I wonder if anyone reads these posts...

If we are to trust the poets (I'd like to think we should and do), there is much to be made with a solitary man. The poet, alone, awake while everyone else is asleep. I wonder if the life of an artist is gratifying, whether we sulk in cafes and coffee shops flying the Roethke or Bukowski flag to the merchant vessels of pretty young women for the reasons of romance or sheer boredom. It is interesting to think of the connection we find with someone who has known what we know. Someone I have never met could feel like the oldest friend when we realize the moderater of the strongest of bonds has been William Maxwell or John Fante. To have spoken and chattered away with an old volume, something tucked away for outcasts and fanatics. To think upon those times as not huddled and alone, but as a part of syndicate of lonely apostles, fingering dry pages, our eyes wet with consumption.

So the artists are not our wolves who mauraude the little provinces of an ordinary life. They are the fathers of our encounters, the engineers of the chance happening, the joint upon which swings two limbs of hot-breathed, bright eyed youth. Like all fathers, they should be blamed for the collision which such a union is bound to cause.

So curse you F. Scott Fitzegerald! I know you wrote that passage for art's sake, but damn you for the congeal and break it has made! Don't you sneak off Theodore Roethke. I know you! You are to be blamed of all! You and that brilliant little poem "My Papa's Waltz!"

Literature is an unspoken language among the lonely and when the door cracks upon and through its dusty cell walks anyone, the time spent on the cold prison floor, sharing stale crackers and gruel, is worth the pain when they have to go.