AG: next – oh yeah, Marlowe – ( (page) twenty-five) – “Come Live With Me And Be My Love” – remember that? – Everybody read that? This was my version of that.
This is to Neal Cassady, but it isn’t very much in the closet, this is 1947, one of the other poems in the book (The Gates of Wrath) and I was then twenty-one– “Come live with me and be my love and we will some old pleasures prove./Men like me have paid in verse /This costly courtesy, or curse/ But I would bargain with my art/ (As to the mind, now to the heart),/My symbols, images and signs/Please me more outside these lines” – (in other words, I’d rather fuck than write about it)
“For your share and recompense/You will be taught another sense:/The wisdom of the subtle worm/Will turn most perfect in your form..” – (meaning I wanted to suck him! – it was probably so much in the closet it probably doesn’t make any sense to anybody but me anymore! ) –
“Not that your soul need tutored be/By intellectual degree,/But graces that the mind can share/Will make you as most wise,, more fair/ Till all the world’s devoted thought/Find all in you it ever sought,/And even I, of skeptic mind/ A Resurrection of a kind” – (referring to getting a hard-on, “A Resurrection of a kind”) – “This compliment in mine own way,/For what. I would receive, I pay/Thus all the wise have write thereof,/And all the fair have been their love.”
So…this was a faint imitation of the Marlowe-Raleigh exchange, called “A Further Proposal” (you know, ( -“here’s another one”)
to be continued
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-five-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-seven-and-a-quarter minutes in]