Caballer, Evergreen N0.52, March.'68

When I was 16, a friend gave it to me, and said, you have got to read this, because I had gone to him with several questions about the New Testament. What about this? Can you answer this? And he couldn't answer any of the questions. He just always said, "Now, Ronnie, there are some things we don't need to ask, we just need to accept 'em." When he gave me The Prophet by Gibran, he said, this is dangerous. One thing led to another . . . And then I'd drive to Louisville. And there was a bookstore in downtown Louisville, W. K. Stuart's. And I would go there on my visits, and I'd buy fifteen or twenty books, depending on how much money I had, all paperbacks of course . . . I started reading avidly, which I've done all my life. So somewhere in my teens I just came across Jack Kerouac. And it was about that the time the whole hippie thing was going on, San Francisco was going on, the Vietnam War was going on. Lots of books and photos and literature was coming out about the Holocaust. I had already been going through, and in school they had been showing films of the atomic, and the nuclear thing that was going on . . . I just couldn't believe that it was possible for humanity to do this sort of thing to each other. And so from the age of thirteen - I think, all my life but thirteen is when I really started - diving into this other world that I dwelt in. I started reading other kinds of literature, and Kerouac touched a chord in me, as did J. D. Salinger, as did John Steinbeck. I read Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school. It tore me completely up. . . I consider Kerouac and Steinbeck to be two of the greatest- maybe the two greatest writers in America, both. They wrote about the downtrodden, the down-and-out, the people who struggled, who suffered, who put it all on the line and didn't always make it. And I love those writers. So you combine that with the kind of upbringing that I had, I mean, that was my experience. My dad was a union coal miner - and let me tell you something . . . The fights, the deaths in the working class, the ones who sacrificed their lives in order to get better working conditions for millions of people- I mean, the U.S. Army was called out to bomb work camps in eastern Kentucky during the formation of coal miners unions, so it was literally a war. . . Where I grew up people were shot and killed. So when I read these stories, about the people, about the Okies, because of the Dust Bowl, they had to leave their homes in Oklahoma and go to California, . . . you know man, I'm right there with 'em, because I saw it happening, in my own world. And with Kerouac, I read about the hoboes, the downtrodden, the down-and-out, I understood why people turned away from big government, big corporations, plantation owners . . . Just get in a car and travel and leave it all behind. Yeah, I understood, and I understand it to this day. I can't stand injustice, people hurting other people. I understand people treating people fairly . . . That's what I understand. These writers - the Beats and others who are, I think, spiritually connected, who inspired the Beats - well, I'm on the same page with them. And I want to carry on that tradition of telling the stories, writing the poems, of the downtrodden, the down-and-out class. Those who are struggling . . . I'm for those people. But those who have need to share with those who have-not. So that's why I'm drawn to the Beats. The Beatitudes. Beat means not only downtrodden, beat down by the system and society, but as Kerouac pointed out- he said to be beat is to be spiritual, when Jesus gave the sermon about the beatitudes

FD: In the poem, "Sex Education," the father refers to the speaker, who is presumably you, as "Bone". As well, this figure composed of a stacked circle, triangle and square. What do you mean when you talk about "Bone" or the "Bone Man"?

Ron: Okay, well, I happen to take after my granddad Render, my mom's dad, and he's built like me. Tall, thin, muscular. . . And I was always wanting to be the leader, never wanting to be told what to do, I had to compete and stay up with them. And with anybody else who was attempting to lead the way. So it was something that just came to me. I didn't really have the confidence to come out of the closet as a poet at seventeen, because I was already getting enough ass-beatings as it was. And just chose not to say anything about it. So what happened was I chose to develop - I had to develop - a whole other world inside myself. So I created some characters and decided to call myself the "Bone Man." And my brother, the "Muscle Man". And my invisible older brother, the "Brain Man". . . and so in my studies, I've gone through periods in my life when I've read as many as three book a day . . . And I studied Zoroastrianism, and I came across this symbol. The circle under which is the square under which is the triangle, and I decided to start signing that figure after my name, and it is the ancient Zoroastrian symbol for a human being. The circle represents love, the square power, and the triangle wisdom. It's those three in balance that creates the ideal human. It's a state toward which we continually strive, hopefully, if we're awake enough, and want to fulfill our potential, then we're striving toward the balance of love, power and wisdom. If one overrides too much, you're out of balance. But that's what that symbol means to me. And I am the Bone Man. . . . I want to find happiness, but this is a strange world we live in, and I like Jonathon Swift's saying, "Vex the world." So I think it's good to constant pull the rug out from under ourselves. Not just the world, but ourselves. One of my goals in life is to move beyond all fear. And part of that process is facing, embracing, and therefore being able to move beyond fear, is to be able to go where there is no ground. So I choose to walk on groundlessness, in openness.