Prodding a sleeping dragonne

"The existence of a single atheist does not disprove the existence of God."

The poet said that in an interview, once, and aside from perhaps his "Horatius died a suicide, in some philosophies" it is undoubtably his best known quote, despite the beautifully ironic "A quote is but a tattoo on the tongue."

I see now, having read his recent dispatches, how low he has fallen in giving up so much for so many that there is little left of him. Don't get me wrong, there is more virtue in the quick beneath his left pinky toe cuticle than in many entire people, but even so, he is brought low. He paid a terrible price to leave his first marriage. I wouldn't have given so much away (even his ex-wife's lawyer told him he "gave the farm away").

What he didn't lose to his first marriage was ripped from him when he moved to the othe side of North America, where he found a semblance of himself. Then he gave that away, serving penance for his guilt by taking on project after project of women who were near death or madness, sacrificing his health, his sanity and his feeble fortunes that remained to try and accomplish some good.

And then he moved from coast to coast, first back to the East Coast to try and be with his children again, then back to the West Coat to placate his second wife, then down to the Gulf Coast to try and please her further, each time moving further and further away from himself to try and find himself and some sense of redemption.

Now, back to West Virginia, to hide. A smallgod in a land where agnostics rule, where ignorance is celebrated, elevated, consecrated as evidence of virtues that passed for ignorance generations ago.

There are good people there, he speaks of them. But there is no traction there for him, no wall to press his back to like in Venice Beach, no school of followers and admirers and readers to feed the failing flames of his couer rage.

It is time for him to move on.

I say this, not because there is anything I need from him, what little is left to him he needs in order to survive long enough to keep hope in his frame. An acquaintance of his recently told him that the one thing he lacked was an empathy with fear, for he had never really known it. I don't know if that is true. But he knows obligation; to himself, to others he loves, to others he does not even know. A lover once told him he didn't love her. He told her he'd take a bullet for her. She parried that he would do that for any stranger on the street and that to prove his love to her he'd have to foreswear that.

And that was the end of his second marriage. It's true. You can silence the truth, bury the proof, but the truth endures, the proof endures, like fossils, waiting for the curious to seek them out and find the world is more than a few centuries old. And that slander and deceit are only blunt instruments of pain, not instruments of change.

He needs to get off his ass and back into the fight. We need him to get off his ass and back into the fight.

You listening?