A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

Crow."
I must tell you that I had never thought of that before, but I
immediately agreed that it was a good principle. It is unseemly to
steal another's pain and write it up as if it were yours. And I
thought my final versions of the poem sidestepped this problem –
making me someone who wished God had swooped up the boy
and saved him, not as a stand-in for the boy.
But clearly, the writer of this poem/critique thinks I am still
guilty of spiritual theft. I will have to re-read the Jacob poem to
see if I agree or not. It is here.
G.O.D.'s central accusation, as I understand him, is that I am
a manipulative egomaniac not to be trusted around sensitive
minds. If so, you probably shouldn't be reading this, unless you,
like me, wickedly slow down to get a look at flaming car crashes.
There is something perverse in our fascination with pain and
misery, no doubt about it.
I confess I have led an emotionally lurid life. I have not just
felt things, I have tried to feel them even more – like Tolstoy,
sprinkling cayenne down his throat so he could write about the
feeling. When asked what is the matter with me, why I feel so
intense, my answer is that I am naturally on the hyper-emotional
side of things – that I feel things intensely. Intense
embarrassment, anger, resentment, self-pity, humor, the works.
I once had a reader write, about my brain tumor book, that I
"milked" the audience, made them feel as creepy about having
something the size of a baby’s arm inside my head as I do myself.
It was the same accusation. Basically, that I write self-indulgently
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