I am so alone.
I stare at the stars above me, and try just to breathe.
How curious that the sudden awareness of my coming death
has awakened me to the fact that I have no one,
that I spent my life discarding loved ones
like poems that didn’t work along the way.
Faces flutter across my soul, and guilt overwhelms me
when I must struggle to put names on their smiles.
Images whirl like autumn leaves in a storm around each face.
As I grew older, piece by piece, I chose to move outside myself
those ideas and those people that cluttered my solitude.
Old friends; new friends . . . they were all the same.
I truly believed I did not have the stamina for them.
Like bits of granite they weighted my soul
demanding attention, gobbling more and more of my
precious internal moments.
I was fighting for my life!
I could not afford such draining ties.
I thought if I set them aside I would have the strength
for greater, more profound efforts.
Not for myself, but for the poems.
A solitary for the sake of the words,
and the poems required me to create a magnificent self
All my strength went into that.
The splendid imposter.
There may be no tomorrow.
I am so alone.
I am old, and tired.
Fighting for one more day is too difficult!
A day is nothing.
Life is over, and I am condemned to spend
my last moments with a man I do not know at all.
Myself.
A soft desperate laugh escapes my throat.
Blessed God! What a sparkling wasteland I carved in my heart!
For the sake of the poems.
For the Sake of the Poems
