| Know Me |
| Know why I show my kin and kind my mind within the lit’ry artifice of all this poetry. It is because my intellect has much respect for what it was. That explanation’s one of many more which, with metaphor, I’ll ask your patience. Another reason is that this scribbling wally might whitewash his folly and be flattered it’s his. Another’s to be admired merely for being a poet, which would be nice, although it is seldom in life acquired. But why did our best creators, Van Gogh, for example or Burns, choose to adorn a world that spurns its living love from all status? For, to each of them all, there’s a host of unsung, unpublished, undisplayed, oblivion-bound creators laid to dust without one surviving boast. Why? Can it be they really loved their race so much that they committed all their days to their art, in the hope that human ways, thereby, would lead to gratitude or Grace? There must be more than self-exultant passion goading the drudging artist piece after piece. When the daemon’s with him, he cannot cease till his work is done, despite cash or fashion. He can’t explain any more than the mountaineer who says he must climb Everest because it’s there or they that seek gold purely because gold is rare or they who for a death-doomed cause will volunteer. Had I desired wealth, I might have chosen a more marketable medium than verse, for which the sharp appetite of man is unready; that of woman, frozen. I might have practised sit-coms and laughed at recycled bawdy and dumb show or worse, the tabloid rag-trade below everything: rags to riches, through craft. A gift can make a lot of cash for middle-men, while the giver and his god’s sold down the river, his best creations labelled trash. Anyway, one day he’ll die, leaving all his works behind for future research to find and, friends, for me, that is why. That’s why it’s verse I choose. It’s worth my midnight sweat and all invention yet brought by the sleepless Muse. One final reason is for those alive who shall survive my life’s brief season: you must not grieve because if I’m true to my time, I do believe when time has turned my fresh, mortal flesh as well as my quill to dust, I trust time will be true to me. |