Note, Returned

My goal is to always come from a place of love . . . but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker.

--RuPaul

I was going to use that as the epigraph of a little essay on the faults and flaws of the modern world, and of LGBT people in particular. Being oppressed does not make you virtuous, ipso facto. There's a difference.

Oh but . . . skip it. Human beings have been repeatedly told, ad nauseam - and better yet, shown - how to live, from Socrates down to Mother Teresa.

But who really cares? Before you answer: circumspice.

ENVOI

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

--Auden