1) I believe I should be a victim of literature.
Art at its best holds you in its grasp like you and it are a pair of binary stars. Art should grab you and pull you to it with all the ardor of a lover, and, in its lustful grasp, you should be unable to pull away. The books that you have to make yourself read are not worth your time.
2) This is a fever. A dream-fever I’ve got to work and sweat and scream out of me. And this is what all such efforts should be. They must be a matter of life and of death. They should be urgent as the night before my lover catches a nine A.M flight to the other side of the ocean, where he will live in an alternative reality a quarter day in the future of my own.
3) And then one night I watch a movie about Allen Ginsberg with my oldest friend. We fail to find each other at the theater, but in the absence by my side I read her thoughtful, rolling revelry. I get to thinking about many things, about art and social injustices and various wrongs, and heartwarmingly heathanous heroes like Ginsberg and Keuroac. And afterwards, something has changed for me. No; that’s not it. There has been no change-- these thoughts have been so long fermenting that they must be worth a million for their dizzying vintage. I have said these things so often that I know the ins and outs of them like I know the ins and outs of breathing: know them so well that I cease to think of them-- indeed; in a way I cease to know them. It is only the resolve that is new, reborn like a long stifled passion awakened by someone you thought you would never meet again.
3.5) Ginsberg, if all that you did was for the love of Keuroac, whom you watched over the lithe shoulder's of his dancing girl, a man who who would never-- for all your words-- fall into your arms, then take heart, my friend; for in your stead have come a hundred evoking their love for you in every word, with every jazz-shoe turn. This isn't the perfect circuit click and flare you were hoping for, but that's the way our mad and damning dance is done.
4.)Don’t back down. Whatever you do, make sure it scares you.
5.) I am writing all of this so that in a million years, when we are nothing but a figment of a calcified planet’s fevered fancy and irreverent imagination, we can look back on all this and say: “Oh, but I lived! Oh, but I fought! I lived and I loved and I fought and I fucked and I failed, but really it’s the striving that counts.” We were the Kings and Queens of Phosphorescence. Our minds glowed like cum under black-light. We made a habit of anything that burned. Anything bright. Anything that excited the blood still blue in our veins.
5.5) These were our manifestos: Love, Scream, Fuck, Sing, Run.
These were our manifestos, and we adhered to them as surely as sailors adhere to the directions of the north stars.
6.) In a million years, these manifestos will still purr in our vanished bones. Even then, the dust of me will say: This is still our world. Of rust, of rubble, of ruin-- yes.
But it remains.
