What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort
and understanding in--all this--and the long years I'd spent
endeavoring to give it a dignified texture--forever emerged as the
overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were
somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a
cheap world.
Some people heard my mentors. Yes.
A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the
attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and
the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the
crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those
whom I ballyhooed.
But others--oh, how rightly--saw me!
Yakkety-yak.
Wylie's next.
Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set
bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.
_Christ Jesus!_
I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc
itself--sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of
acquainting them with the instinct.
O tin messiah.
Tawdry complex.
Bawling calfcake.
Jackass of your own worst describing.
Balloon.
It must be a wonderful sensation.
Not truth, so much as show-off.
Not love of you--infatuation with me.
Not--for what I did--but, like most of us, for what I might have
done--and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the
airs of my hot compartments.
The extravert posing as the introvert.
The hoofer philosopher.
Shame, shame, shame!
Shame ran off me.
And I shall die, in it and with it.
I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and
somebody's radio performed an act of God.
Ja-da
Ja-da
Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing.
Shimmy, I thought.
Shimmy.
Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.
You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall
You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all.
Shimmy.
Shimmy!
Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.
This is a message to and of the American people.
The Dream.
The Cross.
Everybody
Loves my body
But my body
Don't love nobody
But me.
Dear Dean Casselberry:
I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing,
patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the
folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself
different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am
sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for
you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first
person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a
balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the
outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast--you will be
there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.