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I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it.
I would count there to be about fifteen or sixteen hooks in my belly with lines heading off into the hands of people I haven’t seen since a long time back, and that’s one of them.
I’ve got about a dozen hooks in my heart, I’m following the lines back to where they go.
I mean I’m here to change or die trying but all I can think about is if this was still the old Starlight, the Motel Of Bad Dreams, I’d scrape together a couple hundred dollars and lay up here drunk until they smelled my corpse and broke the lock. But everything changes, and the Starlight’s all new and different, and I’d better get new and different too, and find a better way of filling up than alcohol.
The air smelled like disinfectant and something else that was meant to be killed by disinfectant.
I’d expected to wait in the anteroom among the sick and wounded and their loved ones bent over mystifying paperwork or staring down at their hands, beaten at last not by life but by the refusal of their dramas to end in anything but this meaningless procedural quicksand…
Malcolm had gone to generous lengths in order to get Liz here for this last meeting and parting with Link, just as he not only enabled but encouraged their telephone conversations, pressing himself into these services out of some poetic inkling, I’m willing to assume, some unbearable intuition of the rightness and even the beauty of the facts.
The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.
Very chilling. As the author is dead now
Are my own attempts any better than theirs? Marcus Ahearn’s first half-dozen poems delivered my answer. They were the real thing, line after line of the real thing, and as I held them in my hands a secret anguish relaxed its grip on my heart, and I accepted that I’d never be a poet, only a teacher of poets.
The bench’s owner had arranged himself on the bench with his cup presented for alms. I went over to make a contribution and instead created a scene. The poor guy swore at me viciously, obscenely, with savage skill: I had just plunked two germy quarters into his fresh cup of coffee. Now what? Back then you really didn’t know—at any moment Manhattan could shank you, finish you off. Mark Ahearn appeared at my side and bailed me out with a five-dollar bill. We said good night.
Three months prior to his enlistment, the actual Elvis allowed his sideburns “to be taken,” was Ahearn’s phrasing, “probably as a sign of surrender, or, let’s state it plainly, a symbolic castration before the evil father figure, Colonel Parker.
Does it mean I’m childish, or ungenerous, that I felt several different ways, but mainly resentful, felt exploited, violated, when I saw myself walking around half-naked in somebody else’s creations?
Somehow the general news had infiltrated the sealed subterranean environment that something historically enormous was happening very nearby, and it got quiet in our compartment, and almost everybody entered into a small, desperate battle with a worthless cellphone.
I asked a man nearby—“Where are we? I can’t see the other tower.” He said, “It fell,” and I said, “No it didn’t.” He didn’t argue. We stood in the middle of the street with thousands of other people, all of us motionless, like a frozen parade, all silent.
Cop cars and ambulances heaped with dust and chunks of concrete came at us out of the south. I started walking that direction, I don’t know why, but I soon realized I was the only person heading downtown, and then the tide of panic pressing toward me was too heavy to go against, and I turned around and let it take me north.
Twin Towers, twin Presleys, twin Ahearns. The pairings of these pairs must have beaten on his thoughts with considerable intensity. It hadn’t even occurred to me.
