delivered to my flailing sanity
splintery cryptic language
falling from my eyes
and onto these pages
from memories,
adjacent verbs
that make me recognise
that a time arrives
when you must
look further within self
to realise that
it is more simple and virtuous
to die young
in a car wreck
than to bleed
translucently
from the gut
age 65 or 70
having lived a purple lie.
I remember hard now
when I was 23
and living in a small room
in venice.
living off beans and corn bread
drunk everyday by 11
lonely
half mad
I used to receive letters
from females in Australia
(place of birth and childhood)
that I hardly knew
or had met twice,
declaring solidarity to me
claiming
my vigor and honest brevity.
I used to take these letters down to the beach
with a bottle of port wine
and take off my shirt and shoes
and lie flat on my back
in the California sun
burning.
drinking that port wine down
and reading those letters aloud
always finding something
mildly humorous or
significantly interesting
in their words
and wondering what I had said
or done to these females
so far away
sending these hot words
down through the colonies
words laced with want and need
like a refugee.
separated by an ocean,
those girls with all the strength for me
so far away,
me drunk on the beach
clutching those letters
being ridiculed by the bums
and madmen.
the tourist,
looking at me like I was a rapist
because I was young and drunk and
reading aloud
and becoming conscious of it all,
the attention
from the bums and the madmen
and the tourists
and the young females in Australia.
immediately
becoming sick of the sand,
sick of the blue sky
and sick of the world.
feeling that I wanted out
but knowing I was already finished.
soon after the letters stopped.
I never replied
maybe that was why.
life was taking care of
what was left of me.
I’d return home
and my landlady
would be on all fours
cutting in the turf
for a new location for a Tulip
to die.
I’d walk by without saying a word
and check the mailbox.
“desperately empty,” she’d say.
the corners of her mouth turned up
with lucid mockery
her face playing 35
but her complexion savage with bitterness
fabricating a declaration of 50.
I’d walk on in
closing the door quietly behind
and look at the faded calendar
hanging by a nail.
with that relentless
Californian sun falling all over the place,
and my buttermilk semblance–
I’d laugh.
for all the answers
were passed over to the sane
or far from the reach
of my simple grip.