Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the most unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue! --
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year and year,
to so delicately undo an old would,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the look, whatever it was, an infection.

February 3, 1964

***
A smack in the mouth. This damn poem is a smack in the mouth. This shuts me off. I've got nothing serius to say about the matter, though I can utter bunches of nonsense about it.

It's always about it. It's all about that.

Everything and everyone is insane. I picture images of dying babys, people putting bullets in their brains, and girls eating soap. I had nightmares of those images las night. It's all about this stupid fear of death.

"It's all in your mind", "I'm into prescription drugs, they make me easy though I cannot help this sadness"....

I know, but the fear keeps haunting me. It comes and goes. Sometimes I even forget about it, so it re-appears suddenly.

I don't want her pity, as I know she doesn't want mine. It's all about fear, an irracional instict, a chemical reaction in our brain when we percive danger.

No. It isn't fear, it's all about fucking chemical reactions inside my brain produced by the dull perception I have of the unexpected and incoherent chemical reactions inside her brain. It's all about fucking chemicals.