The urge to write comes only when I cannot write, when the time is up.  It comes freshest only when it is time to go to work, time to go to bed, or time to get up when I haven't yet gone to bed.  It comes at the end of days rightly spent—or even at the end of days thoroughly wasted—when all else is put away, like on a moving day when you pause to eat a pizza on top of an empty cardboard box at the place you'll never live in anymore—the last supper.  Those times are when I need ten or twelve, or sixty hours dedicated to words.  Only when the 'unsinkable' ship is going down do I get the blessed rage of words.  I wonder how many books, plays, and essays on progressive thought, fresh and hastily conceived, went down with the Titanic. 

I have always cried.  I remember watching old tear-jerker movies about the Titanic's sinking, based more on legend than on fact.  That's the beauty of that story; it allows room for all the poetic, romantic, and aesthetic license that real life demands.  I have always cried—and loved it.  But I have never wept. 

It seems a purely semantic distinction, but for me there is a world of difference.  'Crying' is not exactly superficial, for it can be evidence, sometimes profound, of the sorrow held within.  Often enough it is the best defense from those long desired visitors who come and knock, and wait.  They heard about your sorrow in town and they come, almost always to console—sometimes not.  They know you are sad, they can see it in the lawn's unhappiness, the broken walkway, the dismembered toys strewn about.  They knock, and wait.  They notice years of dust collected on the window frame just inside the glass, the drapery hanging limp and dull, and the cobwebs under the porch chair.  They knock, and wait.  They can sense even the doorway's sadness as they wait, it wants to allow passage—that's what it was made for—but it almost never opens, and today it won't again.  They knock once more, a resigned and weakened rap; there is no longer an expectation of reply.  They call out their condolences through the unopened door, and then they go away.  Success!  Once again will no one know the weeping matron hiding within the wretched crying house. 

If ever words do win time to stand and stretch, then they flail about, riotous and volatile, as is the way with words, and no marriages are made.  In fertile promiscuity, they seek to form unlimited combinations to hold everything there is—all that now exists, and what dreams may come, as well.  Without extinction's threat, they find no cause to stay in any order, instead they find new partners with each fleeting thought.  They begin to gather into groups of new significance, but soon they are dispersed by the surging, ever flowing stream of consciousness. 

The most writing I ever did was when I thought I had little time.  I was not mistaken, then, about the time that I had left, and I now have even less. 

At the crying house the torrent carries off the childless toys; it strips away the porch, the lawn, and sweeps away the walkway's broken stones.  That house's good and faithful door is rattled in its frame.  Meanwhile, the life of words has gone underground, like a French resistance in opposition to my stifling regime.  I am expected to oppose these secret associations, but unofficially I am pleased—for apocalypse is nigh, and my God!, still I have so much to say:  To describe the breathless boys who love and cry.  To sing unwritten songs about sweet goddesses who laugh and sigh, and about their uninvented matriarchal worlds.  To write about the weeping woman rushing home to fry a steak for the man who beats her up.  To conceive the story of a baby—peaceful born, and pure—greeting an anxious and despairing world.  To deconstruct the man who thinks he is a boy, and to re-create the writer who thinks that there is no one he might save. 

I want an oboe solo when I die; I don't know the tune.  Maybe something by Mozart, who was a genius.  When I was the age that he was when he died, I really had not yet begun.  But intuition tells me that a composition by Beethoven should be my dirge.  Though deaf long before he died, he never stopped composing beautiful music.  Convention would have said, "Move on to something else."  But once you have found the medium of your soul, nothing, nothing else will do. 

I want an oboe solo when I die.  It makes me want to cry, and you do know how I love to cry.  The lonely, mellow oboe's voice is rich as morning coffee and sweet as sugared cream; it stands beside my heart. 

How do I end?  This is the question one must ever answer, only once.