MARGATE, MID-MAY, MIDNIGHT

Alone Without Love
Years and years now
So many deaths

ON EARTH, Bob's last book,
& Leonard's BOOK OF LONGING
The sadness & the loss

The most depressing books I ever read
nevertheless great in different ways. Maybe it's just me.
Their poetry never depressed me in the past.

It was in 1967 they met in Buffalo
Shared mutual respect
A chemistry of feeling

It was the work of men
Who had been there
Opened "that door facing Cornwall"

Though Levertov's "Feet"
Sadly and too late
Trumped

Duncan's furious discourse
Which unknowingly crossed a line
"Never to be healed"

How to put it out there
The pain, so it is useful
To have the feeling live in air

Suspend it there (a HEARTBREAK HOTEL
As Jeremy Reed called his bio in poems
Of the life of Elvis Presley)

Not a direct transfer
A Middle Voice
"No one said it was easy"

Creeley laughed
When I asked him about this
In London,late sixties, or early seventies

Depression, Regret
Deaf (partially) & weary
After two heart attacks

Forsaken, it seems,
By old friends
Lucky to have any

No one here now
No one to turn to
In the night

In the morning, no one
Get out in the daytime
Make sure to eat

No one to talk to
-Pass the time of day with
Have coffee with

Broken I am
Self-pitying and lonely
But I have loved.

& times were
I thought I was loved
Where are they now

Those women who said that
Where does the vibration go
Which I still feel

For those whom I have loved
Vanished they all are,
"Les neiges d'antin"

Too many wrong choices, errors
"Of my condition at the time"
I hurt many

Never did I mean to
I swear by "the holiness
Of the heart's affections"

Maybe I've been in the wrong place
This past decade
Too much alone (otahi)

No child of my genes
No woman really wanted
A child by me I suppose.

Three chose abortion
In my decline
I continue to obsess over that

I was unfaithful
I broke Commandments
I didn't have the sense to lie

The times I cheated.
There were times I was betrayed -
The heart ached

My former wife
Kept all resentment hidden
Seven years

& left.
She needed
To be free

It was all too much for me
I sought solace by the sea
Lonesome blues

A song of my arrogances
Ego conceits, small triumphs
Failure of compassion

It's not been all bad.
Much good times.
This just a sombre wail

Against the inevitable
As Asa Benveniste once wrote.
It's the top yang line now

In Hexagram 13.
There with Kavanagh
"On Raglan Road"

As Burroughs said to Eric Mottram
A paranoid
Is a man in possession of all of the facts

Or as Huncke said, age 80,
Reading at Jackson's Lane:
When you write, just tell the truth