Is This What We Want to Be?

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Recorded Reading (3:28): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2nsfzzchlmj1pi3573vn4/Is-This-What-We-Want-to-Be.mp3?rlkey=g1dfnlnucgrutahd9v34v7rg3&st=ieefnyp6&dl=0

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Even this soul which thirsts for ~ and creates ~ beauty as much as any other soul ever created will stay out of the most beautiful parts of town.

Even this delicate skin ~ as soft as any some say they’ve ever touched ~ descendent of refinement as tender as European high nobility ~ will go without its silks and velvets.

I will eat the most basic of whole foods, so I don’t have to confront the disgusting imitations which are prepared foods for the poor.

I will willingly make the most beautiful and orderly of homes out of any neglected corner ~ shed ~ tent ~ storage room or minivan, to have there what I need to keep working.

… Seven days a week.

For my absolutely one-of-a-kind, world-class contributions to my society I will do without: pay, basic respect, common utilities, even publication (much less honor).

I’ll even accept that this world is so absolutely unfriendly that it’s just not safe anymore to exit my van at all unless I absolutely have to ~ and have learned to live and work in silence and solitude, and to be grateful for so doing.

However …

For this same ultra-refined living physical and poetic mechanism to be targeted to have to see, hear and feel ~ not just the disrespect (that would be bad enough!) ~ but the nerve-jarring, neurally-bright hatred of total strangers many times every day and night…

Nor ever be allowed even to sleep peacefully, but must be awakened deliberately over and over to be enraged first?

Not one of my tormentors would be the same after just one day of it.

Do you think a civilization can survive without its poetry?

You’d be wrong.

Dead. Wrong.

‘Bout to be exactly that, too ~ some millions of you, at least ~ at at the hands of those same targeters.

Making my life hell has just been a testing field for making your Armaggedon.

Coming soon now.

Already went through LA.

A little.

The poet’s been telling you this for ~ how long?

Five years.

Nobody was listening.

And now that somebody might be listening they’re still not talking about it to the likes of this poet.

Not even enough to trace the transceivers in her vehicles back to their source.

It’s too embarrassing to be seen making like this poet is an actual person.

What would their friends say? 

“Maybe that crime ring’ll do us a favor and take her the rest of the way out before it goes down…

“Coupla the guys have a bet on it.”