———-
———-
After Eeyore finally hung himself with his own detachable tail, so that he could finally rest his melancholy and sip purgatorial tea with David Foster Wallace, I finally woke up and realized that I was writing the same poem over and over with different tongues (sometimes wagging simultaneously like the heads of a hydra).
Well, this one is for Henry.
———-
“Can I be as I believe myself or as others believe me to be? Here is where these lines become a confession in the presence of my unknown and unknowable me, unknown and unknowable for myself. Here is where I create the legend wherein I must bury myself.”
– Miguel de Unamuno
Mortality
In our hotel room
she stood
barefoot
adjacent to the body
reborn from the corpse of literary endeavor.
The writer
not the one you thought
lay dying in the bed.
I picked up his pen
from the bloodied floor;
the crimson sweat
covered the ambition,
while he struggled to speak.
“Just write the lines,
“Those are the only memorable artifacts we leave.
“Have a great ending to all your work,
“And make sure the heroine has gusto.”
Some sweetness, maybe, is unnecessary.
“But above all –
“Make sure you don’t end up in this room.”
In our hotel room
she stood barefoot
as a brief seduction
while I remained silent
until the last words of the writer were delivered
like a new childhood.
When she walked over to me
across the unsentimental vastness
to see if I understood with a gesture of the lips,
I resisted because she wasn’t the one I wrote;
I wrote about empty rooms,
and dying writers that I wanted to remain alive in them.
Suddenly I felt mercurial,
lively under Aries;
I walked away that night,
to a bar to write,
where music played
and people danced.
I was worried there that it would all come free,
amaranthine
released
held by the last
the only lines
that I would write
that would matter
in this interminable con
that makes art out of deception.
I took a breath
and resolved to let it be
as it must,
because choice was surrendered
long ago
by those better than I.
———
