haunted house

I can't be here
in this haunted house
the ghosts are those of loss
the places I put myself
for people who would not see

the place I came to
the one who never came

the crisis threatens my understanding
lying awake with blonde angel in the wings
remembering her promise and its lie
this bullshit outside of time
that's meant to last outside of death
it means the same (she said)
she said she said
afraid of being hurt
another defensive manuever
she's circling the wagons
there is no way around it at all

you are alcatraz
this is my tunnel to the sea

Well, I spent a lot of the seventies waiting for Alison to show up. And some days and nights, she did. Far too often for my mental health. I kept waiting for her to say we could be together, though we were sort of together. But she had numerous different lives. And I was only part of one of those realities. The problem with this sort of relationship is that eventually it does become a prison. I should note that I have often been suicidal throughout most of my life. Only in the last ten or twelve years have I really not had that possibility on my mental list of incipient actions. True enough. I have made minor attempts to kill myself five or six times along the way. Probably the most serious was the one brought on by the sudden and irrevocable knowledge that my second wife was in love with another man. A difficult moment, but I believe the Lady saved me that day. In any case I don't go there anymore. I know death will come soon enough for me without any actions on my part. Jolly note, eh?

Failed Suicide, 1993

Her moans from the sunroom on south
grand first tracks of betrayal those cabins at
Allerton she looked on the young father
from west of the illinois and found
someone new to replace me she had
that list of boys/men―the farmer-poet
the chicano-liar, the jazz-drummer
―methedrine in his blood stream, the
saxophoner from food & money
singing about Argentina/“land of meat”
she sent him mash notes. Her spirals
composed of bitter, innocent stories,
her passions avoiding the real issue:
her father's religious requirement
to void the dark lust that lived like
a dead snake deep in his armor
a ghost snake a snake of hatred;
& my catholic pre-occupation with
her pain primed me to take her path
too many times (my) mind overlain
with an extra-terrestrial reality

She fucked me over boys.
The truth is she got tired of me.
Tired of the same old stories,
too much like her sick grandfather.
And then the bad chance
didn't come through for her.
Left her living in a garret
with my five year old daughter in
a sad neighborhood in Bloomington.
Is this history or just a long-awaited panic?
I let the pain take me to the hardware store.
I bought the plastic and
walled myself in the kitchen,
turned on the gas.
She almost killed me.
I am certain that was the plan.
Fuck her. And her minor art.
She could have been the real thing.
If only she could have gambled honestly.
If only she could look in the mirror
And open her eyes.