Jean Genet and me

The American health care system, Time or Asiaweek says, is tops at the higher end. I would end up a bag lady if I were there.

My poet friends there went into carpentry, care giving, backhoeing, then one, the best of the lot, to business writing for a computer company, and then real estate. Real estate doesn’t make her a real estate broker, only rich; she is a poet and will always be.

Jean Genet was a thief and his distinguished compatriots who think highly of their radicalism call him poet-thief, sometimes, criminal-poet. I asked, why not a broker- poet? If you want to distinguish yourself as a poet-fuck, sheilfa, said she, that’s your business.

I sometimes wish I were just plain me. Then maybe, just maybe, she can love me?

But maybe Jean Genet was just a mediocre thief, and like me he only stole books and bric-a-brac to get free board at the penitentiary. A place to be warm in, with table and chair, warm bodies, too, that he may write the plays he wrote.

And that’s why he never completed a novel; prison term didn’t allow him that breadth.