Be sure you give men the best of your wares-- though they be poor enough, and the gods will help you to lay up a better store for the future.

 

 

Friends, Freedom Resumé is the best of my wares. In the 1980s and 1990s a city on an island gave a dreamer with a lyrical bent its best-- summer mornings, sea and mountain vistas, ozone-breeze, crows and gulls overhead, songbirds in the trees. A sweating bicycle ride, steam from a thermos of coffee, the literature of mankind, green hardcover lined journals, a Fineliner felt-tip pen, close male friends and wonderful female companionship to bless me after my Arcadian reconnoiterings, and most of all the treasure of treasures --freedom. Freedom in the Free world! I met these treasures with the tip of the pen, following the Word where that strange creature wended, and later at the keyboard gathered the harvest, bundled into the big barn--(harddrive)-- what I judged worthy, and now offer back to you from fifteen years of living, with your support, outside the sacred limits of the job culture-- hors concours ("out of the competition") and pro-fanum (outside the temple, in the "wild realm of the sacred"). Much of it was written outdoors, in states of light ecstasy, to birdsong, city roar, and the extraordinary permissiveness of Apollo, all during the manic ramping of the "neoliberal agenda." Determinedly tacking 180 to that background, I genuinely tried to slow down. I was clumsy at it, but did loaf and invite my soul. These, my hundred shrines and sanctuaries, are my lyric years-- no man could be more grateful than I that I was granted them.