When I was a young poet,
I found the best method of writing
was to get dressed up like a French chambermaid,
stockings, garters and all,
and then to slit my wrists.
I was immediately faced with a decision:
Write an apologetic note that attempted to explain this scene
to the sad soul who discovered it,
Or to write something that would obliterate their vision.
I often used my own blood to write.
There was plenty of it.
Now that I am old,
I find that every moment is an awkward tragedy
begging for explanation.
This tattered recliner, a table perpetually set for two,
a row of shot glasses, a box of empty envelopes.
It pleases me to be the caretaker of this spiritual
refuse trapped in sidewalk cracks,
pushing a broom through the many chambers
of this museum mortared with my spit and sinew.
At the ubiquitous yuppie way station
I take my medicine:
A dark mug of koffeine, with cigarette butts floating like marshmallows.
My eyebrows snarl at the fragile thing in my favorite seat,
Sending her scrabbling away for human company.
At last I am alone with the blank page, ever awful, empty and expectant,
a fanfold stack of polygraph paper, just waiting for me to spill the first lie.
I have made it my business to tell monstrous, loquacious, perfect lies.
In this way my sins pay for themselves.
I’m just trying to suffer quietly around sips of koffeine
and perhaps accidentally write the most despicable blue collar love poem
this side of Indiana,
when some young Turk cracks open a sonnet on the edge of the bar,
challenging me to a duel,
waving the jagged rhyme at my face.
So young, and already a poet! Goddamn this world.
I decide to go easy on him, a kindred spirit in this country of vampires.
I say to the young Turk,
“When the Child was 57,
he discovered an old shoebox on a high shelf in the garage.
Inside he found all the time he had wasted.
Being a neighbor to dotage,
he placed the box into the hands of his son
who devoured it greedily and set sail for Berkeley
with Imogene, the girl he did not love.”
The young Turk doubles over in grief, ink spraying from his lips.
I turn back to the page, now covered in crisp glyphs of blood.
Later, I encounter a girl scout outside the supermarket.
She brandishes a tin cup and asks me if I could spare some jism.
They’re cloning poets to raise money
for a trip to Cairo and didn’t I have a moment to blow a wad?
I tell her I came at the office and shove past.
When I see the young girls at the supermarket,
my joints creak like the strained masts of a withered salt-soaked clipper.
I am reminded of those days before sleep had been invented,
before intoxication had a patent.
My dreams drifted above the landscape as mighty leviathans,
their spines formed from entire mountain ranges.
But now, I am perplexed by the array of oatmeal
here in the cereal aisle of the supermarket.
Behold the artist in his twilight, squinting at cryptic nutritional information.
I find no poetry in these consumable halls
until I reach the checkout
and see the young man laying down
roses, condoms and a bottle of Jaegermeister.
I could die tonight certain that there was still romance in this world.
That night, while I am occupied with filling cracks in the wall
with haiku,
the phone rings and I hear the red apple voice of a lost son,
ancient wine still dripping from his lips.
“I am in love,” he says.
“Tell me what secret poetry will seal her heart forever.”
I instruct him to get a butter knife and cut out his intestines.
He would have no further use for them.
Next he should empty his bank account and buy her a dress sewn in Valhalla.
Then stretch his heartstrings across a cheap pawnshop violin.
Give these gifts to her.
It is best to get the formalities out of the way as soon as possible.
The man I believed to be my son gushes his thanks and says goodbye.
I study the cracks in the wall,
the table set for two,
the violin that had been returned to me so soon.
I sit down in the tattered recliner, notebook in hand.
Reaching beneath my sweater, I touch the pendulum that swings there,
slowly bringing it to rest.
It will be millennia before they discover me,
cradled inside this brownstone,
encased by the glacier of a new ice age I have felt encroaching
since the day my tears turned to ink.
My face will be lashed down in a rictus
overlooking a final ejaculation of verse.
They shall see where my soul burned into
the last period I would ever write,
exiting at the end of my epitaph:
I was a poet and I drank deeply.