One on the rocks

If I listened long enough to you,
I'd find a way to believe that it's
all true.

                Your paintings aren't weapons, some-

                one wrote for him to say, you would

                never do that to them, never reduce

                them like that. Maybe you started

                the commission thinking that way but

                then art happened. You couldn't help

                it, that's what you do ..

Of all the arguments to present,

to a man who knows what he's do-

ing, I think the effort to dis-

miss a moral crisis he confronts

is the symptom of a script which

has to end, one way or another.

Expression always has something

to do for others, if it is art.

                If you can't find your courage in a

                war, you have to keep looking for it

                anyway, and not in another war ei-

                ther; in where it's old and jammed 

                until the rocks start moving around,

                a little light and air, long time no

                see .. The war ended, and then it 

                really ended .. I watched the chop-

                pers I'd loved dropping into the sea

                as their pilots jumped clear, and one

                last chopper revved it up, lifted off

                and flew out of my chest. 

Tim Hardin
Reason to Believe
1965

John Logan
  playwright
Red
  Scene iv
Oberon Books, 2009©

Michael Herr
Dispatches
  Breathing Out
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977©

Eddie Redmayne
i   Out
ii  Esquire UK
2015