people come as they are

he never made any pretence to objectivity;
the notion of the dispassionate eye he wrote off
as delusion, my life, is at least as
much about me as the people i love: a vast collection
of individuals with the compulsion to be alive

in person, he is a happy humanitarian optimist,
warm-blooded andgregarious;
to know his story, is to love him,
but he’s no sentimentalist and there is a demur
streak in him: coolly contemptuous of the
subterfuge even while enthralled by its performance

like a caricaturist, he thought
that lies and cruelty settled like a crust on the
face and body language of people,
all he had to do was to supply a little light
to expose the particular quality in which
moral grit or its absence had been inscribed

confronted by his legendary gracious grin,
he turns it into a mask of quirky smugness,
as if fattened at the trough of self-satisfaction,
with his most rogueishly smile - that all his
collaborations; and that nothing about the
meaning of himself and the people he loved was
calculated in advance, people come as they are