For Pixi Morand

I

I didn’t write this in a notebook or on a vintage typewriter so I could feel like Kerouac or Thompson

I didn’t put on a special suit or a hat or sit in a candle lit room full of smoke

Because I don’t have time for this to be anything other than mine

I wrote this because I wanted you to be able to see what I see rather than go ‘I see’ and appreciate whatever you see in me

Because I’m not a poet, I’m just a person and I want to pour out the things that I’ve thought because maybe this is easy for some people but for me it is not

I want you to know that I wrote this for you because time is torture and wondering if yours is out is terrifying

I wish I was saying it face to face not facing my phone and trying to find you behind an impersonal display

I wish I could display for you the ecstasy of life but I just ring my hands through hair liked a ragged dish towel and try to dislodge myself from thoughts of your dismay

I want to cradle you in my arms and lift you away from the ungodly wails of an armed madhouse

I want to comfort you and shelter you from glove wearing sadists with name tags identifying them as nurses

I want to move your mind from waking nightmares to the beauty of the sublime that sits outside your window

But ah, while you are away I am away – lurking in classes but listening for the smallest smattering of you in the halls or reminders in pictures plastered to walls

I superimpose your soul on the psyches of everyone I know

I talk of everything but you because you’re all I want to talk about

I almost killed someone when they mentioned your health

I kicked and screamed and died and dreamed

For the call that you’d come out

But I sit and brood and know it’s understood that it may do some good

To allow you to escape your minds clout

II

What was it that took her? What incomprehensible atrocities bayed at her brain and nipped the heels of her heart? Churchill’s black dogs! Hemingway’s unending hangovers! Ginsberg alive in Moloch! Men weeping for their lost lovers, reduced to visions of former masculinity!

Spectral skulls who masticated her mind! Marionette papacies who prophesied the downfall of all but the heterosexual! Ashtrays empty of all but bare bones! The foul wretches of advertising who turned their own self-loathing to a weapon of mass distraction! The money making men who shouted pay no attention to the iron curtain! Disregard the minimalism of your own corporate controlled reality! Buy! Die! And be merry!

Death on a canopied throne, john Milton thrown out of paradise long ago lost and paraded around shouting incomprehensible manifestos! Mindless masses of flesh and folly demanding death but receiving ratios of rations proportionate to their weight!

Luon clad ladies making mockery of the manless and more intelligent for their petition against practicing conformity and consumption as a substitute for personality! Who passed us by on the highway of life in there Gmc’s towards home and prophecies whispered by MTV! Who were lost in the wood when confronted with the midst of their lives but bought ointment, pills, lotion and played with others emotion simply to stay strong in the fiction there life was not gone!

But what was it that took her, who was the final one to look her in the eyes, knowing her worth and told her she didn’t matter? Who was it who had the audacity to say that depression was like financial recession and you could just get a better job or work a little harder? Who was it who thought it would be funny to find weakness In fault lines and fractures along hairlines then think it was ok to stand and say ‘get over it’. Who was it who thought that interesting was a synonym for intentionally compromised?

III

And now the things I thought you ought to know

I am with you in the stairs of the sanitarium where the shocks will not return anyone to sanity

I am with you in the granite corridors of the mind mulling over the food that will not recuperate health

I am in the books you read telling you that there are no intellectuals in the asylum

I stare out your window and I sleep in your hat whispering entreaties about coming back

Nobody’s going to be flying over the thousand foot walls of the cuckoo’s nest

Everyone’s mad so getting mad with them won’t serve anyone

You aren’t crazy but the longer you stay the less anyone will want to believe it

Hospital food is airplane food except your stuck exactly where you are

But don’t break down hysterically screaming har har har because when you’re out I promise you well drink in every bar

Together well ride across the country in comfortable heated cars

And finally well grow old beneath time forgotten stars