A young lady today asked me why I wrote. I said that honestly I didn’t know.
I don’t know because half the time, what I write and what I am thinking is so entirely obscure I dare not let it out, even unto the eyes of such a kind and commiserating world as perhaps I imagine yours is. The worst part of it is, is I only see myself getting more obscure day by day. The whole thing gives me now a physical pain to write. I work on three lines of a poem, labor through them, pick them apart, clean them and yet – they continue to sit as a heap of barbaric sounds.
Still, I’m not an experimentalist. I never was and never will be. I write in the only way I can write and my warped, crabbed and cabinned stuff is not the result of any theorizing but of my pure incapability to express my needless tortuities in any other way. I am tortured by the electric livingness of my too-bony hand and by every doubt and misgiving that a hereditarily haunted and twisted imagination, an insatiable thirst, a commercial quenching, a craving for a body not my own, a checkered education and too much egocentric poetry, and a wild, wet day in a nowhere town are capable of conjuring out of their hellish deeps.
I have very little command of rhythm and I know less, if anything about life-rhythm. If I write of worms and corruption it is because I like worms and corruption. It is because I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man and in the rot of life. I am all for cancers, toenails, and tumors. If I write of love, it is because I have felt the pleasure of yearning, the warmth of your body and known the having been and having had. I have woke up in the middle of the night with only the memory of the bare arches of your slender feet, sweating with the horror of absolute delight.
There is an honest torture in words – a torture in their linking and spelling, in the snail of their course. In the beginning was the Word. A word as long as Glastonbury and as short as pith, one that speaks out sharp and everlastingly with intonations of death, doom, and the humming beauty of silence through a bar of magnificent syllables. A word I can’t spell.
I wonder if I love your word, the word of your dark hair…the word of your voice. The word of your flesh, and the word of your presence.