mental health center" at a hospital on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a neighborhood which has traditionally been, and remains, the meeting ground of a hundred world cultures. Our neighborhood is a place of artists and bohemians and outcasts and addicts, and its streets are filled with the music of innumerable languages. At case conferences, in patient sessions, I am continually astonished by what I hear. I observe both as a psychiatrist and as a writer. A bipolar patient explains that he has been treated with "lithium carburetor"—the psychiatrist hears "neologisms" (creation of new words) or the phenomenon we call "flight of ideas" (runaway thoughts common in mania), the writer hears poetry. Another patient claims to be assaulted by "forces of magnetism released by construction in the city," or "caused by echoes from satellite dishes." A man comes to our Walk In Clinic convinced he has wings sprouting out of his feet. He wears a rubber suit studded with tiny blinking electric lights, and he regales the second year resident with tales of his girlfriend, a woman with twenty-two personalities. One morning in Teaching Case Conference, a man offhandedly reveals that "the whispering of demons make me choose the wrong Lotto numbers." Another day, a shy Caribbean woman describes being raped for hours each night by a phantom lover. Even our staff talks poetry—reporting on a crack-abusing schizophrenic man who is "ripping and running, dashing and scheming, and copping and hiding." On my way to lunch, walking down 15th Street, I pass by a bedraggled man who is singing: "If that don't get my woman, I'm sure my sho-sho-shotgun will!" At Grand Rounds, one of