Plateau

I used to write about suffering

it made for good poems

& long winded talks with potential targets.

it made for fodder of the verse

it made for stepwork & eternal “Me”-o-logues

then one evening in 2005

the veil dropped & a dam of shame burst

up & over me, flooded all the secret places

went all up inside through me & Out.

shortly thereafter the only woman I’ve ever loved

told me three things:

she thanked me for loving her

she thanked me for the memories

& she told me she was never

coming back.

I’ve not seen her since

and that floodgate rolled back up

and eventually the suffering it rendered

was as black as it was ever gonna be:

a pitch-black night

in a self imposed ditch.

well, that’s what it was

maybe you wanted language acrobatics there

maybe you wanted a pan flute of poesy there

an overpowering articulate leviathan flood; a word tsunami

maybe you wanted grammatical bells, whistles, something slick

like an advertisement for The Answer,

some guru slinging Quick Fix, a website promising you

the union of a lifetime; a get rich quick scheme with no money down

maybe a teaser short; The Catch; the Surprise Ending

The Hook; maybe you wanted something

To keep it going, but I don’t have that:

it was pitch-black night

in a self imposed ditch.

After that I started riding the Neuroleptic Nile

And so many years & tears

& SSRI’s couch hours later,

after the interminable lamenting

about what I was

about what I wasn’t

about what people knew I was

& what I wasn’t

None of it made a lick of shit or difference

Because at the end of every livelong day

no matter what gig I was working

what woman I was sleeping next to

what psychotropic agent was coursing through my veins

no matter what Step was or wasn’t on

no matter who I was helping or haunting

no matter the sponsor, the friend, the ear or

confidante

I still had me

to contend with

at the end of the day

huge Dam, that.

Here, now at the Plateau:

plummeting towards 2/3 age.

alone within, but not without

full of hard edges everyone insists aren’t there

but here I am.

with me.

and that

you cannot shake a stick

or bat an eye

or deny

all the way unto the chrome-flamed

shark finned Cadillac

they promised me when it all

fades to

black.

–August 2012.