It’s not that I resent you; no, certainly not
your hard luck soul, or, your lonesome road, no nor
your unquenchable troubled mind (who can begrudge that
in year 2007).  In fact I’ll even see you down, when
the neighbors are here bashing in their heads
over the shrubberies, the landlubbers, and cashing in
their kids for swimming pools.
(Was it that
that did it in, finally, the swimming pools?  Stupid politick
congratulation)     But, no;
no I won’t either be agreed to stay
some glorious abstraction:  your “so
long, forlorn, apple of my
discontent”—to go off careening into a romance of solitude and
stumble over middle age.  Not for you, or them,
effusive and capable in their own loves and enigmas;
who will forget soon the generous bluster of a chaotic con-
sciousness for the starchy business
of growing old.  So here I am, which
is as bold a statement as can be made, mean things on my mind and
all.  Governed, inescapable, by the vestiges of a far, misguided past;
But it’s all OK!  At last
I can detect the exuberant and letting go in my present
state of being.  Because I have you to thank for this, you
who recede into a vast sad but benevolent blurriness.
Loose my wide-faring terrors, expectations of
bliss
I’ll thrust myself, too, into the void.