draft of a suicide note

keep the memory in form. your eyes are glass now, elemental creature trapped within. I still want to know what is happening. these are a suicide's hands. these are the nerves of a suicide. Sylvia is singing to me from the record. stolen record like these moments taken from your life. I don't think we'll be friends. the skin of earth forms over the container. still, I can see sky, I can see the transient world, wind & rain. there are so many of us designing lives. we judge, we breath. christ is only a shadow here.

I had a copy of the record of Sylvia Plath reading at the BBC. I believe I stole it from the Sangamon Library, but I don't really remember. I do remember having that record for a score of years. She does "Daddy" on it, and "Fever 103". Plath's work was very influential in my life. Well, the Ariel poems at least. At the end, when she was working entirely in metaphorical language and it was so very clear what she was saying. Reading some of these things now, as I approach sixty, I think it is remarkable I lived this long.

brave smile

I always wear the brave smile.
So you go again, Gary. He goes, Hulvey too.
They went. Somewhere.
I feel constantly abandoned, finding corpses
in my papers in the basement. Finding
my limbs removed and replaced with metal
fixtures. I always
make those excuses.
You pay the rent.
She writes occasional letters.
He helped me once.
He said I wrote well.
I live in fear,
waiting for the next one gone.
I smoke too much drink too
much can't remember
dreams, good & bad. I
crave unnatural sex as a way out
of this haunted house
pretending to be a writer
almost daily.
wearing that brave smile
dreaming of cutting
your silly throat
I always
end up a coward
in these sheets

it's not liberation folks,
its expiation
and finally redemption
I need another chance

Homage to George Sanders, 1977

Neil sings on WDBR
Summer cold stops my breathing
the phone must be out of order
it never rings, not in any language
I know. I wish Neil would go away
or that it was rich earth and
nineteen sixty seven again. I wish
I didn't smoke or I wish I was
a professional celibate or I wish
I had new love. Mostly its today's
removal~the need to escape
the confusion. And I always seem
to know too much and not enough
at the same time. Why can't it
always be fun? If there is a deity
why would such a knowledgeable Joe
tolerate us? For petty reasons
such as a reference point for
His own existence? Why would He
allow me to become so friggin' tired
of myself, giving Him a reason for
cycles, perhaps? I can't stand being
this static~yet I refuse to move.
Like Roy Roger's horse, they'll preserve
what's left of this human suicide
with plastic wrap, stand him in this
corner and wonder why he ever breathed.
Everything gets forgot.

From 1977. Why can't it always be fun? Yes, I know, pain is necessary to give ecstasy meaning. "Without a hurt the heart is hollow" —from the Fantastiks, ca. 1954.