Ink is Cheap

I am not so good at talking through my problems... or talking at all, for that matter. And though I say small things- hesitant, dull things- it is only shame and lack of heart and lack of ability and all the lacks that keep me from expressing what should be.

I am not primarily a writer; I hate god-gooey-damned people writers messing the smears of their lives against the sniveling world... and writers are bad and the world is bad and we are here, yes?  What I'm trying to say is- what I write is only one-tenth of myself.  The other nine/to hell-tenths are looking over the edge of a cliff down into the sea of rock and wringing swirl and cheap damnation. I wish that I could suffer in the classic style and carve out of great marble that would last centuries beyond this dog's bark I now hear outside my 2006 window, but I am damned, slapped, and wasted down to the nothingness of my arms and eyes and fingers and this here tonight.

This may sound pretty, but god damned pretty it is not. The poetry part of me, the seeming actuality of what I write, is dross and saliva and old battleships sinking. I know that because the world (which is fairly cheap and stylish and- what, what?) forgets a little of the poetry that I have written.

You do not know how much your your words meant although I was seemingly dull and drab and stupid. I know how things are going for you and yours. I say, everything is pretty good now but I of course don't know when or if or what the next O God stroke of everything will bring... which is a coward's viewpoint, and all drowning men are cowards, hear them scream, and life is- what, what?- going down into the waters, and it is not the cutting off of air and light and lung and eye and love that count, it's the itch they put into us making us wonder why the hell we are here. I don't know, I do not know.

I hardly know what to do, I think too much, or too little. I make love to boys who only exist within their bodies and I look against the flakes of their eyes and I know that I am lying to myself and to them because I am no less than an animal. Another animal in the jungle. All is lost like weeds in a garden or snails stepped upon and crushed and left in some sort of slime which contains semi-life.

You've got to understand that there are other ways of facing the horn except through the keyboard. Those who are known to us may be just a bad choice of chance. Never take the Arts as a holy mirror. Very little is just, and that includes all the centuries. The most honorable countries do not survive through courage nor do the ages survive us the best artists. Everything is chance and shit and the strumming of the winds. Please forgive the center word. If I hate anything, it is a vile word said vilely or a dirty joke or the making of sex and life and woman and man into the thing they seem to want it to be.

I am probably fairly insane and you should know this.  I do not mean to knock your verse plays; some of this has been done well. Don't hate me for feeling more than is perhaps necessary. It may be best that we are creatures of gesture instead of reality.  Marriage is reality with life and very few of us can stand either marriage or reality or life.

Give it a try, I say, go ahead: verse, or argument or phone calls or cards or death or love or cast areas of bathing in arenas of sound and stroke and midnight moments, I thank you for going on and I, too, go on a little while more.