So I have been read­ing more poetry & cre­ative prose lately, as I’ve been feel­ing far removed from the world of lit­er­a­ture and the arts in gen­eral, and I’ve stum­bled upon the works of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka for the first time. If you know me (and, in the name of sav­ing words, I’m going to make the whole­sale assump­tion that you must since you’re here), this is hope­fully a sur­prise to you: hope­fully, you’ve been fooled into think­ing that I’m well read, because I do put an industry’s worth of work into inac­tively keep­ing up the appear­ance that I have more in com­mon with the intel­lec­tual that I should be than the moron my mind sees, under the weight of all this skin & intru­sion. All of that aside, I came across some­thing that made me take a good look at myself (again).

I have not been writ­ing for years. I have been forc­ing myself to write, except in maybe one or two iso­lated instances of flash inspi­ra­tion that served appear­ances and not pur­pose, and I don’t really count those. I’ve spent the last few years think­ing about why I haven’t been writ­ing, and I’ve made a plau­si­ble list of rea­sons, all whose crux is time and its sup­posed absence in my day-to-day life. That time thing is garbage. It’s a cop-out, and a weak one at that. I have always had the time. I have not always had a sense of the per­son who would ulti­mately be doing the writ­ing and, more than any­thing else, that has been a fatal con­stant in my adult­hood. That has been it from day nought of all of this new me that I am just begin­ning to get my arms around.

The jump was abrupt. Six years of nothing.

Pic­ture me dig­ging holes into the hori­zon, arms flail­ing, careen­ing towards the sun on Tues­day and walk­ing towards you on Wednes­day, well groomed and stoic, keep­ing a rea­son­able pace but still hot to the touch. That is, essen­tially, how it hap­pened; and in miss­ing the infor­ma­tion one would nor­mally col­lect in mov­ing from pole to pole, I have had a hard time resolv­ing the change. That means, in more con­crete terms, that I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to be around peo­ple. It means I have come to hate the sound of my voice because I don’t ever rec­og­nize it. It means that if there are places on this burn­ing earth more uncom­fort­able than con­ver­sa­tions, I pray to my God and yours (whether you believe in Him or not) that I never get to know what their air tastes like, because those places are col­lec­tively my Hell. I am a man torn. It is true: God helps those who help them­selves. I haven’t been ask­ing for help in this arena, just try­ing to make it through the new, ignor­ing every­thing before it as if it was all a fluke, and no one wants that. Not me. Not Him.

I think I’m sup­posed to be work­ing it all out.

Here’s what Jones wrote:

I’d stopped at a bench and sat down near a square. It was quiet and I could see a long way off toward the newer, more Amer­i­can­ized part of the city, the Con­dado Beach sec­tion, where I could only go if in uni­form, so they would know I was an Amer­i­cano and not a native. I had been read­ing one of the care­fully put together exer­cises The New Yorker pub­lishes con­stantly as high poetic art, and grad­u­ally I could feel my eyes fill up with tears, and my cheeks were wet and I was cry­ing, qui­etly, softly but like it was the end of the world. I had been moved by the writer’s words, but in another, very per­sonal way … I was cry­ing because I real­ized that I could never write like that writer. Not that I had any real desire to, but I knew even if I had had the desire I could not do it. I real­ized that there was some­thing in me so out, so uncon­nected with what this writer was and what that mag­a­zine was that what was in me that wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be my poetry.

And I guess I’ll leave it at that and let the rest of the site be my attempt to explain what all of that means to me. Fair? No? Ah well.