How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.
In the sun and in the rain, in the day and in the night, pain is a flower, pain is flowers, blooming all the time.
Still, I kept thinking about Lydia. The good parts of our relationship felt like a rat walking around and gnawing at the inside of my stomach.
The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.
We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.
When I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original and beautiful I realized that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt). She has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through, like I said she, has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world. She has won. Frances, this poem is for you.
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone, my editor phones me.
Connect with
Login with Facebook