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Condition of my probation: Letter to Jim Harrison (Big Sky Poet)

by christopher-hendrix

You smoked your throat gone. I'll sit in bed opening and closing my Opinel No. 8 and stare at an unread compilation of a then-alive poet's correspondence with a then-and-still-dead poet and wonder at the cover art, a fishing-line-thin threaded rope that could well be tied in a slipknot. Tendrils that look like loose straw scattered thirty different ways. He said You can't fuck your life away and there are many ways to do that. I'm stuck inside a small bedroom dreaming or hallucinating an open space, streams flowing from nowhere near and flat space so full of sky it is sin to call it empty. The world can be hot and fast;  I am bad at resting. I don't sleep well. I can float a river and not once hear it moving. You drank and dissected your drinking so it could masquerade as something under your control. We all are guilty of this at some point. In some way or another. I am lucky to sit in my bedroom and write that the next two years of my life have well been mapped. I do not pout, there is no malice here. My head is close, fastened between my small shoulders. I share no heart with Yesenin. You can't fuck your life away he said he thought. These things change. But you can!
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Written by
christopher-hendrix
31 / American
For You?
Written by
christopher-hendrix
31 / American
Published
Jul 11, 2017
Time
2m
Notes

This letter makes frequent references to Jim Harrison's poetry collection Letters to Yesenin, originally published in 1973.

Tags
#jim#harrison#letter#probation#bedroom#drinking#alcoholism#yesenin
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