Sleepers Awake

"Don't you fret, pet. I'll tell them to stamp PERISHABLE all over it."
Damn! you miss one and you step in two!

"But it's not perishable, Mr. Best."

"I know, I know, but just remember that somewhere we may have an everlasting use too."

The old man walked down the path and told me to come out of hiding. You are a nobody, a freak, a pathetic little weepingstock, lost, already forgotten, as it has spent all meaning, as the words and the quick flesh draw farther apart--

"I'm afraid I don't follow."
--plunge through the net, break into the light--stop writing books

"But I've never even read one." This, of course, happened some time ago; when you might almost say, I still had my innocense, and a little, yes, perhaps a little faith in something...
--try to feel your own heart beating in your chest, your own life in the living wonder of all creation--You are a liar, a thief, a winded ghost making empty sounds in a madhouse--

"I don't know why you talk to me if you think I'm as worthless as all that, sir." And I was down on my knees crying and all the light and stalking had their teeth in my life and I didn't know how I was going to get out I didn't know how I was going to control what was eating the sick oyster that squirmed in my head
--it is time that books began to whirl and dance--

"I thought you just said writing books was bad."
--I've changed my mind. It is time that books be allowed to OPEN INTO THE UNKNOWN--

"What, sir, does that mean?"

--books must be allowed to get out of hand, to wander off on their own account--

"Help me not to be a cheat. I'd like to take all the poor devils in the world in my arms and be able to give them something, some real food, some stuff that has the stink and the painful wonder of being alive in it--Even the crude drawing of a cow--"
--man must be made to understand that all the gates are still open, that all the Wild and Beautiful are beckoning him NOW... a flower, a girl, a star... be hushed in that wonder--

"My trouble in the world is inside, not out at all. Something inside myself has damaged me."
--kneel to the Blakes & the Shakespeares
--There is one king on this earth, and that king is the poet--

"Pray for me, Father... for I am without an animal to live in."
--be as children again.

"I laugh, I weep, Father."
--BE AS CHILDREN AGAIN!

"The world is dying around us."
--then leave the world which has--O my children have been made to murder one another; they have been driven mad--

"A flower, God--a girl, a star."
--and I am crying too.

---------------------------------

Well, that's enough for now. I got to go take mea a look around. Who knows, I may be missing a few tricks--Besides, my fanny's had enough work-out for one day.

! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * !
Put this book aside a couple hours and
go out and do something nice for somebody.
! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * !

[Kenneth Patchen. 'Sleepers Awake.' New Directions Publishing. New York,
1946. pp.85-87]