Niall

This is a great poem by Charles Bukowski A SICKNESS yes, I'm a Romantic, overly sentimental, something of a hero worshiper, and I do not apologize for this. instead, I revere Hemingway, at the end of his endurance, sticking the barrel of the gun into his trembling mouth; and I think of Van Gogh slicing off part of his ear for a whore and then blasting himself away in the cornfield; then there was Chatterton drinking rat poison(an extremely painful way to die even if you are a plagiarist); and Ezra Pound dragged through the dusty streets of Italy in a cage and later confined to a madhouse; Celine robbed, hooted at, tormented by the French; Fitzgerald who finally quit drinking only to drop dead soon thereafter; Mozart in a pauper's grave; Beethoven deaf; Bierce vanishing into the wastelands of Mexico; Hart Crane leaping over the ship's rail and into the propeller; Tolstoy accepting Christ and giving all his possessions to the poor; T.Lautrec with his short, deformed body and perfectly developed spirit, drawing everything he saw and more; D.H.Lawrence dying of TB and preparing his own Ship of Death while writing his last great poems; Li Po setting his poems on fire and sailing them down the river; Sherwood Anderson dying of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick (he was at a party drinking martinis when the olive went in toothpick and all); Wilfred owens killed in the first Great War while saving the world for Democracy; Socrates drinking hemlock with a smile; Nietzsche gone mad; De Quincey addicted to opium; Dostoevsky standing blindfolded before a firing squad; Hamsun eating his own flesh; Harry Crosby committing suicide hand in hand with his whore; Tchaikovsky trying to evade his homosexuality by marrying a female opera star; Henry Miller, in his old age, obsessed with young oriental girls; Jon Dos Passos going from fervent left-winger to ultraconservative Republican; Aldous Huxley taking visionary drugs and reaping imaginary riches; Brahms in his youth working on ways to build a powerful body because he felt that the mind was not enough; Villon barred from Paris not for his ideas but rather because he was a thief; Thomas Wolfe who felt he couldn't go home again until he was famous; and Faulkner when he got his morning mail, he'd hold the envelope up to the light and if he couldn't see a check in there he'd throw it away; William Burroughs who shot and killed his wife (he missed the apple perched on her head); Norman Mailer knifing his wife; no apple involved; Salinger not believing the world was worth writing for; Jean Julius Christian Sibelius, a proud and beautiful man composer of powerful music who after his 40th year went into hiding and was seldom seen again; nobody is sure who Shakespeare was; nightlife killed Truman Capote; Allen Ginsberg becoming a college professor; William Saroyan marrying the same woman twice (but by then he wasn't going anywhere anyhow); John Fante being sliced away bit by bit by the surgeon's knife before my very eyes; Robinson Jeffers (the proudest poet of them all) writing begging letters to those in power. of course there's more to tell and I could go on and on but even I (the Romantic) begin to tire. still, these men and women -past and present- have created and are creating new worlds for the rest of us, despite the fire and despite the ice, despite the hostility of governments, despite the ingrown distrust of the masses, only to die singly and usually alone. you've got to admire them all for the courage, for the effort, for their best and at their worst. some gang! they are a source of light! they are a source of joy! All of them heroes you can be grateful for and admire from afar as you wake up from your ordinary dreams each morning MyGen Profile Generator