I love the British. I was making fun of myself and my fractured interior voices. I thought deeply about your poem for several days, and it struck a resonant chord in me. My feelings about the USA were formed in vastly different vats than yours. My best friend was Creased-Shorts Brit Andrew Holmes Higgins the III, who taught me how to carry a satchel and wear a bow tie. My other best friend was Daniel Malak, a Lebanese kid whose family was supposedly massacred according to my father, but may not have been, since I am beginning to uncover facts revealing that large swaths of my father-implanted realities were indeed, completely fabricated.
Our histories don’t match. Two blind men, an elephant, and the elephant is mad. Two different piles of books, two sets of professors, two different marriage partners. Probably somewhere deeper down in the hard social bedrock — an incident for me this way, an incident for you that way, and Byron feels this forever and Andy feels that. I get sweaty palms from heights, and fear tall buildings intensely. I got shocked hard and permanently by the images. I hate and fear violence like that. Freaking stupid religious shit. Always with the Church of the White Creator and the Murder All Jews Mosque. I respect the Buddhists, and the Hindu, but I’m a techno-hippie. I’m happy to be alive. I want to go to space. I don’t believe the bad parts of people and life will ever stop. I do believe in the struggle to grow, and I believe in Mr. Green’s statements that humanity is slowly getting better, in ups and downs, more liberal, more thoughtful.
I suppose I overdid the poem. It’s all true except for the hate the British part. I love England. It’s France. France I hate. France, the broken reed of Verdun. The Petain Vichyness, Admiral Darlan and the fleet at Oran. Damn them. I have French blood flowing in my veins, but mostly German. Which explains me. German. Transalpine Gaul barbarian. Smart but not wise. Good for oxcart pulling and carrying grudges for a thousand years. Realpolitick. Conservative.
A hundred thousand years ago, we had a single mom and dad, you and I, all of us alive. You’re related to your wife somewhere within the last thirty generations. But not to me.
Scot. That’s all I have to say. Scottish. What? What’d I say?
I really do love you
Dissimilar as we are
I wished we could just
write some more poetry.
but i understand
if the tartan intrudes.
you know what i mean