Poetry from Thailand

Original poetry written in and about rural Thailand.

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Location: Chong Khae, Nakhonsawan, Thailand

Sunday, September 18, 2016

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?