writing v

My advice to the poets? To the yarnspinners: consent to your madness. Insofar as it does not kill you consent to that which drives you wild, to those voices speaking to you and those pictures no one else can see? Everyone else needs those pictures. Those who don't know envy you for your gift. Some pay hundreds of dollars to learn what cannot be learned, what is gift. No matter how clumsily you think you express it, and we ALL think we clumsily express it, it must be expressed. Open your mouth and prophecy sister singers, brother bards. Just do it, damn it. Last night I lay in bed and one lay beside me I'd never known and addressed me by a name I never knew I had. He told me out story, how we'd grown up together here and there. He did not go away. He lives in inside me.

When I was young, at an awful time in my life I went to my mother and put down the book I was reading. I despaired, "It's not real," and she said no, that it wasn't." She had her own troubles and these made her a sorry comforter. Her wings were weighed down with the weight of the world some man had made for her and handed to her and she mistook it for the only truth.

Twenty-six years of seeing wings weighed down. Now I know the whole world is the product of imagination, and it is for us to dream the dreams which give us wings. Everything is real. Do you hear me? Everything? And by our imaginations we can imagine for ourselves such glorious wings we will touch the sun, and beyond.