Distance in time has made my voice less contrived and subjective. I don’t feel I’m writing some kind of diary (which I kind of felt I was doing when I was 16). I am far more conscious of my voice and more disciplined in separating myself from my characters…
I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else's mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.
I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.
Forgive me, that I manage badly,
Manage badly but live gloriously,
That I leave traces of myself in my songs,
That I appeared to you in waking dreams.
Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal…
And I pray not for myself alone..
for all who stood outside the jail,
in bitter cold or summer's blaze,
with me under that blind red wall.
For seventeen months I have cried aloud
calling you back to your lair.
I hurled myself at the hangman's foot.
You are my son, changed into nightmare.
Confusion occupies the world,
and I am powerless to tell
somebody brute from something human,
or on what day the word spells, "Kill!"
You thought I was that type:
That you could forget me,
And that I'd plead and weep
And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare…
I acknowledge myself a unitarian — Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father.
