deaths of a poet

deaths of a poet

it’s hot. it’s a hot and stormy night. indoors. the paint blisters and peels from the walls. there is a fire behind the plaster or maybe in my room. i piss out the window. i lie down. i am trying to sleep. i get up and light a cigarette. the match explodes into a flare. i listen to it burn. i smoke the cigarette while the paint peels. i go back to bed. i lie there. i hear singing. it is a large choir. the holy choir outside my window. i get up and press my face against the glass looking for angels. the singing stops and i see nothing but a dark street and the darker profile of a pine tree. i go back to bed. the choir starts up again. i run to the window. they hush. i go back to bed. the choir starts. it is beautiful. i leave them alone. i listen. i get up and take a painting off the wall and give her my seed . . i fell into the river twice today. i swam for my life only to fall off a cliff and get a bloody concussion and tear my shoulder on a rock. but i didn’t drown as a monster fish fought for its life even though i would have let it go it snapped the line . . i drank this first night out of the crisis unit. six days suspension and i was free, i could do anything and i continued the crisis. first thing they offered me when i arrived was a comb. the specialist said i have three years to live, but that’s his math versus my magic. i write drunken letters to friends i have not seen in years, but what is such a letter worth when we once stood side by side? . . beer and nicotine, Librium and ativan, morphine, heroin, hashish, cuervo, mount gay, jim beam, absinthe, three mood stabilizers, an anti-depressant, and one pill for sharp weapons. i am a reluctant stabilizer conscripted in a fight against aluminum cans and glass. will i sleep on the floor and be swept away? there is no romance or glory in a war so easy to lose and no condoning my determination . . buzzing high i walked into the woods down the river to the swamp, where i fell backwards into the mud. i lay there in the pointed grass with the crawfish and flies and the smell of the earth stewing, looking up and laughing until i saw the sky had dropped me. i got up and went home before something mistook me for an animal . . by now it doesn’t tickle. the flies think i’m lunch but lunch was already served. i have seen the art of the maggots and i admire their virtuosity but i can’t stomach their medium . . which would be my housemate, mike, drowned. my girlfriend, amber, overdosed. my best friend of 13 years, katz, blew his brains across the atlantic. i’d been clean and sober eight years until i saw his house. i fucked his girlfriend, but it didn’t help. mike and amber and katz left together, the only three people i talked to, all of us friends. i am a man of few friends and now a man of fewer friends. the worms take for granted our disemboweling and decapitation and the ungodly drippings, but i never will. i’m the bleached rib who testifies.