then I hear him speak: “You haven’t escaped me.

I appear in new forms and work at you through

them.

I’m going to make sure that hell never stops for

you.”

then Bach is back.

Bach couldn’t you have been my father?

nonetheless, you make my hell

bearable.

I have come back from suicide, the park bench, it was a

good fight

but my father is still in the world,

he gets very close at times

and suicide creeps back into my brain,

sits there, sits there.

as old as I have gotten,

there is still now no peace,

no place,

and it has been months since I,

myself, have laughed.

now Bach has stopped

and I sit in this old chair.

old man, old chair.

I still have the walls, I still have my

death to do.

I am alone but not lonely.

we all expect more than there

is.

I sit in undershirt, striped pants, slippers.

hell has a head, hell has feet and a mouth,

hell has hair and nostrils,

hell curves down and encircles me

and I think of bridges, windows,

buildings, sidewalks,

last New Year’s Eve,

an eyeball in the sand,

the dogs, the dogs, running in this

room now,

eight of them,

nine of them,

many of them,

coming closer and closer,

I watch them,

I wait,

old in my slippers,

something cutting through me,

the dark night humming and

no laughter,

no laughter

ever

again.

the modern life

just lost another poem in this

computer.

I don’t believe it was

immortal.

neither was this day

or night.

not when all you

can remember

is the 4 horse breaking

through the gate

and spilling the jock

in the yellow silks

as the man

in front of you

bit into a hotdog

like a mongrel

dog

as the market went

down

and Van Gogh

up.

mailbag

a schizophrenic

in Dallas

writes me about his

problems:

he

hears voices,

he’s

hooked on

Beckett,

also his shrink

makes him

sit too long

in the waiting

room.

he’s supported

by his

mother

and he follows

women’s

softball.

also he recently

won

2nd prize

in a chili

cook-off.

you ought to come

to Austin,

he writes,

you’d love

Austin.

I file his letter

in with the

other letters

from schizophrenics.

I’ve been to

Austin.

self-invited

well, strap my ass on backwards, phone China,

run the birds off the wire,

buy a painting of a red dove and remember

Herbert Hoover.

what I am trying to say is that 6 nights out of the

last 8 there have been visitors, all self-invited, and

like my wife says, “we don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

so we have sat and listened to them, some

famous and some not so, some fairly bright

and entertaining, some not so

but it all ends up as chatter, chatter, chatter, voices,

voices, voices, a polite heady whirl of sound and