e.e. cummings - INTRODUCTION from New Poems

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and
ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human
beings;mostpeople are snobs¹. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe
unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat² yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and
dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming³ with every conceivable species of undesirable⁴ organism. Mostpeople
fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd
improbably call it dying--

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely⁵ welcome mystery,the
mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of
doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now'and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem
anything,catastrophic included.

Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean
living. They mean the latest and closest plural⁶ approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but
unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal. Mostpeople's wives could
spot a genuine delusion⁷ of embryonic⁸ omnipotence⁹ immediately and will accept no substitutes.

-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly¹⁰ scientific parlourgame of real
unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated¹¹ to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is
a king,hasn't a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic¹² not to mention transparent¹³ majesty¹⁴, mrsandmr collective foetus,would
improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn't a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a
transcedentally sterilized¹⁵ lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of
immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally
milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be
continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it to my
hand"--

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal¹⁶. Nothing ordinary or
extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints
childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which
breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to
fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of
mutual entirely¹⁷ opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and
rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes¹⁸ and cringing¹⁹ ecstasies²⁰ of
inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question