else.
I sit here in this room and stare at the
lamp
and I think,
Stribling, Stribling.
outside
the starved palms continue to
decay
while in here
I remember and
watch a cigarette lighter,
an empty glass and a
wristwatch propped delicately on its
side.
Stribling.
son-of-a-bitch,
what causes me to think
about things like this?
I really don’t need to know,
yet I wonder.
dear sir:
thank you for your manuscript
but this is to inform you
that I have no special influence
with any editor or publisher
and if I did
I would never dream of telling
them who or what
to publish.
I myself have never mailed any
of my work to anybody but
an editor or a publisher.
despite the fact that
my own work
was rejected for
decades,
I still never considered
mailing my work to
another writer
hoping that this other
writer might help me
get published.
and although I have
read some of what you
have mailed me
I return the work without
comment
except to ask
how did you get my
address?
and the effrontery
to mail me such
obvious
crap?
if you think me unkind,
fine.
and thank you for telling
me that I am a
great writer.
now you will have a
chance to re-evaluate
that opinion
and to choose another
victim.
it’s unholy.
I appear to be
lost. I walk from room to room and
there aren’t many (2 or 3)
and she is in the dark room
snoring, I can’t see her but her
mouth is open and her hair is gray
poor thing
and she doesn’t mean me harm
least of all
does she mean me
harm,
and in the other room are
pink lips pink ears
on a head like a cabbage
and a child’s blocks on the floor like
leprosy
and she also doesn’t mean me any harm at
all,
but I cannot sleep and I sit in the kitchen
with a big black fly
that goes around and around and around
like a piece of snot grown a
heart,
and I am puzzled and not given to
cruelty (I’d like to think)
and I sit with the fly
under this yellow light
and we smoke a cigar and drink beer
and share the calendar with a frightened cat:
“ katzen-unsere hausfrende: 1965.”
I am a poor father because I want to stay alive as a
man but perhaps I never was a
man.
I suck on the cigar and suddenly the fly is gone
and there are just
the 3 of us
here.
