maybe maybe not

these words
this patience
makes me sound phony sweetheart
what really hurts now
are the disappearances
the things we never said
in the intrigue
the bullets of the self
poisoning the blood
and you are the antibody
but you are gone and this disease
sounds phony now with its own
empty circular solution

I am
balanced on the tip of the pyramid
no one will give me the shove
which face will I slide down?
none of the above
all the words accumulate
in the will
a slow poison
the hours crowding
into this house

This piece is strictly speaking about Alison and mine's inability to get beyond the fact that we were in love, but couldn't really be with each other because we both were living off of somebody else and we were not quite capable of dealing with that. So rather than simply say we need to find a way to make enough money to live together, which would've meant spending time not making art (which is truly what we thought we were doing those days), we just hummed our way through a decade of game playing. The pyramid reference is very pointed. Sometime in the late 70s I got into that idea that a pyramid was a way of focusing psychic energy. I build a pyramid and put it in the attic at Scarritt. The roof itself was a four sided pyramid, so I figured it would do some serious focusing. Hey, it was the sixties. People did things like this. I did many. I used it to ask for a specific boon which I actually received. And not a small thing, either. I didn't ask it to work things out between me and Alison, however. I felt that only she could do that. I, for one, was ready to give up everything for her and I told her that on more than one occasion. And she would say, maybe. Well, that's her crime, her sin in this. By and large she wasn't a terrible person, but she kept me hanging on, and herself too. Maybe.