Part of the reason why I never pursued publishing any of longish ramblings as books is the terms publishers offer writers. Esp. first time authors.

You read one of those contracts and no self-respecting person would willingly subject themselves to those terms.

The system is built on the desperation and willing subjugation of the creative person.

And no, I will not transform my life in that of a traveling salesperson for the foreseeable future either.

If my existence relies on value for recognition of others, it is already cheap and not worth a flicker.

If my ideas and creation are not enough for publication on their merit, no problem, the ideas will find a way and the creation itself sadly may not see the light of day.

But my creation has already fulfilled their purpose for me, in having been created.

Although I do wonder, like that young Columbian girl I met outside the Boscolo in Rome, reading Rupi Kaur.

We talked for a couple of hours and then I did something I hadn't done in a long time.

I read some old poems, she grabbed the I-pad and read more on her own. Went very quite. And then flung herself at me. Crying. Punching little punches.

Where were you all this time? She sobbed. I read that book (her Rupi Kaur) a thousand times looking for this.

For you.

Now I don't much know about Rupi Kaur. And it is not about her. I had come across her profile on the Times and recognized her. The vein of her work. Sourced from the same mother lode as mine.

But suspected owing to the format of Instagram and our shifting times, as veinlite.

Her success is wonderful.

When I read my poems out aloud in New York, you can hear the nothing as a thing.

It never daunted me.

I had discovered something very early on that the beatniks had discovered.

I did not wait around to be discovered, I discovered myself.

Even then the mores were changing.

By the end of my time in New York, when I opened a poetry festival upstate, a young man walked up to me, bought my little self published poetry book, the second one, (i detest the term chapbook) and said he hadn't heard anything like mine.

It is always the young ones.

Who recognize the truth. Who need to hear the truth spoken to them. Nothing like truth spoken out and aloud affirms it in their own young hearts. That brings involuntary tears to their eyes.

It takes no special artistry to do this.

It is directly proportional to the depth of feeling of your very own inborn truth.

He asked if he might invite me to his poetry class (pending approval of his professor) as he really wanted the rest of his class to hear me. Read my work.

What greater recognition does one need.

I said yes. I would go. How can I not?

The girl outside the Boscolo though. And some others like her. How can I not continue to fail her?

I wonder.

I do labour from an anonymity fetish.

It is a result of a bunch of colliding catastrophes.

It started off with an earnest attitude of rejecting the compromised, the colluding, the craven, the crass, the commercial culture of the current.

It took me a while to see the snobbery of that. In that. And there was some.

And then some more to see the secret fear of being seen. As one really was.

There was a reason that although I was a fearless performer on stage and in performance art, I never 'performed' my poetry.

I always 'read' my poems using the barrier of the book between me and the audience.

Although one wants and needs to be seen for who or what one is, as they are, in an everyday encounter or amongst friends and relations, it is a different thing embodied in front of an audience.

Standing up, being seen takes a strength, a clarity of purpose, of beingness, a distillation of spirit, a total and utter vulnerability, but one that can not be hurt or destroyed as it is not available to others in that way.

Yet it is an organic thing.

Like a flower that knows no shame.

But how long does a plant continue to flower its innocence again and again, how many flowers squashed, and roots crowded, bull dozed, planted, replanted, trashed, thrown out, thrown back, stepped on, does it continue to flower?

I once had a tiny African Violet.

It was one of my very first potted plant. I loved it to bits. It may or may not have come from a cutting from my ex's grammy. I think not. But that is not nearly the point.

It was only a tiny plant. It was kept in the front inside window still of my east village flat.

Small as it was, kept in a small (normal?) sized container, it bloomed its mighty purple violet soft velvet blooms. Like a baby's laughter. Gurgling non stop.

Without going into details, which would derail this thread in a disastrous way, I lost access to the flat while away.

Four months later, well into very nearly autumn turning into winter, we walked back into my dear dear flat with lavendar walls to pick up a few things and clear the fridge may be.

For four months there sat the plant, while all else indoor was dead, the Trusty Violet,

Still gurgling. Her sweet happy tear flowers.