SCRIPT:

Dear Friend, Let’s talk about rage, about that trying, trying

I want to talk to you about rage, about anger, about trying loneliness and unreachable hurt. It’s not your fault, friend. It’s not your fault. You are living in a society—not a world, a society—that tells you that you are useless unless you are useful.Now you know this. No matter what you do, you amount to little unless someone can get what they need from you, from your labor, your grace, from your unmanageable song. Now, if this is not you, listen no further. But if it is, I will carry on.

Consider—and I whisper to those in the “know”—even if you have not felt the quivering tension between your product and your dreams, their similarities, their sticky exchange—someone you know has. There is an untraceable bargain between the you who slipped into a body and the body’s recognition of what it has to be to escape detection, to move to the holy meal, to receive communion at the temple of the presently unmolested and the not yet damned. Let me put it to you simple, you had it figured out in diapers: Get fed.

Now, who loves you? You anticipate the question I am going to ask is “Do you love yourself?” No, no, no the real questions is, “Who are the intertwining, overlapping, interdependent flowering unseen selves you came to love and be loved with, goddamn it? Who are those selves, and why won’t you give them a chance?And why is love the “yeah, yeah, yeah” to every tune?” Now, I am not asking, “Are you having fun? Are you blessed?’ I’m asking, what have you given up to live? What ghost, what image, what effigy works its magic on you, hustling you toward your starkly visible end?

Our ancestors suffered life. Now our fathers cum with no expression; our mothers worry about the rent. At the same time, the same time, their spirits blaze invisibly behind them in candied violets, bloody reds, parrot yellows, tart ripe oranges, and nasty, sour greens. Look at us. Isn’t it the oddest thing, to see folks at the supermarket, on the overpass, under the bridge, waiting in line, drifting, half-dead, and their spirits full of dance? We are wild, friend. Wild.

And you know it. You do. And yeah, yeah, yeah, you never tell me. Oh, language is a glass jar. I can’t tell you and you can’t tell me, how it is that we are rendered so silent in the tight borders of an American grin, why we ache together and turn away.

You’ve said it: “Where has the day gone?” Well, you know it went to the products, to the check, the soup line, to the digging of that old trench, to the finger frenzy of ordering, to the demonic games of power and control. Let me say this, “Where does the child go who knows no difference between itself and every other living...Thing?” Without its rocking, snorting, slippery little dreams, the child like its progenitors seeps into cracks, stands hard along the wall, becomes a sign, of bone. Yet that child thirsts and craves and lusts, still as the child is, as quiet.

Now consider that I’m speaking about myself. Consider that I am the total product, the right and fuming concoction boiled down from a Christian doom, a fine line drawn by a bony finger in coal. Consider that I have got it all—-I’m preaching aren’t I? I’m talking to you?—-And here I am, still hollering at written history, at linear time, at the prophetic act of filling out a W-9. I am angry, because I got no home. I got no place to take me in. No, I do not know a borderless town, and 

Death is everywhere. In all my years, I have not lived, because I need love and I am afraid to and ashamed to ask. Now, why is that friend? Why? Because Love is Love’s goal and end. It does not jibe with American values. It’s not hard. It’s not tough. It lays no demands, and it will not make you famous. It makes you small and weak and dependent. The multiple faces you never knew and did not believe you had fan open with love’s chant. I hear that. You see. I can’t tell you friend, I cannot tell you who you are, or what to do, but I can tell you something, I can tell you that that anger can.

#