we were twelve and we packed thirteen passion-fruit juice boxes,
crackers and peanut butter because who can survive without peanut butter?
the three long hours we were
walking then
running then catching our breath at the corner of
Kennedy and Lincoln.

having lunch in a ditch and rolling down hills and
I can remember everything.
I bet you can too, the

cars screaming past us on the highway and the
darker it got the faster we scrambled and we ended up
exactly where we started but

we tried to run away and we returned
not with our tails drooping between our legs but
stick-straight and in the air because
we'd had adventure for the first time,
we'd crossed the street holding each-
other's hands, not
our mother's anymore.

and I wish I was
in that ditch again,
with you sticking your fingers in the peanut butter because we forgot a knife

not with you, "dead in a ditch somewhere"
like they say you are.

Sometimes it is, poor Sylvia,
that we cannot find the answers. They're
not to be found clinking about in the stars,
blowing about in the August wind,
or blooming among the tea flowers, no matter
how scented. No charlatan soothsayer discerns.
No pull of the cards deciphers. If answers come
at all they'll be found deep within yourself, only.
Don't we all prove that countless, wretched
times? But know this, dear Sylvia, even though it's too
late for your sanity and your life, your daddy didn't
die because of you, for you, by you. Death simply
drew the line and pulled him across.

What were you to do when life puzzled you
to the limit, when all poems disappointed,
when the ink failed to flow smoothly,
the pen tore at the paper and the paper
turned to ash before a line could be written down?
What to do when your child's smile failed to ignite
motherhood, when Daddy's image floated in and out, when
emotional pain dragged you terrified under its
black cerement, that cold, wet, smothering grave cloth?

Fear, oh my God, fear, and the doubt that you had,
the whirling about of a shattered mind, bouncing
from this trap to the other - your muted, stifled inner
screams unheard, or worse, unexpressed. Yes,
you found a solution, poor Sylvia, but suicide
doesn't always equate with an answer. You found a
sad poem, a dirge to be exact, something that moves
us, but there is no rhyme to it and the ending is an
enigma, a great puzzle yet to be invoked, understood.

----

like thighs

                   (shes got 'em)

them thick as ******* thighs
all skin and creamy
and the backs o' her knees taste
so good
                      (like sugar shes got 'em)

and that dark little spider web
o' ink shes got coming up her
shoulders out over her clavicles
shes got her neat little muscles
under it all bunching and loosing
muscles when she's (head down
biting 300 thread count) her hands
don't lie gripping and grabbing
snaring sheets and,
  

                                          ,
                   ­                                                              ,

Death will come,
Death always comes.

When I was a ****** up kid,
I used to draw skulls
in the margins of the bible.

I used to laugh
and pick
at squashed squirrels;
while the girls
stood at a distance
crying.

I don't know
who they were crying
for.

I'd take an eraser
to the wrists
and
rub my own tombstone into my skin
until it burned.

Death will come,
Death always comes.

At
the time
of a late day,
when the sky has
diluted colors of burnt sienna, lavender gray, ecru and blue bell
and it's clouds are a haze of purple that seem to transcend into the other worlds,
the specks of light below these black, black boulders, so-called mountains,
become dots of light to thy eyes behind the thick glass of the moving vehicle,
reflecting
all but
life.