Why shouldn’t I tell you only about myself?
This is all I know. I have not been
Conditioned to think I know the key to something else;
I will not lie, like all the rest.
Talking away from yourself
Is the best way to lie, but if I talk of me
Talking of me; if I cannot escape myself,
No lie is possible. This is truth and poetry.
They may say it’s selfish, or mad,
To be like this, to be self-obsessed;
But myself is not just what I know the best,
It is the only thing I know;
And if you are honest,
You know it, too.
You pretend and lie about everything else,
Don’t you?
Here is what we’ll do:
I will talk of me and you will talk of you,
Defending ourselves, not lying,
Exposing ourselves, laughing, crying,
Entering a heaven of intimacy
Defended by increasing self-examination and honesty;
If I pick up a guitar,
I will not teach; I will say here’s what I know I cannot do until you know it; we are
Receptacles ourselves of all knowledge.
We will examine ourselves in the world
Until we are geniuses in our honesty.
Your eye will be my eye.
And by ourselves there will be more expressed
Than all the science and all the manners pronounced by all the rest.
I’ll listen to you, and you’ll listen to me,
And in our irreverent originality,
With unbounded faith in ourselves,
No lie will mar our life and poetry.
And we will be like scientists, too;
Through pure honesty, I will be a scientist,
Who, until the end—oh God will there be an end?—loves you.