in parentheses

I felt these ragamuffins were orphans, so how their clothes hung dirty on their dirty flesh, so how their lives hung dirty into the grime and grunge of what their hands wrought, so how gentle and angelic they seemed. A whole new race of artists are they and from out of the earth they came, and brought with them all the mysterial colours of the grave, for you.

For you they brought this, for you to batter into shape your eye’s likeness, fore art to them is the shaping of me, for you they holed themselves years in the dark to be born a lodestar out of the travails of your sufferings.

So care for these motherless and fatherless urchins, when by your door they falter wasted to the bone and punctured all up the heart-vein, bring them up from waste and dark and show them your life, let it be opened page by page pain by pain prayer by prayer, and let them taste the fruits of your memory, and let them cover their self in the leaves of your past, and hurt them, hurt them the million-fold pain of your pain, hurt them so they as to live may be knowing, the pulse of a generation unknown unseen and going under, and seeing, and when time has returned bathe them in comfort fore it shall come to be, the last comfort before the flame.

But what, what cause to stir and spread me out into the canvas of thought, but what, what has stabbed me, by their motherless look, by the rags to which they raise themselves unconsciously above, by the rags to which they become naked, by the rags to which they return to the molded-self, the rags, is it the rags which give them the fatherless look, or is it not the rags but the childe free that I see?, a freedom delayed only by sleep, a freedom of creation, a freedom of me, so is this your lonely I see, though you are free?, or is only my eye a seeing-machine, of dreams into visions and visions unto dreams, you gaunt squirrelly boy, you erratic-attack girl?

I know not, and am maddened by this defeat, but I do know, if we were but to kiss, behold what worlds may come, through your painter hands and from my visions and dreams.