Writing, my writing, is usually a solitary act, and there are so many pressures from everywhere. The piles of papers in my office are pressures. I have to write in my time for my reasons… I have to find myself writing, so to speak. I can write in community, but it’s a different kind of writing. The kind I’m wanting to do now, to return to, is writing that can’t be pushed in or governed by business of any sort. It has to be the defiant act of a young man luxuriating in the mentality of free time, time to throw the paint of words around, not so much to play as to try things, have fun, find his intensity, his passion, give it words to take shape, the mentality too of guiltlessly buying books and supplies as they may offer the least assistance or impetus or spurring, not pushing himself too hard, and feeling free to take seriously what he even dabbles with, like a boy in an open school, like a young man turned loose in the college/playground/theatre of his own mind, a young man driven to say what he is thinking, and be persuasive, and affect the world, and so coming of age. Then it has to be tempered and cultured by the grown man who wants to write stories, implying something finished, or not unfinished simply from being erratic and undisciplined. And then lastly, it must be shared with someone who is mated to his soul, shaped partly – intentionally – but not entirely by the knowledge that he will share it. And then it becomes a dialogue, coming out of solitude. At least, I think these things are true.April 2002

You tell a person there’s a reason to live
And he lives because he believes you
That makes you responsible for him being alive

However much he may have picked up the will to live
You held it out to him
You fathered and he mothered the life

And no, you can’t live it for him
But yes, you can’t simply expect him to forget it
And show him the door and say “you don’t owe me anything”

Even if you do nothing else
You can’t tell him not to let it matter
You can’t expect him to go quietly

You can’t tell him to “forget it”
Because when he was finally ready
To let it all slip away

You stopped him
Made him know what it’s like
To want life for a reason

You showed him what it looks like
To be loved
Through your eyes

So if he calls your name
And if you matter to him
As much as life does

That’s the price you pay

February 5, 2002

You must be very still when she passes by.
Is she the one?
No, she is another traveller.
Not dark, like him?
No, she soaks in the light and it becomes color, not a blinding reflection. You must not speak to her. This is not her tale.

June 1997

Writers write of peace and pestilence, partridges and parasites, prima donnas and prima dons
Because apathy doesn’t read well
But if the earth were a soft-boiled egg
And we whacked off the top
Like Louis IV used to do
And Louis didn’t like eggs
ANd we wouldn’t like the earth
We’d find a core of complacency
We wouldn’t find people living in the center
We’d find their nature
like the soft, malleable brains in our heads
like the places we live
Not lava but lava-lamps, mostly vegetable oil and a little food coloring

Then all the disaster films would make sense
Brain candy for candied brains
About candy escaping and taking over
Almost but not quite.
We’re talking about apathy, after all.
Just the force of ooze, of squirt, of an occasional burp
Not too disturbing, and then it goes back to sleep.

Until some poet tosses another virgin off a cliff
Until its hood doo, geronimo, ungawa
Or some other ritual ride to the rim of the volcano

And that’s what we are – a priesthood
Inventing the place to stand so we can wield the lever
That will move the earth, only we don’t cut it open
We color it all over like an Easter Egg
So you need us to tell you lies:
Need us to say, “Gee, Buffy, you have a brilliant personality.”
“Gee, Bif, your exploits are truly fascinating.”
Need us to make it look like candy when its a deviled egg

You put microphones in our faces,
You who don’t write, or sometimes write, or once wrote,
or write but don’t want anyone to know what you wrote
or like the idea of writing but aren’t listening
and clap regardless of what we say,
when it sounds good, just to be polite, because others are clapping
you want to be cultural
(and we’ve convinced you that culture is form not content)
shell not yoke, and yoke reminds me of a proverb:
don’t yoke a donkey to a bull
but how can that be if we’ve made everyone donkeys
if we are the Birth Control Committee, full of bad jokes:
“You can have two asses this year but no bull.”
If all eggs, if this egg, if this world belongs to writers
As trite readers and pedantic publicists often say.

But we are surface matter, parasites, mold, scum, residue, superficialities
And the difference between us and you is that we’re less honest:
We pretend apathy is anger, sadness, or joy.
We write poems about it. We make our apathies extraordinary.
Writers can’t afford to save the world – there’d be nothing to write about.
We deal in emissions, waste, the sweat on the egg, in blood.
But that’s what everyone else is and that’s an honest existence.
That’s worth more than being written about.

May 1997

They don’t change when they grow up either. I decided that years ago. I’m not certain rather we change, but it does seem that from the start there is always an us and a them. The gentle and the vicious – with the vicious always disguised as promisingly congenial children and the gentle as antisocial. (Then there are those caught in between. And nothing seems to explain that.) The lords of the flies are popular at school and don’t bring blood home to be seen by parents, who occasionally even join in the game. “So and so. Is he the geek?” asks a parent to such a child.

The Peter’s grow up and pretend to change, selective memory – even believe that they have changed – self deception, and anyone would think it silly to suppose that they hadn’t. The parent’s – the Great Parent, Great Tit, Society – never saw anything to change. Always, “Such a strong, lovely child. So promising. He’ll fit in wonderfully.” And he does. And he still kills the little brother if he can get away with it. His whole life is like Peter Keatings – persons as means rather than ends. He steps on whoever is necessary. And when it all comes crashing down – this world built by incompetents so progressively narcissistic that they won’t be able to run what they’ve built, he’ll eat us. The barely useful distinctions between friend and foe, family and stranger, will be levelled and he’ll kill anyone he neads to for their bag of wonder bread, for enough wonder bread to feel secure. But it will never be enough. He will be a barbarian and think himself the meaning of society – the point of civilization. He will be more vicious than death and think himself the embodiment of love. And if previous events are a guide – those who are not eaten, or who eat him will beleive it and he will be a monument to their next world.

I, meanwhile, am a siamese mind – a war between two brothers – Ender and Peter, Roark and Keating, Able and Cain.

I wish I’d had a sister like Valentine. I don’t see how she could have survived in my home, but then I suspect that a Valentine is much stronger than I. Still, I wouldn’t have liked her to be put through it.

May 1997

Why don’t you join a corporation?

I don’t have any of the things corporations want, Charlie, and I have many of the things they hate.

But you have to make a living.

You sound like my father.

Maybe he’s right. You can’t always be what you want.

My father has no notion of being. In his thinking, one can only behave – never be.

“What’s the difference?” Charlie asked, turning away from the campaign ad in disgust. “What is a ‘documented untruth? That’s an oxymoron.”

C2 mused, “Actually, documented untruths are more common that you’d imagine. When someone wants to turn a deception into an institution – a fixture of history – he creates the necessary evidence. He documents untruth.”

Then what can we believe?

We can believe that humans have a propensity for evil – to deceiving and being deceived. Only after that presupposition can we ask “What is believable?”

But after all, the deceived are only victims. Is being deceived evil in the same sense as deceiving?

More so, Charlie. Deceiving may leave one’s knowledge of the truth intact. Being deceived lobotomizes that knowledge. It weakens and can eventually destroy one’s capacity for truth – one’s capacity to truly be anything – even a deceiver.

There you go about “being” again.

We cannot be except in truth, Charlie. You are a personal truth, which means that while I might be able to behave like Charlie, I cannot be Charlie. It also means that if Charlie behaves in a way contrary to the being who is Charlie, he denies himself – eventually he destroys his own being – until nothing is left but behavior, without a source.

That sounds so terrible. I cannot believe that God would let it happen.

Yes, Charlie. As a machine, I cannot believe in God. But if I did, I would have to believe that God would not ever allow that process to run its full course – not until the final judgement. I would know that God would never lose anything of a man.

May 1997