Suicide

Suicide

People stay a little bit longer – Jackson Brown

At seventy, I don’t think suicide is a forbidden

topic, do you?  Heroes have gone over the top

and charged into sure death at Verdun at

Monte Casino at Gettysburg and hundreds

of other venues, so why should a man with

few teeth and a wart growing worm-like out of

his cheek that’s so gross he’ll never get a job

again worry about the long goodbye?

Many artists:  John Berryman, Silvia Plath,

Hemingway, Van Goth - people aware of

beginnings, middles and ends more so than

we who admire them are -  have recognized

the end for what it is: the end.  Do we chastise

them for  technical details of life insurance

policies or not being buried In sacred ground? 

I doubt it.

Robert Lowell once wrote “My mind’s not right.”

It wasn’t, but he died in a taxi coming home from

Logan, I think, and not by his own hand.  Still,

Bobby’s rather late in life conversion to confessional

poetry is close to my throws right, bats right play.

I see poetry less as a confessional medium though

as I do as memory.  It’s a trip seen in gray scale

pictures held in place by little black eye brows

fitted over crenelated, painfully white edges.

No, I’m not thinking of offing, capping, jumping

or zapping myself . . . for now.  But I do think

of suicide as the oversized period at the end of

Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.  It’s half art and half

talking to yourself.  Little more. 

Surprisingly, scientist have found the elderly

to be a pretty happy bunch.  Ha, ha, see?

For now I’m with Ernie Banks’ ”Let’s play two.”

FG       9/18/2016

There was a suicide on Spring Street, the dead-end street I grew up when I was very young.  Since then I have acquired several Canasta books of suicides, a cousin and several friends.  Most were by people who were very ill and suffering.  But at least one was by a friend whose father had committed suicide.  These are the saddest.  History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.  People stay a little bit longer.  No?