1:04 a.m.

This is a poem I wrote a little while ago, called indie / lo-fi.

for E.

DIY to the last,
you didn't undo yourself like
grunge, with a shotgun
blast through your scream

and heroin: nor
with your mouth crammed shut
with pity and poems
teasing, confessional:

no. Simplicity was your rule.
A single thrust of all your will,
Concentrate on your heart, that gyring fool,
Then all that wonder was still.

Not that I admire you.
But oh, that plaintive
motion that muted
the urgent whisper singing

Overshadows
Everything. Was it despair?
Was it motherfucking
Goodwill? Where

In Portland or Either/Or
Did you discover your end?
Was it p.636 of Diary of a Seducer when Kierkegaard writes,"Better to be dead

Then endlessly undergo
The tedium of blow upon blow,
Knowing you shall never know
The sweet boredom of overthrow"?

So clean, that heart attack.
How often did you hold it back,
And what calamity unloosed your hold?
And where are you now? Where did you go?

Stupid fucking poem. I had wanted to write so many other things; like the funny bit when Amanda picked me up from the hospital (she was listening to the soundtrack of some teen movie called Not Another Teen Movie or something, a bunch of 1980s songs done by bands who hadn't been born then; she assaulted my febrile nerve endings with Linkin Park and blink-182 and such-like caterwauling "99 luftballon" and the like, and asked me to identify Nena, and Berlin, and ohmygodthe SMITHS-- she had never heard of MORISSEY. I am officially old.) and the funny bit about the fire (I was in a fire), and the funny bit about my niece's asthma attack, and the other funny bit about my health coverage and lack thereof, and more funny bits about my physical condition (for example, an ex-girlfriend of mine finds the fact of all my hair having fallen out muy hilarioso, hee!). But. Anyway.

Anyway. So. A few hours ago I heard Yong's voice. I had called him because. He said, "Never call here again." Then he hung up. It confuses me. All I had said was, "Yong!" This was the boy who had fallen in love with me long ago, and fed me ecstasy in a too-successful effort to love him back--- my introduction to drugs, by the way. This was the boy who had told me he was closer than my brother, and he was. This was the boy whom Stephanie will marry, Stephanie whom I love as well, I don't understand. My mind is going. I don't understand why people. I can't comprehend why people would murder one another. I I I I

This is a poem I wrote a little while ago, called analyses terminable and interminable.

how I long for the heart's reprieve,
a final formulation of my lonelyness and grief,
a magical phrase that would bring some

surcease

or for some compromise that would restore you

to me.
Come back to me. I can't imagine being dead,
and I can't withstand being alive, alive and apart

from you. Perhaps love is the full disease,
the measure, the necessary fatality
of the long and silent choking, life without

you; measure mortality
from your last casually breathed, "I love you,"
until now; that distance

hard as silence, more infinite
than number, is wound
like wire round that fist
of congealed grease, the pit

of my motherfucking ravening heart.